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Comment by TreeRingCounter | Hacker News Reader

We shouldn't be doing either of these things. It wasn't a serious problem 20 years ago when kids would bring whatever allergens to lunch. Throwing away peanut foods is an absurd overreaction and misdirection of food-safety resources.

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Here's a story from around 14 years ago where this was a serious problem [1]. I could probably find more from 20 years ago if I looked further.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Health/AllergiesNews/story?id=4659705...

I guarantee you that schools were not throwing out peanut butter sandwiches when I was a kid, and many of the schools I went to are doing so now.

I'm sure you can find an article about peanut allergies at any point in recorded history where they had peanuts.

Yes, and my schools were not throwing out sandwiches either. Schools started doing so because it became a serious liability issue with kids weaponizing it for bullying and leading to death. Unless you have a solution for the human condition that will stop people leveraging deadly allergies as a form of torment, then schools will keep doing so.

> Schools started doing so because it became a serious liability issue with kids weaponizing it for bullying and leading to death

This sounds completely absurd and hyperbolic, but let's say I took it at face value - why is this an issue now and not an issue when I was in school?

I literally posted a story where this was happening, did you not read the link I shared? There are multiple other examples in just the past few years, and the thing is that all it takes is one inciting incident to cause massive problems for the school district.

Why are you expecting the world now to exist as it was when you were a child?

This has nothing to do with expectations - it's an inquiry into why something is worse now, without a clear justification.

Your only argument for why it's "worse" is that it was different when you were in school. Maybe it was "worse" when you were in school.

The world has changed in the past 20 years. The world will change over the next 20 years.

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