Silly as it sounds to recall nuts for undeclared nuts, not all nuts are the same.
If you’re allergic to cashews but not pecans, you want to know whether the pecans you might eat have come in contact with cashews. And that’s not even getting into the peanut/tree nut difference!
In this case [Edit: link broken], a process breakdown at a roaster opened up everything to cross-contamination by every other kind of nut they sell. They’re recalling affected lots while they fix the problem.
If you are told a child in your care has a severe food allergy, believe them. Don’t kill a three-year-old with a grilled cheese sandwich.
According to his parents, staff at the preschool knew about his severe dairy allergy, but an adult gave him the cheese sandwich anyway. He ate it, went into anaphylactic shock, and died in the emergency room. No word on whether they gave him epinephrine. (New York law allows schools to stock it, but doesn’t require them to.) Update: Apparently the school called his mother instead of 911. Want to bet paramedics could have helped?
“We will get to the bottom of what happened here…” says a spokesman for NYC’s health department, “and whether the facility could have done something differently to prevent this tragedy.” Well, yeah: Don’t give kids food that you know they’re severely allergic to!
Children with severe allergies know to avoid certain foods, but they need help to do it:
Maybe it was someone new who didn’t know yet. Maybe it was someone who didn’t take it seriously. Maybe there was a mix-up and he was supposed to get something else, but they handed him the cheese sandwich by mistake. All of those could have been prevented.
Yes, mistakes happen. Even fatal ones. But they happen a lot less often when you listen to people who are facing the danger, believe them, and take action to follow through on it.
1 in 13 children has a food allergy. Even if your child doesn’t, they have friends who do.
Don’t let them down.
Update on the case from Allergic Living (Nov 16):
The incident is still under investigation. It’s not even clear at this point whether the specific person who gave him the sandwich was aware of the allergy (though they certainly should have been), or whether they gave him epinephrine, though it is clear that:
The school has been closed pending the investigation results, and new directives have been issued that childcare staff will call 911 in the event of a medical emergency.
Another update from Allergic Living (May 2018):
Today I joined hundreds of people at the CBS Studios in Los Angeles to raise money for Food Allergy Research and Education through the FARE Walk for Food Allergy.
We skipped last year and decided to join this year’s event at the last minute. Rather than walking along the shore at Long Beach, this year’s course ran through the CBS Studios lot. It started on what looked like a suburban New England street, and wound past production trailers, soundstages, prop storage, and even the Los Angeles river….
…such as it is. Other parts of the river are much nicer, even navigable at times, but this stretch is basically a concrete drainage ditch inside a bigger drainage ditch. It looks bleak now, but during flood years the channels fill completely, preventing the city’s streets from flooding instead.
FARE funds studies to explore the causes of food allergy and develop new therapies. They run outreach programs to make it safer to visit restaurants, or just be at school or the workplace.
Food allergies can range from mild to life-threatening — yes, people die — and those of us on the far end of the range need to be constantly on the watch for hidden ingredients and cross-contact between foods we can eat and foods we can’t.
Cool: Michael’s is selling plastic teal pumpkins for people who plan on offering non-food treats for allergic trick or treaters as part of the Teal Pumpkin Project. You can still paint a pumpkin teal, of course, but this simplifies the setup. (Are we really that close to Halloween already?)
On every news story about someone who experienced a severe allergic reaction outside the home, there will be someone who says, “If it’s that dangerous, why would you even risk it? Keep your kid at home and make all their food yourself from scratch all the time!”*
Let’s think about this.
A car could kill your child. Today, tomorrow, years down the line. This is not a hypothetical. This is a fact, and it’s a risk that you live with.
Why on earth would you risk letting your child cross the street? Keep them at home! Don’t let them out of the house in case someone jumps the curb!
That’s…not exactly practical, is it?
You don’t keep your child inside 24/7 to avoid cars. You take them outside, with precautions. You teach them to stay on the sidewalk, cross at corners and crosswalks, and look for cars before crossing. You walk with them until they’re old enough to walk safely on their own.
You rely on drivers to follow the rules of the road…but you still look both ways in case someone’s distracted or feels entitled and plows through a red light anyway.
And then your children can live their lives out in the world instead of being frightened recluses who hide in the basement whenever a car goes by.
You can’t eliminate risk 100%, but you can manage it.
The exact balance is going to be different for each person with an allergy.** But it’s not unreasonable to expect the food industry to follow basic safety procedures to avoid cross-contact — and to not introduce a danger that wasn’t there to begin with.
—
*Even if you have the time to prepare every meal at home, there’s still the risk of mislabeling or cross-contamination in the supply chain. Right now, there’s an ongoing recall of baked goods produced with peanut-contaminated flour. A year ago, supplies of cumin were tainted with peanuts. That impacted everything from prepared foods down to bulk-bin spices. Everyone’s at risk with the massive listeria recall of vegetables, allergies or no.
**Heck, it’s different for each of my allergies, and I’m one person. I’ll cheerfully walk into a coffee shop that serves almond milk and soy milk, but won’t set foot in one of those burger places that plops a bin of peanuts on the table. Even with my Epi-Pen. That’s just playing live-action Frogger.
Sure, there are a few things that don’t have peanuts in them (or at least aren’t supposed to). And there are potato chips too.
I’ve taken to bringing my own string cheese and keeping it in the fridge. It’s one way to be sure there’s something I can eat safely.
I was at the store the other day and noticed that they had a limited edition Thin Mints-flavored Nestle Crunch, based on the classic Girl Scout cookie. I had to pick it up. But when I looked at the ingredients, I was in for a surprise:
Ground peanuts.
Why they put ground peanuts in the Crunch/Thin Mints mashup, I couldn’t say, because peanuts aren’t in either Nestle Crunch or Thin Mints. (Not on purpose, anyway, though they do list a cross-contact warning.) And nothing in the packaging except for the ingredients and allergy statement makes any mention of it. The candy bar isn’t labeled as Crunch + Thin Mints + Peanuty Goodness, it’s just labeled as Crunch + Thin Mints.
This is why clear labeling is important: I would never have expected to find peanuts in a combination of two things that don’t have peanuts in them.
