<p>My D (in a dorm with a peanut-free cafeteria) eats peanut butter on occasion in her room. No effort is made to keep the rest of the dorm peanut-free necessarily, just the dining facility itself. That seems reasonable. If her roommate were PA, then obviously the two of them would have to work out something based on the other person’s severity.</p>
<p>But this made me think - she lived on campus over the summer, when there were no dining halls open, but they had a kitchen on every floor and girls prepared their own food as they saw fit and ate (generally) communally. This issue didn’t come up, but what if a PA student had been there? Would such a student have had the “right” to request that the communal kitchen be peanut-free and that everyone who wanted PBJ eat in their own rooms? Somehow this feels different to me and I can’t articulate why.</p>
The life of the child with the allergy is the most important thing. Full stop.</p>
<p>Every school that should accommodate that student and would accommodate that student might not be the right place for that student because, despite official accommodations, some schools’ confligurations and circumstances might lead to a situation that can never achieve an acceptable level of real-world safety no matter how good the intentions. Such a school should not be chosen by the life-threateningly allergic, because being right doesn’t trump being alive.</p>
<p>Well, yes, ZM, of course the student’s life is the most important thing. But when no one on this thread has pointed to a single instance of a college student dying from ingestion, let alone exposure, in any university dining hall, never mind one that has made other modifications short of a total ban, I’m wondering how realistic the fear of death is. Yes, even one death is too many - but if we operated under that principle, we’d have to ban a heck of a lot more than peanuts.</p>
<p>As I said earlier, prohibiting alcohol nationwide would probably save at least a few people from being killed in DUIs every year. I don’t hear a lot of support for that position. Even more to the point, the girl in California who recently died from biting into a rice krispie treat would probably still be alive if the United States banned all peanut products. Wasn’t her life more important than our right to eat peanuts?</p>
<p>CTScoutMom- The difference remains that if a college isn’t wheelchair accessible, a student in a wheelchair can’t attend. Period. On the other hand, if a college doesn’t have a totally peanut free dining hall, it can still offer a range of other accommodations that should allow the student to have a reasonable approximation of an ordinary college experience. Unless this student has also never gone to a restaurant, mall, sporting event, movie, family function, home of someone who eats peanuts, etc, even using the dining hall would entail no more risk than the same risk he routinely assumes in almost every other situation in life - and a risk that is, statistically, not terribly high, especially if proper precautions are used. That is nowhere remotely similar to the far more clear-cut case of a wheelchair-bound individual.</p>
<p>It is not a “small handful” of students. From the article I cited earlier:</p>
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<p>In the developing world, the peanut is a critical part of many people’s diets, as it is low-cost and nutrient-rich. It is used to help fight malnutrition in people with AIDS and other “wasting” diseases:</p>
<p>The girl in California would be alive if she and her parents hadn’t trusted homemade, unlabeled food that was placed before her and that she ate without questioning the ingredients. They made an assumption that proved fatal. It would be HORRIBLE to have to go through life never being able to let one’s guard down. It is heartbreaking that this happened at all.</p>
<p>that about sums it up…reasonable accommodations is all that is needed. If there is just one dining hall, then maybe this college is not a good “fit”. Of course, he/she could do the absolute wrong thing and go to this college and sue…</p>
<p>Yes, this combined with prefect’s first-hand knowledge that being near peanut butter is not a danger, makes me wonder why the ban is being done in the first place.</p>
<p>I can see why banning peanuts as a recipe ingredient of dining hall offerings might be justified, but I don’t understand why peanut butter would need to be banned.</p>
<p>I still think it is dangerous from a liability standpoint for a college to represent that its dining hall food is peanut-free.</p>
<p>Just as a data point, peanut butter is a major staple of our family’s diet. We perceive it to be, especially in natural form, more healthful than processed luncheon meats and cheeses. PB & J was the only sandwich my S would eat in K - 8th grades. Fortunately, it was not banned in his schools. He eats it in his dorm room every day now, he tells me, both out of the jar, on bagels and in those go-packets that are now available.</p>
<p>I dont understand why the choices for your lunch are restricted to processed meats and cheeses or peanut butter.
Want me to suggest some recipes?
