Comment by jandrewrogers
4 years ago
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.
> 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.
My point is that there is a scale and if you think about it not as a binary, but as a gradient, you might be more understanding of school administrators who are trying to create a safe learning environment for hundreds of kids.
Yes, if there is a substance that's poison for one kid, they'll need to learn to take precautions. And if there's a substance that's poison for all, it should be banned from school meals. What if it's 10% of kids? 5%?
Food allergies are common these days.
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.
My point is to think about risk as a scale. There's no need to be pedantic about the analogy.
Would you send your child to school if there was a 1% chance that they would be served something that would put them in the ER? .5% chance?
If you were a school administrator, would you serve food that could put 3% of the student body in the ER? 6%?