7 ms·

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

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.

spacephysics 4y ago
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.
- kqr 4y ago
  It's not a slippery slope. There's a small list of known deadly allergens. Those need to be taken seriously.
  - bestcoder69 4y ago
    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!
    - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
      I don’t think it’s tremendously slippery, but I do think it’s a slope. It’s hard to imagine the government ever removing an allergen from the mandatory labeling list - if they did, a lot of people who got used to having it would find themselves in more trouble than if it had never been there.
    - savingsPossible 4y ago
      If speed limits aren't, it is just because of the distribution of benefits With speed limits, almost everyone suffers and almost everyone benefits. Of course, some people are more likely to be walking, and other driving, but it is not a core part of their identity. Whenever something makes a specific small group much safer and around 100% of the people pay the cost, giving in and making those people safer is a slippery slope. There are infinite such cases, the system points towards more safety because of lawsuits, and careful cost benefit analysis is harder because there is no one person for which cost and benefit are similar -- for some it is just a small cost, for others just a gigantic benefit. You'll get a small percentage doing a lot of activism and a large majority harmed, but not enough to fight it.
  - j-bos 4y ago
    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.
  - DavidPeiffer 4y ago
    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/#:~:text=Asero%20and%20colleagues,35%E2%80%9337 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3440177/#:~:tex...
tracker1 4y ago
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.
- gedy 4y ago
  Wait, there are schools that don't allow non-allergic kids to eat peanut butter, etc?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - MattGaiser 4y ago
    Here is a sample requirement: https://www.stjohnsschool.org/uploaded/Files/Nut_Sensitive_FAQs_aug2017.pdf https://www.stjohnsschool.org/uploaded/Files/Nut_Sensitive_F...
    - gedy 4y ago
      Thanks. I'd seriously take my kids out of schools like that. They shouldn't be scared about their sandwich is breaking "the rules", seems like it would breed low-grade paranoia in kids.
      - LesZedCB 4y ago
        Children are remarkably adaptable, it's usually the parents who are stuck in their ways
kqr 4y ago
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.
Aperocky 4y ago
> a school that will throw your lunch snacks away What is the reason to that?
jandrewrogers 4y 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.
- LesZedCB 4y ago
  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
  - jandrewrogers 4y ago
    > 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.
orangepurple 4y ago
Another absurdity is food containing prop 65 warnings like this one https://www.reddit.com/r/ramen/comments/zb9xu8/p65_cancer_warning_on_assi_organic_ramen_any/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ramen/comments/zb9xu8/p65_cancer_wa...
TreeRingCounter 4y ago
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.
- fzeroracer 4y ago
  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&page=1 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/AllergiesNews/story?id=4659705...
  - TreeRingCounter 4y ago
    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.
    - fzeroracer 4y ago
      Yes, and my schools were not throwing out sandwiches either. Schools started doing so because it became a serious liability issue with kids weaponizing it for bullying and leading to death. Unless you have a solution for the human condition that will stop people leveraging deadly allergies as a form of torment, then schools will keep doing so.
      - TreeRingCounter 4y ago
        > Schools started doing so because it became a serious liability issue with kids weaponizing it for bullying and leading to death This sounds completely absurd and hyperbolic, but let's say I took it at face value - why is this an issue now and not an issue when I was in school?
sidlls 4y ago
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.
- fzeroracer 4y ago
  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.
  - savingsPossible 4y ago
    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?
    - kelseyfrog 4y ago
      Which is easier, banning peanut butter or eliminating bullying?
      - sidlls 4y ago
        Neither. Parents routinely send their kids to school with prohibited food items, including sweets and various products with nuts. I'm not allowed this privilege because of the extra scrutiny already on my kids due to their conditions.

spacephysics 4y ago

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.

kqr 4y ago
It's not a slippery slope. There's a small list of known deadly allergens. Those need to be taken seriously.
- bestcoder69 4y ago
  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!
  - SpicyLemonZest 4y ago
    I don’t think it’s tremendously slippery, but I do think it’s a slope. It’s hard to imagine the government ever removing an allergen from the mandatory labeling list - if they did, a lot of people who got used to having it would find themselves in more trouble than if it had never been there.
  - savingsPossible 4y ago
    If speed limits aren't, it is just because of the distribution of benefits With speed limits, almost everyone suffers and almost everyone benefits. Of course, some people are more likely to be walking, and other driving, but it is not a core part of their identity. Whenever something makes a specific small group much safer and around 100% of the people pay the cost, giving in and making those people safer is a slippery slope. There are infinite such cases, the system points towards more safety because of lawsuits, and careful cost benefit analysis is harder because there is no one person for which cost and benefit are similar -- for some it is just a small cost, for others just a gigantic benefit. You'll get a small percentage doing a lot of activism and a large majority harmed, but not enough to fight it.
- j-bos 4y ago
  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.
- DavidPeiffer 4y ago
  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/#:~:text=Asero%20and%20colleagues,35%E2%80%9337 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3440177/#:~:tex...

tracker1 4y ago

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.

gedy 4y ago
Wait, there are schools that don't allow non-allergic kids to eat peanut butter, etc?
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- MattGaiser 4y ago
  Here is a sample requirement: https://www.stjohnsschool.org/uploaded/Files/Nut_Sensitive_FAQs_aug2017.pdf https://www.stjohnsschool.org/uploaded/Files/Nut_Sensitive_F...
  - gedy 4y ago
    Thanks. I'd seriously take my kids out of schools like that. They shouldn't be scared about their sandwich is breaking "the rules", seems like it would breed low-grade paranoia in kids.
    - LesZedCB 4y ago
      Children are remarkably adaptable, it's usually the parents who are stuck in their ways

kqr 4y ago

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.

Aperocky 4y ago

> a school that will throw your lunch snacks away What is the reason to that?

jandrewrogers 4y 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.

LesZedCB 4y ago
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
- jandrewrogers 4y ago
  > 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.

orangepurple 4y ago

Another absurdity is food containing prop 65 warnings like this one https://www.reddit.com/r/ramen/comments/zb9xu8/p65_cancer_warning_on_assi_organic_ramen_any/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ramen/comments/zb9xu8/p65_cancer_wa...

TreeRingCounter 4y ago

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.

fzeroracer 4y ago
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&page=1 https://abcnews.go.com/Health/AllergiesNews/story?id=4659705...
- TreeRingCounter 4y ago
  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.
  - fzeroracer 4y ago
    Yes, and my schools were not throwing out sandwiches either. Schools started doing so because it became a serious liability issue with kids weaponizing it for bullying and leading to death. Unless you have a solution for the human condition that will stop people leveraging deadly allergies as a form of torment, then schools will keep doing so.
    - TreeRingCounter 4y ago
      > Schools started doing so because it became a serious liability issue with kids weaponizing it for bullying and leading to death This sounds completely absurd and hyperbolic, but let's say I took it at face value - why is this an issue now and not an issue when I was in school?

sidlls 4y ago

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.

fzeroracer 4y ago
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.
- savingsPossible 4y ago
  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?
  - kelseyfrog 4y ago
    Which is easier, banning peanut butter or eliminating bullying?
    - sidlls 4y ago
      Neither. Parents routinely send their kids to school with prohibited food items, including sweets and various products with nuts. I'm not allowed this privilege because of the extra scrutiny already on my kids due to their conditions.