I made pasta salad with veggies and tuna or salami that makes a great lunch, as do soups, chili, white bean dip with crackers & veggies…</p>
<p>We do keep our peanut butter in the frig, as does my S who has a mini frig in his room.</p>
<p>As for your suggestions, salami is a processed meat, tuna smells bad at school lunch (according to my kids), and things other than sandwiches are just not practical for everyday school lunch in my opinion.</p>
<p>I’m not a medical person but I have to believe there is such a thing as mental allergies. My grandparent who lived into the nineties smoked well into the sixites and prompty developed asthma only when she saw smoke or smelled moke. Many, many doctors said yes that the asthma was real, but it was not triggered by the actual exposure but by the sighting or smelling of cigarette smoke. So I have to wonder how many different kinds of physical reactions are caused simply by the “thought” and how many allergies were developed in young years and outgrown but the worry of having the reaction causes the reaction or causes people to have a reaction. My GF just went through allergy testing and was told she was “allergic” to chocolate…the irony is this GF eats chocolate all the time…and knows she eats chocolate all the time. Sometimes I think there is a very real paralytic fear in this country that people succumb to. I remember when the country thought hair dryers and cell phones caused cancer and when eggs gave you high cholesterol. I remember when they were yanking tonsils out of every little kids. And when they put tubes in every little kids ears. This decade it is the peanut fear. In a few years it will be something else.</p>
Oh, wait let me pull out my portable stove that I stash under my bed in my dorm. And according to your post, regular non allergic people are supposed to change their diets because of one person? </p>
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Yes, those meats have a strong smell!</p>
<p>Today I went to a club meeting and there were brownies offered. Chocolate and peanut butter right next to each other. Guess which one I had. :)</p>
<p>Niquii has a point… EK, most people can’t make anywhere close to those things in the dorms. </p>
<p>I did live off peanut butter as my source of protein when I was unable to consume dairy for a while. No, dairy didn’t kill me, but it caused excruciating pain that sent me to the ER. A lot of students depend on peanut butter… funny enough, when we traveled abroad, we were told to bring it with us to make the food in other countries feel “homier”.</p>
<p>Most of these sound delicious to me (except the tuna) but, other than the white bean dip, none are things I could see either my younger child taking to school or my older one preparing in his dorm in college. Hummus is an option but it needs refrigeration, even in a lunch bag.</p>
<p>Or to “train” fellow students in proper peanut-proofing. If you followed what cobrat said, you will then be called an idiot if you screw it up (and worse, have the guilt of having potentially caused a PA reaction on your conscience).</p>
<p>Honestly, can you imagine sending your child to a school where he had LEGAL LIABILITY attached to his eating habits? Or conversely, as a parent of a PA sufferer, would you seriously trust others–even with the threat of litigation–to care about your child as much as you do? The more I think about it, the more I begin to doubt the seriousness of some of the claims being made. If exposure to a peanut could cost my kid his life, the last thing I would be worried about is whether he’d “miss out” on the residential college experience just because he had to eat his meals in a controlled environment. I would be completely freaked out about letting him out of my sight and into the world where he would make decisions of his own and be susceptible to the whims of others.</p>
<p>*One can easily substitute those who face possible violent attacks from violent segregationists for allergies here to make comparisons with similar arguments made by both segregationists/conformists of the '50s. </p>
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<p>And segregationists/conformists back in the '50s probably made similar types of arguments when Brown vs. Board of Ed made the news…</p>
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<p>Knowledge which isn’t authoritative considering I witnessed a classmate having a severe PA attack in school due to the idiot student/parent’s thinking “What harm could there be in eating a PB sandwich around him” which not only caused a serious life-threatening medical emergency, but also to lose a semester in school. </p>
<p>And from what I’ve heard from lawyer friends…that parent was smart to listen to his lawyer to provide a generous settlement to the PA sufferer’s family as under the outlined circumstances, few judges/juries would have been sympathetic to the defendant at trial considering he and his son were notified of the severity of my friend’s PA by school officials…and demonstratively ignored it.</p>
<p>cobrat, you keep repeating this story. It’s one anecdote. And again, all it does is confirm that EVEN with the threat of legal liability hanging over people’s heads, no one should trust the life of their severely PA child to others.</p>
