There’s another allergy-related thread just now that I don’t want to hijack, but I was thinking about this this morning. My son loves peanuts. I mean the kid could just about gorge himself on peanuts every day. Since he is still in elementary school (third grade) they have “healthy snack” time every day, halfway between the start of class and lunch time. Most of the parents just send junk food for their kid’s “healthy snack” but since my kids like healthy stuff, he gets a healthy snack.
Usually, he asks for either nuts or fruit (freeze-dried when we can find it for a good price), mostly peanuts. Now, fortunately, the school where he goes does not do this, but I know many schools ban peanuts and peanut butter due to the possibility of allergic reactions. What I want to know – especially if anyone has a legitimate answer (not just an opinion, although those are of course welcome!) – is why ban peanuts/peanut butter, but not other common allergens?
For example, the school where he went to kindergarten had the school-wide ban on peanuts/peanut butter, but tree nuts were ok to send for snack, as were strawberries and other common allergens. :dubious: So, why is it so much worse to have peanuts than any other allergen? Just seems odd to me.
Do people commonly have such severe reactions to strawberries as to peanuts?
I’ve only heard of people being allergic in the sense that they get a rash if they eat strawberries - do people often suffer the sort of windpipe-swells-abruptly-shut allergies as seem to be the case with peanuts?
And if they do, then there’s your answer - peanuts are banned, because I’ve heard of really bad peanut allergies - and the people who make policies are human like me.
Yes, people have windpipe swells shut and you die reaction to strawberries. Shellfish is big too, but most people aren’t sending shrimp snacks to school (unless maybe you have a lot of Asians in your school).
There is a huge difference between an allergy that just causes a rash and runny nose (nuisance) and one that causes anaphylaxis (potentially fatal).
ETA: Dangerosa, you know if the strawberry allergy can also be caused by passive exposure the way nuts/shellfish can? I’m allergic to pickles and my mouth will swell, but if someone eats them in the same room as me I’m fine.
OK, but are they nearly so common? And if they are, why haven’t I heard about them so much?
NB: I’m not trying to justify the ban, merely explain it - the rules are made by humans like me, who have heard about nasty peanut allergies, but not so much about nasty other allergies.
Peanuts are a common snack food. You can put them in a baggie or in your pocket. Strawberries and shrimp need containers, need to be kept cold, and I sincerely doubt Harried Working Parents are preparing these items for their kids’ lunch. Tree nuts? As portable as peanuts, but unlikely to be in lunch boxes. Think. Back when you brought your lunch to school, did you have strawberries, shrimp, or a handful of walnuts? No. You had a peanut butter sandwich. Which you swapped for someone’s Twinkie.
In addition to those challenges, dear Og, are some nuts expensive! We made a recipe over the holidays that required pine nuts and they were over three times the cost of almonds, which in turn or more expensive than peanuts. For comparison, I can buy about 750g of peanut butter for $3, and the almond butter we prefer is 460g for $6 and that is an insanely good deal, since that amount usually costs me closer to $9.
I can’t imagine bringing shrimp to school in a lunchbox. Even if there had been a fridge available to me, as a dorky kid, I would have forgotten my lunch in the vestibule and would have been eating poison by noon. Although I’m pretty sure I occasionally took a shake-'n-bake drumstick wrapped only in aluminum foil. I think my mom was trying to kill me. :eek:
Edit: Whoops! Almond butter is 460g for $6-$12, not 40g. Typo!
Does it make any difference how common it is? - if you are going to ban peanuts because three kids in a school are allergic, is the life of the one kid who has a shock reaction to milk, wheat, shellfish, latex, walnuts, or strawberries less important?
I’d like allergies to be treated consistently in schools - if you are going to ban peanuts because children are allergic and a peanut free table is socially isolating, you should ban recess if someone is allergic to bees.
I am sure it is just due to the fact that peanut allergies are the most common of all food allergies among school age children.
My son is allergic to peanuts. It sucks, trust me. I am not very militant about his allergy, but sometimes I want to be. His school is NOT peanut free. He is in 4K two days a week, and often sits right next to a kid eating a PBJ sandwich. It is a bit scary to send your five year old to school where he may be offered a snack that could kill him. The teachers have an epi-pen handy, and are taught how to react, but still…I have to try hard not to worry all day.
