And...peanut butter does not have peanut dust. It is a ... butter. It is creamy. It resides between someone else's two pieces of bread. You aren't going to inhale it. If you can inhale peanut butter from someone else's sandwich from down a table or another table over, while they are even eating it mind you, I would pay to see it. Heck, I would sell tickets to that enormous feat.
I repeat, you cannot, that is...cannot, have an allergic reaction from peanut butter without actual ingestion. Even if you get this miraculously dangerous "residue" on your hands from touching someone else's hands who just ate a PB&J the most you can get (if you have an extreme allergy) is a mild skin irritation which would prompt a washing of the skin. It would not be enough to set off full alarms of severe allergic reactions and anaphylactic shock and everything else dramatically talked about here. There is no possible way.
Look, I can see not putting peanuts in hot lunch items, fine. Not serving the kids nut products en masse, ok. But we are talking about parents sending personal lunches for their own children. Peanut butter. Not peanut dust.
I think you're ignoring the potential risks with peanut butter, D. You've jumped around and said that kids should be able to just bring PB&J regardless of any risks, that the risks aren't serious, to kids should just wash their hands, to how this is mindless, this doesn't register on the radar, to there's no risk to peanut residue on hands from peanut butter (I brought that up in another post).
There's a liability issue here. Not only that, but the school ban on peanuts is actually not that new of a thing. There are lists of schools, day care centers, airlines, restaurants, etc. that explicitly label themselves as "allergen/peanut-free" to let people with potential fatal allergies be aware of what establishments are safe and which are not (and are in constant need of wiping down seats, table tops, silverware, glasses, any surface the child has to touch.
Let me put it another way for you here....say a school has a bee hive on its premises that may be out of the way, but still open and active for the bees to roam around looking for pollen. There are people who have possible life-threatening allergic reactions to bee stings from the venom, so how responsible would a school be by knowingly having a bee hive in its premises while there are students who knowingly attend that have severe allergies to bee venom?
What I'm getting from you is that a) kids with severe peanut allergies actually don't exist and are blowing this out of proportion....or that b) their health concern is not worth the majority people's convenience and preferences. But please correct me if I'm wrong.
Your gripe has been addressed many times over around the nation with many different establishments. Some parents get riled up (especially vegetarian parents, which is weird) about the "right" to send a PB&J to their kids' school without some snarky kid saying he'll have an allergic reaction to peanuts.
Did you know that many kids, when given the chance (you brought up school bullying before), look at that as an opportunity to sneak peanuts into these kids food items as a joke or as a bullying opportunity? It's not just about kids just being mindless little twerps who have bad parents who don't teach their kids how to protect themselves against all possibilities. There are kids who think it's funny and see it as a chance to play a sick joke.
Again, I've seen the reaction happen. Have you? It's not funny. It's not something to wave a hand at and dismiss. It's not something to blame parents on. Restaurants and airlines will often treat gluten and wheat allergies much less seriously than peanut and shellfish allergies. And it's because they know the unique nature of these food-borne allergies and the reactions that they inflict on the person. They'll cater to the individual to offer a gluten-free meal, or vegetarian-meal, or a kosher-meal, etc. But peanut allergies? They're fully aware of the risks involved with not just kids
but teens and adults. Airlines will treat their customers with these allergies much much more seriously and with much more attention than what I mentioned before with specialty requests. That is, unless they are "peanut-free" as an airline.
