Comment by james_pm
4 years ago
As a parent of a kid with a sesame allergy, I wish it got the same treatment as peanut allergies do. It's common here (Canada) to have a school that will throw your lunch snacks away if they aren't labelled "peanut safe" but will have sesame buns at a school bbq lunch and just tell the kids with sesame allergy to bring their own lunch and avoid touching it.
The current treatment of peanut allergies is already an over-reaction.
My brother was deadly allergic to even trace quantities of peanut products as a child. Nonetheless, we routinely ate peanut butter sandwiches and peanuts at home, never mind school or the many other spaces a child occupies, and it was never an issue. Reasonable precautions were sufficient to eliminate all practical concern and it didn’t require sterilizing the environment of all peanuts. This was easy and effective, same as with other kids with dangerous allergies. The only incident I can remember involved some Korean food that used peanut oil, and he knew it contained peanut the instant he put it in his mouth. He was quite capable of avoiding peanut products on his own.
Banning everyone from eating peanut products anywhere in the vicinity of someone with a peanut allergy is just another example of pathological safety-ism. And it goes far beyond actual deadly allergies now, we accommodate all manner of imagined hyper-sensitivities “just in case” with no rational or pragmatic consideration of the risks and costs.
they are not imagined and you anecdata of one demonstrates nothing.
anaphylaxis is highly individualized and can change within an individual over time.
It's also not necessarily just about preventing anaphylaxis but general food anxiety as well as alienation from a cultural and social staple of sharing food together. Most people will never understand the secondary effects of anaphylactic food allergies, no less CONSTANTLY downplay then as you did with your brother.
I know this sibling downplaying is very possible because my partner has MCAS, which causes random allergies to pop up like whack a mole. Her family caused her very much grief as a child but she developed strong coping mechanisms and it's similarly capable of "managing what she eats." However I am one of very few people who truly understand how completely alienated she feels because of it. The primary concerns (death by anaphylaxis) are bad but very infrequent. The secondary effects of social alienation are constant and boundaries are always being pushed even by close friends and family
> not necessarily just about preventing anaphylaxis but general food anxiety as well as alienation from a cultural and social staple of sharing food together
I see, moving the goalposts to an even less defensible argument. Sharing food together doesn't mean eating the same thing. By this reasoning, we should all be forced to eat the lowest common denominator of least offensive food for everyone. If one person is vegan, we should all be vegan. If one person can't eat any nightshade vegetables (a common allergy), none of us should eat nightshade vegetables. Same for dairy, shellfish, etc. The set of foods all humans can comfortably and traditionally eat is approximately the empty set. This sounds like the very definition of a culturally and socially enriching experience around food!
You don't speak for my brother and he'd likely mock someone trying to "white knight" his eating experiences or suggesting his peanut allergy caused profound alienation. We all eat different things based on preferences, never mind allergens. Do people feel alienated and anxious because they can't handle spicy food but other people can? There is a ubiquitous food that I can't eat (for reasons unrelated to allergens) but never once did I feel alienated because of it, even though people tease me about it.
If people are intentionally being assholes about it, the issue is them being assholes and has nothing to do with the food. If one person is hyper-sensitive about what other people eat, the answer is therapy for that person, not changing the world to accommodate their hyper-sensitivity.
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> The current treatment of peanut allergies is already an over-reaction.
The current treatment of peanut allergies affecting people older than infants/toddlers is probably not an overreaction to the situation created by the fact that for a period until very recently (and maybe still now, as there is some social inertia), the attempt to prevent exposure in infants/toddlers was an overreaction, that produced a much greater number of very severe allergies than otherwise would have existed.
Imagine you have a school age child. If there were a 100% chance that they would be served arsenic at school you would probably keep them home. If there were a 0% chance, you would send them to school.
What "%" risk that your child would be poisoned do you find acceptable?
In this analogy though, is 99% of the population able to eat and digest arsenic without a problem?
If so, I think the reality that needs to be dealt with is that there are going to be a lot of situations throughout their life where people are going to be serving arsenic. It sucks to be in that situation, but it's something that child will need to be taught to take into account (even if accommodations can kick that can down the road for now.)
If arsenic is poisonous for everyone in this analogy, then I have a lot bigger problems with this school than the lunch menu.
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Arsenic is an essential micronutrient with a toxicity profile similar to selenium (another essential micronutrient). Arsenic is sufficiently available in diets around the world that deficiency isn’t going to be a thing unless you go out of your way to aggressively remove it from the water supply.
Your attempt at an analogy was clumsy and nonsensical regardless. They aren’t serving poison at schools. Sugar would have been a better example.
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I'm allergic (not deathly so) to legumes, cranberries and have trouble with wheat as well. Most of the time, I just try to minimize my exposure and live with not feeling well when I get wammied. Cranberries are my worst reaction, the only time I tend to get really nosy is actually BBQ sauce, because many tangy sauces will contain them.
In the end, I don't (and imho, shouldn't) expect the world to put padding on the sidewalk to protect my from myself.
I would be happy if labelling laws included a "Manufacturing facility handles (allergen list). This product may contain trace amounts." as a statement for what there might be trace amounts of in terms of allergens not intentionally part of the product.
It bugs me a bit that if a kid wants a PBJ they no longer are allowed to at school.
