Don't Kill the Birthday Girl (11 page)

In March 2000, Dee Dee Darden founded the National Peanut Board (NPB), a representative body for peanut farmers. The board's activities, which focus on scientific research, domestic advertising, and export promotion, are funded through a 1 percent assessment levied on annual peanut crop values. Soon
after the board's formation, Darden approached the council's leaders with a radical idea: to fund not just agricultural science but research into the explosive rise of peanut allergies.

“We faced a lot of opposition at first, especially from those in the industry,” Darden says. “They thought if we talked about it too much, it made it a forefront issue.”

Darden was determined. “I'd heard all the numbers,” she tells me. “We wanted to have a positive impact on the situation.” Darden, then in her early forties, had grown up in a farming family of Suffolk—“there wasn't hardly a day I wasn't out in the dirt”—in a region of Virginia once referred to as the peanut capital of the world. “It was hard to believe. I never knew anyone who had any allergies, much less peanut allergies … but we didn't want to be ostriches, with our heads in the sand.”

Darden and her colleagues wondered where their relatively small amount of start-up money could make the most difference. So they created the Scientific Advisory Council (SAC), a rotating panel of five leading doctors and scientists from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Though each member is already prominent in the field of allergy study, the SAC's biannual meetings bring them together for brainstorming sessions, for the opportunity to share research results, and to decide which proposals the NPB should offer future grant support.

“They were like little children, all excited to be in the same room,” Darden remembers. “You know, like when children's faces light up? We were a bunch of peanut farmers, putting all these great minds together.”

In the past ten years, the SAC has overseen the cumulative allocation of nearly $7 million of NPB funding for allergy
study and education. One vein of research looks at which peanut-preparation techniques release the most proteins. On a molecular level, it turns out that dry roasted peanuts are more “allergic” than ones that have been boiled. This may explain why frequency of peanut reaction is so high in the United States, where dry roasting is the norm, even in the production of peanut butter. In China, where peanut consumption is comparable but the peanuts are steamed or boiled, the incidence of allergy is low.

Scientific data is a double-edged sword. Some discoveries are welcome to peanut farmers; others make their jobs harder. One focal point for investigation has been defining the minimum exposure capable of eliciting a reaction. The latest research suggests the threshold is about one-tenth of one peanut, a frighteningly small amount for farmers when negotiating with manufacturers wary of cross-contamination at processing plants. Scientists have also shown that peanut oil can be refined to the point that the reactive proteins are removed, resulting in FDA approval to take that refined oil off the “allergen” list (this is also true of some soy oils)—great news for farmers. But complicating matters is the reality that this process has a higher price point than cold-pressed, expeller-pressed, or extruded peanut oil.

One study funded in part by the SAC looked at the degree to which peanut proteins are passed from mother to child via breast milk. For many years, parents have been advised to avoid exposing their children to peanuts until the age of two. Did breast-feeding mothers need to abstain from peanuts as well? Then, in October 2009,
Pediatrics
published a study demonstrating a correlation between early consumption of peanuts
and a
low
incidence of peanut allergy. The American Academy of Pediatrics has changed their official stance and recommends that peanuts be administered to children whenever parents judge developmentally appropriate.

Peanut farmers aren't rejoicing just yet. It's one thing to get a vote of confidence at the organizational level. It's another thing to get thousands of local doctors, used to telling new mothers one thing, to start telling them another.

I call up Ryan Lepicier, the NPB director of communications, who works to reconcile the advice of the scientific community with ingrained local policies. He reaches out to schools struggling to formulate their peanut- and other allergen-related protocols. Each time, he says, he must first figure out who is driving the decisions. The principal? The dietician? The school board? The parents? Lepicier sees the decision to ban some foods outright—a policy, he is quick to note, not endorsed by such groups as the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network—as part of a slippery slope in which lobbying and political correctness trump common sense.

“It's like the association of nurses,” he recalls, “who didn't want to implement programs fighting obesity because students would be ‘singled out.' Or schools that didn't serve grapes because the janitors didn't want to clean them up off the floor.”

