Don't Kill the Birthday Girl

by Sandra Beasley

  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. The
se 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.

  When it looks as though Raven and her father have a fighting chance of defeating the defending champions, their jealous competitors take matters into their own hands by spiking Raven’s dish with mushrooms. Apparently, fungi are Raven’s Achilles’ heel. (I suspect the only reason the scriptwriters didn’t go with peanuts was that it would have been too difficult to ensure continuity; odds are that at some point in the three seasons leading up to this, her character had been shown eating a peanut butter something.)

  Once Raven ingests the mushrooms, the camera steps into her point of view so we can see her vision is blurring. Her father notices and diagnoses an allergy attack, declaring only “this is worse than last time!” When we switch back to an outside view, we see the actress’s face is layered in bubbles of fake flesh, so that her eyes are squeezed shut and her cheeks are puffed out in a parody of allergy edema. Her actual hands are encased in cartoon gloves of inflated skin. Sight gag: check.

  The team knows they have been sabotaged, which makes Raven all the more determined to keep cooking. Her father, otherwise portrayed as a rational adult, okays this after a two-second hesitation. No pause for Benadryl. No mention of penalizing the opposing team. Raven’s allergies are Raven’s problem.

  The contest comes down to Victor’s ability to execute the “quadruple flip” of a pan-fried fish. The best their competitors can accomplish is a triple. Of course, in the crucial moment (heroic action alert), his daughter must step in and complete the trick for him. She does so not in spite of her allergies but because of them. When the filet of trout looks like it might not make its last midair rotation, Raven claps her obscenely swollen cheeks and—as if expressing air from a bellows—blows the fish through its final turn.

  When she must catch the fish to win, her pan is out of reach. No problem! She sticks out her hand, which thanks to her allergies has grown to the size of a dinner plate. She catches the sizzling fish in her bare but conveniently numbed-by-hives palm.

  This is what personal victory looks like on the Disney Channel.

  This isn’t late-night sketch comedy. This is not an art house film. The bottom line is a big issue for shows like this one. If anyone thought there would be enough outcry to injure an actor’s brand or lead to a boycott, scenes would have been rewritten. They were not. Actors, directors, screenwriters, producers, and dozens of others sign off on these projects before they make it to the screen.

  The good news about all the activity galvanized by those with peanut allergies is that we’ve become a blip on the cultural radar. The bad news is that food allergies have the dubious honor of having joined a long line of diseases—gout, asthma, chronic fatigue syndrome—for which that blip doubles as a moving target.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  King Soy and the Body Politic

  So much rides on empathy, at the end of the day. Mothers find (or fail to find) a way to relate to their allergic children. A classmate forgoes his peanut butter sandwich so he can sit with his best friend at the nut-free table in the school cafeteria. You’d think, given all the times I rely on empathy from the world around me—from teacher to chef to airline stewardess—I’d have a heightened empathetic instinct of my own.

  You’d be wrong. When my eleven-year-old sister announced that she had decided to become a vegetarian, I didn’t applaud her philosophical stance. I didn’t look forward to commiserating over restaurants that couldn’t (or wouldn’t) accommodate her. Instead, I thought, Of course. Of course, when I would give anything to have her options, she voluntarily gives them away.

  The little snot.

  From the vantage point of being ten years older, I thought Christina’s choice of a meatless diet was a self-indulgence, no more rational than the six months when, at age three, her favorite snack was Heinz ketchup dipped out of a bowl with her bare finger.

  Her vegetarian stance would later complicate a trip to Fort Worth, Texas, for the Beasley “cousins” reunion. My father was going back as something of a hometown hero, to share pictures and stories of his troops. The army had promoted him through various leadership roles all the way up to brigadier general, commanding army reserve soldiers in six of the largest Midwestern states. My childhood had been peppered by periods when he had returned to active duty, then deployed.

  It had been years since our family had visited Texas, back before Christina had even been born. I recalled the seven-year-old me’s impression of Houston: a hangar-sized warehouse with BINGO painted on its silver roof (which surely housed row after row of gaming grandmas, as far as the eye could see); the smell of cigarette smoke laced with spicy Shalimar perfume; winning an oversized pink bear at the Six Flags amusement park; chatting with surprised truckers via Grandpa Joe’s CB radio.

  The flight from Washington, D.C., to Dallas’s Love Field airport, and then the drive to Fort Worth, left us all exhausted and starving. My father parked us at the first upscale restaurant he saw on the way into town. Leaving us in the car for a few minutes, he stepped inside to speak with the manager.

  He returned and assured m
y mother, “The chef says it’s no problem.”

  Meaning, no problem for me. As we walked in, my mother said, “I wondered if he asked about the vegetarian options?”

  We should have been tipped off by the fact that every chair in the place was upholstered in leather. Christina balked, but, realizing she didn’t have a choice, we sat down. Texas: 1, Vegetarian: 0.

  I had easy if limited options in the form of an appetizer of asparagus wrapped in prosciutto (west of the Mississippi, prosciutto means bacon), a grilled chicken breast, and a plain baked potato. Christina’s options consisted of an appetizer of mixed greens, followed by a second course of more mixed greens and a plain baked potato.

  She looked to me for confirmation that, yes, the salad dinner is a lousy deal. But I avoided her gaze. I was still envious of how casually she could take a corn bread muffin, along with everyone else, from the bread basket placed on the table. So I played the poor allergic girl. When my asparagus came, I adopted a joyful tone, worthy of any Dickensian orphan, at the luxury of a straight-off-the-menu appetizer.

  “So good! You have to try it!” Pause. “Okay, not you, obviously.”

  The next day, we gathered at the house of George Marvin, a cardiologist and that year’s reunion host. Beasleys are equal parts eccentric in their interests and meticulous in their craft. Our ranks include Charles, a renowned geologist and snake expert; Lola, a University of Texas at El Paso business professor emeritus whose legal blindness has not kept her from paddling the Amazon; and Ray Olachia, a full-blooded Apache who travels the state advising on flint napping and basket weaving.

  We call it the “cousins” reunion because of the difficulty everyone has keeping track of how we’re related. One couple that has been attending for years—she always in a floral shirt, he in a navy blue cap—has no blood tie to the family that anyone can figure out. But they’re such nice people that no one can bear to question them on it.