Food safety in elementary school

Factual Questions
42

Ugh - I meant to say raw shelledeggs are unsafe, not unshelled. Thanks for pointing this out.

43

I’m getting better…

As other have mentioned, most foods used in lunches brought to school can survive just fine for the day out in room temperature. Lunch meats are precooked and preserved, meaning they are less bacteria-ridden than raw foods. Bread takes a while to get moldy, hopefully home does not use questionable bread. Cheese is already rotten milk. Jams and peanut butter are stored at room temperature often. Healthy stuff - carrots come to mind - and fruits are again, often stored for long times at toom temperature.

I’m not sure how many kids (or adults) are hyper-sensitive to allergens; my wife works with one fellow who is sensitive to perfume, and when an over-drenched customer comes in, he does indeed have breathing problems for awhile. They also limit the use of nuts to times he is not working, and staff meals have to be planned to avoid accidental exposures. (And to avoid gluten for another employee, but that usually involves just ordering one of the pizzas gluten-free). It’s not just ingesting, peanut butter breath is real, and the suggestion that like the Covid glitter test, the resulting dust can be everywhere. However, most allergic people are likely not that strongly sensitive to such a wide range of items.

44

Again, this is objectively untrue on so many levels that it’s basically the equivalent of creationism.

  1. Peanuts, physically, do not aerosolize. There is no such thing as “peanut dust” to begin with.

  2. The mechanism of peanut allergy involves a reaction in the digestive tract. A peanut-allergic person could inhale and cough up peanuts below choking size into the lungs all day long and nothing would happen chemically.

  3. There are no known actual cases of an allergic reaction to peanuts that did not involve eating the peanut product, which, since this is impossible, should not be a surprise.

  4. There is nothing special about peanuts compared to any other macroscopic food item - serving utensils and tables can be cleaned with ordinary dishwashing procedures and do not require any special sterilization to avoid causing allergies in future users.