The National Peanut Board has an undeniable financial stake in avoiding peanut bans. But Lepicier hopes that as Americans learn more from international allergy studies, the NPB will no longer have to be its own best advocate. In 2008, a team headed by Dr. Gideon Lack announced that in a study looking at ten thousand Jewish children (i.e., a cohort with genetic similarity), those who had been raised in London were
about ten times more likely to have peanut sensitivity than those raised in Tel Aviv. Lack theorized that one contributing factor could be the predominance of Israeli children exposed to peanuts via a popular peanut-based treat, Bamba.

First debuted in the mid-1960s, Bamba is corn that is puffed, enriched with vitamins, and sprayed with Argentinean peanut butter before it cools. Picture a peanut-based equivalent of a Cheez Doodle. An even sweeter “strawberry” version is also available, dyed red with beetroot. It's a ubiquitous treat in Israel, often fed to toddlers as their first finger food.

Lack theorized that tykes chewing on Bamba were somehow inoculating themselves against peanut allergy. In contrast, the widespread Western timeline of “protecting” children under age three from peanut exposure might be contributing to peanut allergy, instead of preventing it. With grant support from several groups including the NPB and the National Institutes of Health, Lack has launched the LEAP (Learning Early About Peanut Allergy) Study, an ambitious seven-year study that has enrolled 640 children, all between the ages of four months and ten months, considered at high risk for peanut allergy because of diagnosed eczema or egg allergy. Half of these children will be restricted from peanut exposure; half will be exposed regularly between the ages of ten months and three years. When the participants reach the age of five, they will be tested for peanut allergy.

This data, which should become available in 2014, will primarily impact attitudes toward prenatal and early childhood peanut exposure. But it may also persuasively align with shifting attitudes toward treating established peanut allergies through low-level exposure rather than absolute avoidance. That is,
pending the success of oral immunotherapy approaches only now being attempted. These breakthroughs glimmer as part of a more rational future.

In the meantime, we have entrepreneurs like Sharon Perry, co-owner of the Southern Star Ranch Boarding Kennel in Florence, Texas. Perry has devoted a division of her corporation to the cultivation of service animals taught to detect peanuts. Their proponents hope these companions will become as widely accepted as seeing-eye dogs. Perry claims to screen three hundred candidates for every single dog chosen for the program. Once you factor in purchase, vaccinations, and up to six months of training, the price of one of these dogs can top ten thousand dollars. In one promotional video, I watched a harnessed Labrador walk up the aisle of a public library with his master, stopping at any book that had once been handled by a child's nut-contaminated fingertips.

I ask Lepicier what the European scientists he works with think of America's peanut-sniffing dogs.

“They are aghast,” he says.

•  •  •

When allergies come up in conversation, I hear one of two comments. The first is “Oh, I know a person who is so allergic to [fill in the blank].” The second is “The schools now—you can't serve anything. It's unbelievable!” Those uttering the latter follow with a guilty look, as if I won't understand. But I do. In an effort to protect children, we've asked everyone to join us in the briar patch. Parenting is hard enough without having to reinvent the sandwich, just for the sake of your kid's classmate.

So people call the situation “unbelievable.” As in, “I can't believe the change from when I was a child.” Or as in, “I can't believe this is all really necessary.”

In the gap between what is feared and what is believed, folks have accumulated hostility toward those of us who claim severe allergies. You find skepticism in the comment boards for allergy-centric op-ed pieces, where anonymous voices suggest it's all in our heads, that we're making others abet our neuroses. You can hear the resentment in pockets of the restaurant industry. One Las Vegas chef told Ryan Lepicier, “Some people say they have an allergy when they just don't want to eat something.”

Something is awry when the news delivers stories like the 2007 incident in which a janitor at the Riverside Bakery in Nottingham, England, purposefully strewed peanuts around the facility—usually a nut-free zone—after being disciplined for putting a calendar of nude girls up on the wall. The bakery, part of a larger plant called Pork Farms, estimated that they lost $1.6 million in delayed production while decontaminating the factory.
Janitor Goes Nuts
, says the link to the story I find online.

