Try sending your kid to school with a peanut butter sandwich these days.
It’s so odd. There were no restrictions at my schools when I was a kid in regards to food (either served or brought) and nobody died in the cafeteria. (Though if they did I’d have blamed the quality of some of the “mystery meat” some of the hot lunches had, such as the “fishicken” as we called it that we couldn’t tell if it was fish, or chicken, or bat or snake or alligator or who knows what it was.)
Food allergies are on the increase worldwide.
More of the population has food allergies than ever before – and around the world, they are sending more and more people to hospital. One large-scale review of hospital admissions data found anaphylaxis cases on the rise in the US, Australia and Europe, among other regions. In the US, hospital visits for food allergy increased threefold from 1993 to 2006. Between 2013 and 2019, England saw a 72% rise in the number of hospital admissions for children caused by anaphylaxis, from 1,015 admissions to 1,746.
“That food allergies have risen is unquestionably the case, to an absolutely crazy extent,” says Graham Rook, emeritus professor of medical microbiology at University College London.
My theory is that the human race is tired and so it’s just giving up on existing. 
(Ooh that would also explain anti-vaxxers!)
It’s EXTREMELY odd, and while off topic, I wonder if this is legitimately a response to increasing food allergies or if there’s a mass hysteria thing / parents diagnosing their own children thing going on.
I was going to tie think back into COVID, and I briefly had a neat way of using this as an analogy to people self-diagnosing with COVID, but it’s been a long day and my brain just shorted out.
That’s my suspicion but I try to be open-minded about it.
Our time on Earth is drawing to a close.
Bit of column A, bit of column B.
And a bit of that too.
ShadowFacts’ cite seems to prove pretty conclusively that allergies are on the rise. The alternative explanation would be that people in the old days were tougher and just expected their kids to suck it up and get over the anaphylactic shock without any fancy hospital care. This seems implausible.
Infant mortality has been dropping for decades. Even compared to the early 90s, the death rate for under-5 has been cut almost in half (from low to very low, admittedly).
Are children that would have died in previous decades more prone to food allergies? I have no clue but I would like to know if there are any statistical analyses.
My completely uninformed guess (so feel free to dismiss the ignorant rambling) is that there are some people with legitimate and serious allergies to peanuts. I don’t think people are going into psychosomatic anaphylaxis.
But at the same time I suspect a large number of parents have a mild form of Munchausen Syndrome by-Proxy and declare their children to be deathly allergic when they aren’t at all (or it’s mild). The presence of these situations cast doubt on the legitimate allergies that are suffered.
(Again this is my WAG.)
I also suspect (another WAG) that the reason you didn’t see any kids dropping dead in the cafeteria was not only that true anaphalaxis is relatively rare, but kids who had this in the past were dead before they ever reached your school.
There’s a vast stretch of real estate between a reasonable degree of confidence that government overreach can’t happen and a reasonable degree of confidence that government overreach won’t happen, and your apparent unwillingness to set one toe into that vast stretch suggests that your “freedom-loving” inflexibility is based more in timidity than in rationality. But then, your risk-evaluation skills have already been called into question.
I live in brownstone Brooklyn, which just possibly has the greatest concentration of highly-educated, affluent liberals anywhere in the world (I guess Berkeley is in the running, and maybe Georgetown).
Every child has special food needs and allergies and can only eat organic food picked and packaged by indigenous virgins paid a fair trade wage.
Throwing a birthday party for a kid is a nightmare. Me, I just want to go with pizza and an ice cream cake* (and believe me, the kids are on my side), but then the emails with every child’s special dietary needs start coming in…
Poor kids.
* Which I bought at Costco. By the standards of brownstone Brooklyn, buying a cake at Costco, as opposed to the Park Slope Food Co-op, is prima facie evidence of being a Trumpist. Even having a Costco membership card is suspect. It’s like having a CPUSA card in the fifties.
Is Bushwick far enough from Park Slope that my daughter’s Costco membership card won’t get her run out of the building she’s about to move into? I don’t want to have to sign another guarantor application.
You never know. She might not actually have a CPUSA card, but she might be a fellow traveler.
I’ve reconsidered my wording in the clause There’s a vast stretch of real estate between a reasonable degree of confidence that government overreach can’t happen and a reasonable degree of confidence that government overreach won’t happen,
A more felicitous statement would be: There’s a vast stretch of real estate between a conviction that government overreach can’t happen and a reasonable degree of confidence that government overreach won’t happen,
Only if you think that I’m so heartless that “I got in a car accident, and it was my fault, fortunately no one was seriously hurt” and “I got in a car accident, and it was my fault, and I literally killed another human being and saw his brains all over his windshield” are equivalent.
I suspect there is a strong component of “people didn’t have as much access to medicine, and medicine wasn’t as advanced,” involved, though. Most food allergies aren’t fatal, they just make you feel sick. If little Johnny in the 19th century is sick all the time, and nobody knows what “celiac disease” is yet, then the solution is “Let little Johnny be sick, and hope he gets over it, or at least doesn’t die from it.”
It’s pretty widely accepted that lack of exposure to peanuts under 1 year old has led to higher rates of allergic kids. Can Early Exposure Fix Food Allergies?