A Food In the Classroom Horror Story

[Bettina at The Lunch Tray]

Thought you guys would appreciate a story on today's Lunch Tray about food in the classroom and a scarily clueless teacher.  This board won't allow me to share the link but it's today's post (10/25)

[CMdeux]

Ahhhhh-- yes, it's because you're posting as a guest.    (Sorry, it's for spam control.)

Let me see if I can find the link and paste it in below.

The Lunch Tray-- A Food-in-the-Classroom Horror Story

[ajasfolks2]

Bettina, as always,

THANK YOU!!            THANK YOU!!          THANK YOU!!          THANK YOU!!

[Bettina at The Lunch Tray]

I'm so glad to share these stories and shed light on this serious issue.  And thanks to the readers of this forum for being longtime supporters of TLT! 

[twinturbo]

Totally not your fault, Bettina, but I'm going to call out one portion here but it's an important nitpick when it comes to contamination in a classroom. Aerosol sensitivity is more than smelling the odor of an allergen it is about the allergen agitated to the point that the proteins start filling the air in concentration. One boiled egg across the room will not provoke a reaction in my eldest child. One egg cooking in the room will release proteins into the air in great enough concentration to most likely provoke a reaction. Worse, if the egg is in powdered form then mechanically agitated like an angel food cake mix then that would be... I don't want to consider it.

Same for milk with my youngest child. A glass of milk in the same room, no problem. Milk being steamed or milk in a powdered form mechanically agitated is the danger.

The wording around airborne peanut sensitivity in the submission from your reader also sounds more like the intent was more contact-to-ingestion rather than truly concerned about aerosol. I have seen this repeatedly used as a straw man by many allergist researchers that completely fails to address how an allergen migrates around in solid ingestible form in younger children or when the treats are co-mingled during serving, or handing out napkins, anything that facilitates contamination.

So it's going to be more about concentration, agitation and contamination. Again, there's no way Bettina would have known this but where these things hit other readers it's important to distinguish where life and limb is on the line, at least on here I wouldn't necessarily rewrite the blog entry or edit it because your main point is still accurate.

For clarity's sake this is the part that I refer to:

Then the teacher pointed out the nutty bars and asked if it would be a problem just having them in the room with her. My kid doesn't have airborne peanut sensitivity, so I said, "No, if she doesn't eat them she'll be okay. But this little boy over here was also at the peanut free table today, so it might be a problem for him."

[CMdeux]

I agree-- and sometimes this is used even by those of us who DO know better.  The reason is that in communicating with laypersons, it's often too difficult for them to grasp surface contamination which isn't visible to the naked eye-- at leat to grasp it sufficiently well to understand how dangerous it is to someone with that kind of VERY low threshold, anyway.

Some of this is about low threshold, versus "even lower" threshold.

There was a time when even cooking pasta contaminated with egg aerosolized enough protein to cause hives on my allergic daughter-- when she was in another room in the house.     We've definitely seen reactivity from peanut this way where it is really difficult to imagine the route of exposure being anything but aerosol, but the form/circumstances also make aerosol exposure pretty low.  (Hives UNDER clothing, wheezing/stridor without nasopharyngeal contact symptoms-- resolution upon leaving a space which is contaminated, even without 'washing' hands or skin.) 

So yeah, shorthand is often a useful way for people without much experience to 'get' it well enough for safety.  We do tell people "aerosol" sensitivity and have occasionaly indicated that this does in fact mean that just "eating it around her" is dangerous.  Because it seems to be.  The mechanistic reasons are not really essential to safety there, for the most part.

This goes a long way to explaining, however, why it is that there are some risks that NOBODY but experts (e.g. parents of allergic children) have any business evaluating and making decisions about re: a particular allergic child's safety.    What is deemed okay for one child may be completely unsafe for another, and there are risks which WE may take on in our presence that should be way out of bounds for another caregiver.  We know things that they can't, and we're alert to the real dangers that they may not understand are different from what they THINK of as the real dangers.  Convoluted, I know.