Forty years later, I dimly remember a bologna contingent. There was also a tuna fish faction, and the chicken-noodle-soup-in-an-Underdog-thermos brigade. A fringe weirdo or two might’ve favored liverwurst. But the plurality, if not majority, of the brown baggers in my grade school lunchroom were staunch peanut butter and jelly devotees. I ate a PB & J sandwich every single day of grade school. I never got sick of them, and so far as I can recall, nobody got sick from them, either. Today, however, peanut allergies are so widespread in schools–or at least so feared–that many lunchrooms and preschools ban peanut butter altogether, while others enforce a separate seating area for the PB & J coterie. (Children excluded from this group sometimes suffer from peanuts envy, also known as Peter Pan syndrome.) I do not belittle anyone’s allergic woes, but I do wonder why such a perennially popular and heretofore benign comfort food has so suddenly mutated into typhoid goober.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
You got me, bubba. Peanut allergies have been around forever, but peanut phobia blew up out of nowhere. Ninety-four percent of the journal articles I turned up by searching on “peanut” and “allergy” in an on-line medical database (165 out of 176) were published since January 1995. Now a week doesn’t go by without some new sign that peanut butter is to the 21st century what fleas and rats were to the 14th. Recent bulletins:
An Australian teenager on a field trip in 2002 ate a spoonful of peanut butter, went into cardiac arrest, could not be revived by paramedics, and died soon after arriving at the hospital.
Are peanut allergies becoming more common? Many researchers think so, but the evidence isn’t overwhelming. News reports last fall told of a fresh study showing that the prevalence of peanut allergies was increasing. But what the study actually said was that between two groups of about 1,200 children born roughly six years apart, the number of cases had risen from 6 to 13–“a strong but statistically nonsignificant trend.”
