Keeping teachers on their toes…

From a friend’s Facebook status…

Our [8-year-old] drama queen caused an e-mail to be sent to all the parents regarding bringing nut-derived foods to school.

  • Mama, so I noticed that this girl was eating a sandwich with Nutella today…
  • Really, the school doesn’t allow nuts!
  • See, Mama, good, you are paying attention. Then, I came up to her, licked her sandwich and started choking, popping my eyes, and making weird noises with a red face… I do not have an allergy, but everybody freaked out!

[This Huffington Post article says that roughly 11 Americans die annually from food allergies.]

5 thoughts on “Keeping teachers on their toes…

  1. There is a “nut-free” table at my son’s middle school. A decade ago, that was limited to elementary cafeterias. Does seem appropriate in light of the increasing % with some sort of intolerance/allergy. However, was bothered about 5 yrs ago when my son’s entire 1st grade class endured tasteless egg-free, gluten-free, dairy-free refreshments at Halloween & Valentine’s Day as one child in the class had severe allergies. So the mother insisted on providing all the food for class parties, including some which was air-freighted in from a vegan Manhattan bakery. The children barely touched the food. We dubbed this the least common denominator approach. Better that everyone should suffer than that anyone should enjoy dessert. The Silver Palate brownies I had baked using Land-o-Lakes butter years earlier were devoured. Sadly, by the time my youngest entered kindergarten, Montgomery County Public Schools (MD) had banned homemade baked goods. Thus the room parents bought cupcakes made with corn syrup & canola oil — ugh! (Whole Foods cupcakes would have exceeded the budget, but are nothing to write home about either.)

  2. Unfortunately it’s not just the States any food consumed by the public must be prepared in an inspected kitchen, my brother in law was forced to throw out a lot of food at a homeless shelter (Ontario Canada) and at our community out reach in Munich, same thing, home backed goods yes, but only if prepared at our kitchen.

  3. At dinner a few nights ago the parents of a three year old shared the fact that, because of various classmates’ allergies – and the hard line taken by the teachers enforcing the different food bans – their son was now afraid of a variety of foods that he does not, in fact, have an allergy to. What’s particularly odd in this case was that at least two supposed allergies are extremely rare – to the point that finding severe cases of both in a class of 18 children stretched credibility, at least according to the physicians in the discussion.

  4. @Rob agree that it’s become the norm, and that a home kitchen might carry additional risk. So due to perceived risk of litigation, the public schools probably had to choose the store-bought route, which my local schools did circa 2006. I was recently at Whole Foods toward closing time. To their credit, they were getting ready to donate all of that day’s breads (in plastic bags or in paper sleeves with just a bit exposed) and packaged cookies (in clamshell containers & similar) with that day’s date (so not the freshest) to a homeless shelter. Then I saw the bakery guy dumping the self-serve cookies into a large trash bin. He said since those cookies aren’t individually packaged, they could have been contaminated by customers reaching in to access the rows of pastries/cookies/muffins. Therefore, Whole Foods doesn’t donate the self-serve muffins, cookies, etc.. So beware if you’re buying the muffins at Whole Foods that the germs exceed the standards for charitable donations, but are good enough to be sold to the public at $1.59 @ea.

  5. I had a high school math teacher years ago who was allergic to peanuts; he sued the Mars company because it turned out that “plain” M&Ms have peanuts in them.

    Must be something about K-12 education.

    These days I troll Gluten-Free people on line, particularly complaining that labels often just say “FLOUR” instead of “WHEAT FLOUR”. In my case I am looking for wheat because the worst thing about my food co-op these days is that if you don’t look carefully at everything they might slip you a cupcake that costs twice as much as a real cupcake and that tastes like sawdust.

    At least when our kid was in elementary school, however, they didn’t give us any problem about bringing in home-cooked deserts. Also, even though they had a “no masks”, “no weapons” policy from Halloween they never stopped me from showing up as a pirate with a real sword.

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