There are some great responses here on Bettina's site:

http://www.thelunchtray.com/readers-respond-what-are-our-societal-obligations-to-food-allergic-kids/

Yup.


It was a work-potluck two weeks after our DD nearly died that made me fully aware of just how different my world now looked.  Similar setting to what she describes.  I was afraid to set my then 1yo DD down, afraid to let anyone TOUCH her (since they all had hands loaded with poisonous food residue) and generally a nervous wreck... which I knew even at the time probably looked to everyone else like profoundly disturbed paranoid schizoid behavior. 


It is awful, that realization-- you look crazy/irrational/mentally ill, but you aren't.  But there's no way to explain it to anyone else if they don't already more or less understand all on their own.

We tweeted it from Slate this morning.  Loved this.

What I especially resonated with:

QuoteIn the months after Claire's diagnosis, my relationship to food changed so much that I felt as if I had woken up one day, still living in the same country I'd always lived in, but that I could no longer speak the language. Around other families -- at a picnic for my husband's colleagues and their families, for example -- when I watched other children handle food, I felt like they were holding tiny snakes. Maybe the snakes were poisonous and maybe they weren't; maybe they'd escape, and maybe they wouldn't. But this is the comparison that's ultimately stayed with me: Being the parent of a child with food allergies is like someone suddenly telling you the colors orange and gray are harmful to your child. I can guarantee that you'd soon realize orange and gray are everywhere.

Nor is feeding your child* okay in any of the following ways/times/locations/places:

a) the doctor's office
b) the dentist
c) a local stylist/haircutting place
d) in any office supply store
e) the library
f) at the post office
g) the county courthouse or polling place
h) in MY car
i) a fabric store
j) any museum exhibit space.

* barring a medical necessity.  Remember medical necessity means that HARM will result from not attending to this need.  HARM.  Not "inconvenience" or 'temporary discomfort.'  HARM.  As in, a metabolic condition which requires caloric intake at unpredictable intervals and is fairly urgent.  This would be things like diabetes, or a need for a medication administered "as needed" which requires food simultaneously.

---

By the way, in case anyone reading is too young to recall what this was like, this is what we used to refer to as being.... civilized.   

If snacking all the time really worked as weight control, by the way, why are we SO ****ing FAT??  Riiiiight.  Because that particular theory doesn't work. 

I think it comes down to there being a time and place for everything.  And this line is so disgustingly blurred these days it is not funny.

I don't care if there is food at the park, feed your children while they are sitting down and won't choke, clean up after them, etc.  Feeding little Joey Goldfish crackers or Cheerios on the slide is just not kosher in my book.