If the story was arsenic being thrown around a baby food jarring facility, no one would be laughing. Yet we do laugh. More and more, food allergies are being played in movies and television for laughs.

I grew up watching
The Simpsons
, and there's a season-eighteen episode in which Bart (newly revealed to have a shrimp allergy) and Principal Skinner (newly revealed to have a peanut allergy) face off on the landing of a Thai food factory in
the previously unknown Little Bangkok section of Springfield. Their weapons? A peanut tied to the end of one long stick, a shrimp tied to the end of another. The sound track? “Duel of the Fates” from
Star Wars
lightsaber battles. Their fight comes to a draw when the catwalk collapses, dumping them into a vat of equally imperiling peanut-covered shrimp. And I laughed, I did. I can take a joke.

But
The Simpsons
is, by definition, a cartoonish treatment of the world. What worries me are the programs that do not operate in the register of satire or surrealism. These shows develop a grounded setting, present three-dimensional characters, and invest in those characters' emotions; yet when the plotline employs an allergy incident, it does so with callousness that suggests the writers don't see allergies as any real threat to life.

The media frames food allergies with three recurring clichés. The first cliché: the allergic reaction as sight gag. In
Hitch
, a 2005 romantic comedy, Will Smith plays matchmaker Alex “Hitch” Hitchens, and Eva Mendes costars as his love interest. When Hitch accidentally ingests shellfish, his eyelids swell into a grotesque mask. This isn't a way of showing that Hitch's braggadocio is actually rooted in a lifetime of vulnerability over whether his body can be trusted not to turn on him. Nah. This is an excuse for Smith's character to go into a drugstore, scarf down Benadryl, and stage a “look, he's acting like a funny drunk” scene, which is about as funny as the ol' runaway wheelchair gag.

The second cliché: allergy as Achilles' heel, in which an otherwise competent, competitive character is taken out by an allergen. In the ABC Family movie
Picture This
, the prototypical
“evil blonde,” Lisa Cross, is determined to prevent the lead character, Mandy Gilbert (played by
High School Musical
star Ashley Tisdale), from going to a party with Cross's ex-boyfriend. Her solution? She bribes a mall worker to sell Gilbert a nut-laced smoothie, knowing this will transform the allergic girl's features into the dreaded “butt face.”

Three years earlier, in the big-screen
Monster-in-Law
, Jane Fonda's titular character sneaks peanuts into the Jennifer Lopez nut-allergic character's food the night before her wedding day, hoping a reaction will prevent Lopez from marrying her son. The real-world potential for a charge of attempted murder? Details, details.

The third cause for an allergy cameo: provide an excuse for the protagonist to act heroically. In the recent movie version of
Nancy Drew
, Emma Roberts's Nancy is introduced as a brave, practical, and preternaturally well-read young teen. Our proof? A party where one of Nancy's friends passes out on the floor, and it's discovered she is in the grip of an anaphylactic reaction due to a known peanut allergy.

Nobody asks if the girl carries an epinephrine injector. Instead, it just so happens that Nancy is versed in at-home tracheotomies. Give her a ballpoint pen, a pocketknife, and some room, and she can save a life. (The grateful friend appears in a later scene, remarkably none the worse for wear. There is no scarring in the world of teen cinema.)

All these clichés come together in a 2005 episode of
That's So Raven
that still lives on in syndication. I caught it one night during one of those dull-eyed, 1 a.m. moments when it's either the Disney Channel or HGTV, and I'd already seen that episode
of
Property Virgins
. So instead I got season three's “Chef-Man and Raven.” Victor Baxter and his daughter, Raven (played by Raven-Symoné, aka Olivia from
The Cosby Show
), are invited to compete against Victor's former college cooking rival for the
Iron
Chef-styled program
Challenge Captain Cook-off
.