Kids need extra protection since they can’t weigh risk and don’t understand how the world works. So I understand if my daughters can’t have peanuts in elementary school if their classmate has a real allergy.
But policies go above and beyond that now. They bar peanuts even if nobody has an allergy. Other places bar peanuts for self identified allergies (which cannot be confirmed 90% of the time by a doctor). That’s just bad policy driven by litigation fear.
I’m pretty sure that allowing companies to slip legal liability with a “might contain” which just result in boilerplate for all allergies which isn’t helpful to anyone.
I’m glad your allergies aren’t so severe. But minimizing contact isn’t enough for people who are deathly allergic to peanuts or sesame, where the best case for exposure is an epi-pen shot and a trip to the ER. It’s not so much asking for padded walls as enough information to allow people to live without fear of dying because of something they ate.
Every kid deserves an education without fear of being killed by some other kid’s snack. I don’t think it’s too much to ask for people to just eat their PB&J at home.
Why should they have legal liability in the first place for small amount of cross-contaminated ingredients?
Regardless, listing ingredients they aren’t willing to affirm aren’t in their products is helpful. It identifies products that aren’t for sure safe which is what you want.
> I don’t think it’s too much to ask for people to just eat their PB&J at home.
What's the cost benefit analysis here? That the kid does not get to share the food?
Would touching someone that ate a PBJ be enough to trigger an episode? In what percentage of people?
How can you just say something like that without also stating a model? Without percentages and numbers?
> I don’t think it’s too much to ask for people to just eat their PB&J at home.
Totally get that. Others do think that's too much to ask though, and I'm sure there are cases where you'd disagree with their "not too much to ask" in return.
I didn't say boilerplate for all allergies... I specifically stated, that the mfg should list allergens the facility handles, but aren't ingredients. That warning should be sufficient to state that it may not be safe for the allergens in question.
I'm sure actually adding allergens to food and labeling them is a much better solution after-all.
Why, because nobody is going to make 10 mfg facilities each avoiding a different singular ingredient.
Wait, there are schools that don't allow non-allergic kids to eat peanut butter, etc?
All the schools round here in the UK where I live are 'nut-free'.
Here is a sample requirement:
https://www.stjohnsschool.org/uploaded/Files/Nut_Sensitive_F...
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I don’t know, I feel this is a slippery slope. I don’t want everything to be on the same level of caution as peanuts, let’s look at root cause for this stuff.
Most likely could being an over-sterilized environment during pregnancy or at birth, some chemical in common products, or something else effecting the micro biome or immune system.
It's not a slippery slope. There's a small list of known deadly allergens. Those need to be taken seriously.
There's a small list of commonly deadly allergens, but there's a ton of diversity in the population of people, and some people react with anaphylaxis for items beyond the top 8 or 9.
> Asero and colleagues29 recently reported on a series of 1110 adolescent and adult Italian patients (mean age 31 years, range 12–79 years) diagnosed with food allergy based on history of reaction in the presence of positive skin prick test (SPT) or elevated food-specific serum IgE. Anaphylaxis was reported by 5% of food-allergic individuals, with the most common cause being lipid transfer protein (LTP). LTP is a widely cross-reacting plant pan-allergen. Offending food for LTP-allergic patients was most often peach, but included also other members of the Rosaceae family of fruits (apple, pear, cherry, plum, apricot, medlar, almond, strawberry), tree nuts, corn, rice, beer, tomato, spelt, pineapple, and grape. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3440177/#:~:tex...
Peanuts, sesame, pineapples, eggs, fish, shellfish. The list may be small but it's varied. Yes, deadly allergies should be taken seriously,and reasonably. Banning entire classes of food for those not allergic seems much.
Ha it's like saying speed limits are a slippery slope, and we'll trend closer to 0 mph over time. It's not a slope, it's a dial!
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I absolutely hate not having peanut butter as an ingredient for my kids' lunches and snacks because the school forbids anything with peanuts in foods they bring to school. I understand the struggle of having a kid with special needs in schools--one of mine has autism and the other an as yet incompletely diagnosed neurological condition (could be epilepsy, could be mundane ADHD, could be both--we're still testing). The school must accommodate these conditions, but that accommodation doesn't require banning things or reorganizing every activity around their needs.
Your kid will be just fine if some other kid eats something with sesame in it, unless they're sharing, kissing, or fighting with their food.
Well no, it depends on how severe their allergies are. And there have been multiple stories or examples in the past decade or two of kids hazing someone with peanut butter allergies by intentionally triggering it or even putting peanut butter on them.
This is why schools have taken drastic measures because all it takes is one incident to send a kid to the hospital, put the school in serious lawsuit territory and cause a massive news scandal. It's a matter of liability reduction.
hard cases make bad law.
extreme cases make bad policy.
If a kid assaults another with peanut butter, might I suggest the problem is the assault, not the peanut butter?
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> unless they're sharing, kissing, or fighting with their food
Good thing kids never do this.
Another absurdity is food containing prop 65 warnings like this one https://www.reddit.com/r/ramen/comments/zb9xu8/p65_cancer_wa...
My wife has been allergic to Sesame for as long as she can remember. It's always a struggle not only because it is less known than peanuts, but it's also very easy to hide it in all sorts of foods -- intentionally or accidentally.
> a school that will throw your lunch snacks away
What is the reason to that?
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.
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.
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The world has changed in the past 20 years. The world will change over the next 20 years.