Editor's Note:
Over the last several weeks, Chatelaine has received an unprecedented volume of responses to Patricia Pearson’s December feature story, “It’s Just Nuts,” which follows here.
We welcome, and read carefully, each comment to this article. Our editors have created this venue on Chatelaine.com to hear your voices on this important issue. We plan to publish more reaction in our January edition of Chatelaine. We also welcome feedback and conversation in the discussion area of our Facebook page.
Chatelaine knows that food allergies can be both serious and deadly, and this is a reality for many Canadians, and, in fact, many of our readers.
Above all, Chatelaine welcomes the national discussion this story has generated.
Maryam Sanati
Editor-in-chief
Chatelaine
Read Anaphylaxis Canada’s detailed rebuttal to Chatelaine’s food-allergy story.
My son is a picky eater. Actually, that’s an understatement. He is so ludicrously selective that he will only eat macaroni and cheese, for instance, if the noodles are straight rather than elbow-shaped, and if the cheese is pale orange, not white.
Luckily, given his catlike fussiness, he does have a consistent passion for health-food-store peanut butter on whole-grain bread. The trouble is that I can’t feed him that. Or at least the ban extends from Monday to Friday, when carrying the lunch he is most likely to consume into his elementary school is equivalent to showing up with a gun.
Fewer than 2 percent of Canadian children are allergic to peanuts, and none of them happen to be in his grade 4 class. Across the country, schools are implementing strict peanut-aware and peanut-free policies without shunning any other allergens. Other children are allergic to bees, milk, wheat, almonds and soy products, all of which are abundantly evident in schoolyards at lunchtime. The term peanut-free has even become a marketing strategy, with companies such as Mars leading the way by running television commercials in Canada boasting that “no peanut will be near a Mars bar again.” (The irony that Mars bars still contain milk — another potentially dangerous allergen — is apparently lost on the corporation.)
Why, exactly, does the tiny peanut loom so large as a threat?
Given the extent of the panic, you would think that the answer is obvious, but it turns out it isn’t. Research on food allergies is relatively new, and some initial assumptions are beginning to be overturned. There is uncertainty within the medical profession about how pervasive severe allergies are in Canada, and we are just now getting a clearer picture of the risk factors, such as asthma.
People — particularly parents — may overestimate how many of us are life-threateningly allergic, and to what. Since there is no national data on hospitalizations and fatal-
ities from food allergies, we are left to guess apprehensively about the phenomenon and draw our own catastrophic conclusions.
