It’s the week after Halloween, and there’s a lot of cheap candy floating around. In general, this is an amazing thing.
Without meaning to bring down the good times in any way, I’d just like to use this space to provide a brief PSA about keeping people with food allergies in mind if you feel the need to start chowing down in class.
I know, I know. What freshman in modern Canada hasn’t sat through at least 13 “peanut awareness talks” since kindergarten?
The thing is, I sometimes worry that the perfunctory nature of such talks causes people to become numb to their content. I think we could all benefit from a little story sharing to better understand exactly what is at stake.
When I was in class this afternoon, the late arriving student next to me whipped out a small plastic sandwich baggie filled with roasted peanuts. A healthy, high-protein snack to help him stay awake during a thrilling late afternoon commercial law class — who could object to that?
From my perspective, he might as well have pulled out a loaded revolver.
I know that probably sounds overly dramatic. It isn’t.
Anaphylactic reactions can arise from basically any contact with an allergen: direct ingestion, touching invisible residue left behind and later snacking on safe foods, and even breathing in airborne particles.
Itching and hives can begin immediately upon contact with an allergen. Within minutes, the reaction can worsen dramatically. Symptoms include wheezing (morphing quickly into more serious difficulties breathing and swallowing), abdominal pain, vomiting, extreme increases in heart rate, and dramatic drops in blood pressure. Without immediate medical treatment, death can occur in minutes.
It doesn’t take much to start the timer. I once had to be hospitalized over a reaction to an improperly labeled Nanaimo bar made in the same bakery where they had recently baked peanut butter cookies.
Given the above, you can understand how the open bag of concentrated death a mere foot to my left caught my attention. In a delightful coincidence, I’d learned minutes before class that my brand of epinephrine injector had been recalled due to a serious design defect, thus depriving me of the crucial time-buying medication that would keep me alive on the way to the hospital in the event of a reaction.
I did my best to keep my cool. I raised my shirtsleeve to my mouth, took a deep breath, and held it. It might have looked foolish, but my neighbor was already rubbing his hands together vigorously, sending little peanut particles flying in all directions.
There was a free seat in the row ahead. I packed up and took off towards it it, forgetting to exhale until I sat down. I got a lot of funny looks, but since dying of embarrassment isn’t actually a thing, I was willing to accept the tradeoff.
That’s the kind of effect you can have on someone who suffers from allergies without even realizing it. For him, the incident was a brief, forgettable encounter with a weird, squirrely classmate. For me, it was a near-death escape worthy of the next Mission Impossible movie.
I want to make it absolutely clear that I’m not advocating for some heavy-handed approach to this issue. Outside of the public school system, where students are compelled to attend, I’m not generally in favour of inflexible rules that forbid foods in all circumstances. We’re all adults. Exercise your judgment. I trust that you probably don’t want to kill me.
(Well, okay, maybe there are a few of you who want to kill ME specifically, but there are lots of other people with allergies who you wouldn’t want to off. You get the point.)
I’m a passionate believer that the best way to handle these situations is with education. When I was a kid and the schools brought in strict nut-free policies, the main effect was to piss off the parents of the other children. Initially, lots of the parents refused to follow the rules.
They saw it as yet another example of people trying to restrict their personal freedoms. “First they came for the PB&J, and I did not speak out,” etc. Many were proud of their defiance. No one had consulted them beforehand, and by the time administrators tried to explain the reasoning behind the rules in more detail, some were already too upset to listen.
In the end, it was the other kids who were the real life-savers. They understood what would happen if I came in contact with peanuts, and none of them wanted to murder me. Kids would voluntarily self-identify if their parents had packed Oh Henry bars or Reese’s Pieces, and they would shove them back into their backpacks. They’d often go to comical lengths to warn me to stay away, as if the small wrapped bars in the depths of their bags were miniature proximity mines waiting to obliterate me the moment I walked past.
I really do believe that most people are inherently good, and they want to do the right thing. So that’s my appeal to you. Now that you’ve read this and thought about the impact that certain foods (and not just peanuts) can have on your classmates, maybe try to keep it in mind. Perhaps you can wait until after class to start devouring that bag of nuts, messy egg sandwich, or sloppy milkshake.
If you slip up and forget, I’m not going to judge you. Even my own parents messed up once or twice. It gets easier to remember the more you try.
Fair warning: if you intentionally start shelling peanuts next to me because you like to watch me squirm—well, yeah, I’ll judge you, because you are a psychopath.
(You may want to keep an eye out for black widow spiders climbing up your chair during future classes—I hear Dalhousie hasn’t yet established an arachnid-free campus.)
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