A friend invited me for dinner and asked if I had any food allergies. I explained that I was too old to be allergic, having grown up in the 1960s rooting around in a filthy suburban environment. We were so poor and dirty that we didn’t have antibacterial soap. He said that his previous guests had emailed him an HTML document describing their food challenges. I’ve reproduced it at http://philip.greenspun.com/humor/allergies (names changed).
5 thoughts on “The family dinner in an allergic world”
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Sadly not a rare occurrence in my world with a 6 and 4 year old. My kids regularly eat dirt, lick grocery cart handles, etc.. My oldest tells everyone peanuts make him sick which always starts off the family feud competition of ER horror stories of swollen tongues and wheezing like an asthmatic baboon. I always lose these battles since his sickness was confined to gagging on too large a bite of peanut butter which was promptly corrected with a yarking of all foodstuffs he had consumed over the last week or so.
I blame my boring kids on exposure to dirt and pets. Allergy journals are full of studies proving the benefits of regular scum exposure. The limit for advantageous pet exposure seems to be the number 2. Less than 2 fur balls in an abode does not confer a benefit. My kids exposure to cats, dogs, snakes, and assorted furry vermin in my yard guarantees my kids a Darwinian advantage.
Don’t even get me started on the evils of antibacterial soaps…
That is insane. Any idea if these allergies are self diagnosed? I was talking with my kid’s doctor one day and she said that at least 90% of the patients she sees about allergens are having a psychosomatic response. Of the 10% that get referred to an Allergist, she has had exactly one with a severe allergy.
Michael: I’ve never met these folks and don’t know anything about them except that they can craft a very entertaining (albeit inadvertently) Web page. I’m allergic to mornings…
This is a topic that comes up frequently at work, and like Michael, I always wonder how much of it is self diagnosed. I don’t remember anyone having nut allergies when I was a kid (born in ’74). I can only assume all of the people with serious nut allergies died at a early age, or else people didn’t develop them.
I do remember a number of people that had very serious shellfish allergies, but that was easy to avoid even in Southern Louisiana.
Well, imagine I grew up during the late ’80 snd then the ’90 (I was born in 1984) and I still have no allergies. But wait, I grew up in Romania… maybe that explains it. Today, my mother (who is a preschool teacher) tells me allergic kids are not common yet, not unknown either, but surely their number is growing. You can take that as a sign that Romania (or any country) is finally decadent, sorry, 1st World.
The pollution cannot be the unique cause. With the collapse of the communism economy in the early ’90, most heavy industries shut down. The environment was clean of most pollutants for the first time since the start of the Industrial Revolution.