Last year in his preschool, he accidentally had a snack with ONE Reese’s peanut butter M&M in it. He immediately spit it out and said his mouth was burning. I was there, thankfully. I was pretty pissed off. Guess who brought the snack in… His TEACHER. She forgot! UGH. :mad:
Well, I can only speak for this harried working parent, but both of my kids have carried strawberries, cashews, peanuts, and sushi for lunches/snacks. Strawberries can be packed in a tupperware bowl easily, as can sushi (which is a special treat my daughter loves). The most common school lunch in our house is a baggie of nuts (peanuts for my son, cashews for my daughter), a baggie of chips, a sammich (usually ham for the boy, turkey & cheese for the girl), a couple oreos and some kind of juice or a bottle of water. The nuts are a solid stand-by in our house. We eat a lot of nuts, both peanuts and tree nuts. They’re a bit pricey, but the kids like them better than other snack foods and as mentioned, they’re easily portable.
As for whether the other things can cause as severe of reactions, yes. A friend of mine actually had a lung collapse due to a strawberry allergy. His reaction is so strong that we never had strawberries around him – just in case. I agree that the peanut thing is more widespread – you hear more stories about it – but I don’t know stats as to whether it is truly more common or not.
It was just something I was thinking about while I was packing the boy’s peanuts this morning.
Oh, and FTR, when we send sushi for lunch, I pack it with a little ice pack to keep it cool for her. So far, she says it works just fine and loves it when she gets to have it. Personally, I find fish/seafood to be the most disgusting thing around, but…my girl likes it and that’s what matters
Of course it does - because that is proportional to the likelihood of an incident. Occasionally, planes fall out of the sky - but we keep using them. If planes fell out of the sky about half the time, we would treat that differently.
This is irrelevant to any point I have been trying to discuss in this thread. I’ve been trying to explore/explain why things may be so, not why it is good and proper that they are thus. I decline this detour, thanks.
Isn’t it because, unlike other allergens, peanut allergy is susceptible (in some cases) to just being near peanuts and inhaling dust from them?
This messageboard has some credible links which suggest that there is probably a link. It’s not a hard and fast link, of course, but given that kids do sometimes share lunch, that and the possible passive allergy are decent reasons for banning peanuts.
Tree nuts are not banned because, unlike peanuts, they really are nuts. Peanuts are legumes. People who are allergic to peanuts are not generally allergic to tree nuts.
You can’t ban all foods that cause allergies, because nearly any food can, but it’s not stupid to ban the most common allergens, and peanut allergy is far more common and more severe than other allergies. Smaller, less transient schools can more safely rely on a policy of not banning peanuts unless they knowingly have a child who’s severely allergic, but larger schools with frequent intakes might not know about such an allergy till a child gets taken ill in the cafeteria, so they’re more likely to need a preventative policy.
Kids who like nuts can have them for other snacks at home or at weekends, anyway. They’re not going to suffer from the ban.
I’m sure you’re right and such arguments are made. But it cannot in all honesty be said that we apply such absolute and minute risk assessment to every single thing, and consistently. Policies are made by humans, based on (ideally informed) perception of the risks, but human perception is an odd thing.
Some risks are considered too small to guard against, others are considered serious or likely enough to warrant action. Maybe people get that wrong a lot, but there it is.
I think it’s plausible that a cost-benefit analysis would recommend banning peanuts but not other allergens based on the frequency of the allergy, the ubiquity of peanuts without the ban, the frequent severity of the allergy, and the frequency with which the allergic child would accidentally come in contact with peanut products brought by other children (airborn, sticky hands, etc.).
Questions of lawsuits aside, it’s going to be pretty darn disruptive to have a kid go into anaphylactic shock in the classroom.
I should mention that last year, Niq had a classmate with a severe peanut allergy – the parent mentioned it in passing during the orientation, so I made sure that Niq didn’t take peanuts very often – he was aware of the student with the allergy and stayed away from him when he (my son) had peanuts for snack. When I have sent snacks to school with questionable content (I sent a kitty litter cake for Halloween this year – it has several different ingredients, although I leave out the walnuts) I always ask the teacher to try to verify if there are allergies. I have been known to send in special sugar-free treats for diabetic students in the past. It’s not that I think we shouldn’t be safe, it’s just that I think some schools go overboard for one item when there are others that can be just as dangerous.
