About freaking time someone published a study like this:  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/health/research/12allergies.html?emc=eta1  Some Stanford affiliated-folks made an exhaustive assessment on the crazy amount of allergies Americans seem to have developed lately; nearly a third of the population has it in their heads that they suffer from at least one allergy or another.  Which isn’t to say the belief is without merit, as a small fraction of these allergy victims do have an actual allergy. To the tune of about 8% of all children and 5% of the big people population. 

   For nearly 25 years now, allergies have been a regular factor in my days (a period which had nothing to do with chucking beehives, peanut butter balls and oyster shells at the sickly kids in the hood – that was much earlier…)  Allergy madness became a daily issue once I joined the restaurant industrial complex.  In the beginning it didn’t seem all that big a deal; you see a larger cross-section of society as it moves through your joint to glut, waste and complain. In a restaurant one would expect to encounter more nut or shellfish allergies than you would in a normal life.  Even still, in the mid-late eighties the number of diners claiming allergies was pretty small.

   Things changed appreciably by the early nineties.  I was working in busier Boston restaurants and encountering exotic, cosmopolitan people with exotic, cosmopolitan allergic conditions. My first live-in girlfriend had an apple allergy (lips would swell like balloon animals) as well as an intense reaction to lidocaine (discovered post-Vagisil use; similar comic ballooning, more personal area…) I met cilantro allergies for the first time in Boston – we didn’t have that one in the RI suburbs as the herb wasn’t in use there yet. The roster of patrons with life-threatening reactions seemed to expand exponentially, many more customers who couldn’t have eggs, or wheat, or dairy and so on.

   I’d already become suspicious of the veracity of these claims; many people like to blur their dislikes into the notion of allergies. Then I became the lucky waiter to serve one tragically afflicted woman at Joe Tecce’s, the megatypical red-sauce Italian slopchute in the North End.  She came with a trailing scroll of foods that were likely to kill her – Peanuts and shellfish, of course.  And dairy, eggs, cilantro and black pepper. Oh, and rice and tomatoes and broccoli too. Not to mention garlic and basil and especially lettuce. Lettuce?  I was stumped when she asked me what she could eat – we didn’t have feeding tubes or sterilized bubbles to dine within anywhere in the restaurant.  But when she characterized her wheat allergy as so, no bread but pasta was okay, it was obvious she could have a dish of all those verboten ingredients as long as she ate them with a fistful of psychotherapeutic drugs.

   After that allergy caveats from diners did little more than elicit eye-rolling. People with allergies were proliferating at a mad pace but in the service business you had to accommodate them.  In the end, a few people are actually endangered by certain foods and many others are simply morons.  You can’t change either so you have to cater all of it. Peanuts, shellfish and even eggs can have deadly effects and had to be taken seriously.  As for the herb freaks, well, we just leave the stuff out they hate.  No point in getting sued for making somebody’s mouth feel yucky.   

   Allergies thus became a minor nuisance in life. Until the arrival of my first kid, that is, when they resumed pain in the ass status. Allergy warnings came from everywhere: friends, pregnancy/infant literature and doctors weighed in gravely on them.  First there’d been the encyclopedia of foods pregnant women could not ingest at the risk of delivering stillborns or flipper babies. Then came the forbidden edibles that would kill your children in their highchairs. No peanuts from conception until year-two of a baby’s life?  Was that for real? If they were really so universally lethal then why haven’t the populations of Asia, Africa, South America, the Caribbean and Dixie USA already been decimated? Not only subject to overpopulation, you can’t breathe deeply in some of those places without swallowing a peanut.

   The anxiety of feeding my boy was up a bit – not experts, we were compelled to listen to those who said they were. Couldn’t throw my new lad’s health into harm’s way because a gut feeling said the hazards weren’t necessarily there.  But the more I read the more allergy prevention looked like hype rather than health scare. Was withholding certain foods for the first year really the way to stave off development of allergies?  Shouldn’t that initial year of life be the prime period for children to grow inured to things in the environment? 

   The issue became resolved anyhow and Jack was released from his restricted diet by accidental exposure to nuts at eight months of age.  My mother-in-law was over, feeding him some Indonesian gado gado because I’d left it right next to his regular veggies in the fridge.  When I saw what was in his bowl my first reaction was,

   Holy crap!  That stuff is wicked spicy!

   Oh, I didn’t know!  Well…Look, he really seems to like it.

   He sure did, as the container was nearly empty.  But then the real issue hit me,

   Oh my god!  That stuff is loaded with peanuts!

   It was a tense minute or two, waiting for Jacko to asphyxiate or squirt blood from his ears, but he was just fine and banging his bowl on the tray for more. After that we began introducing him to scrambled eggs, shrimp and lobster.  That settled it, next time we had a baby I’d instruct the doctor to wear latex gloves dipped in crab bisque and lubricate the birth canal with Skippy.  Ultimately, having the most say on her own canal, Elisa nixed the idea.  No worries however, when little Elsie came around I could dip her bottles in Fluffernutter if I felt like it since not only had the nut scare been lifted but…Elsie’s breastfeeding experience lasted all of a half day!  (Dig the following excerpt from the above article:   “Authors of the new report — and experts on the guidelines panel — say even accepted dogma, like the idea that breast-fed babies have fewer allergies or that babies should not eat certain foods like eggs for the first year of life, have little evidence behind them.”) 

   Parenthood would bring all the wonderful, magical, eye-popping and retarded things one gets to witness in a widening circle of other parents. In the realm of allergies you get the feeling that children have far fewer allergies than their parents want them to have.  Or that allergies are parent-driven in other ways: moms taking up half-baked, malnutritive diets during pregnancy; parents setting up over-sterile (and thus non-exposing) environments or continuing crazy, low nutrient regimens (like breast-feeding) well into a kid’s walking life. Where twenty-five years ago we all knew at least one child with a serious allergy, today you’d be hard pressed to think of one who doesn’t.  It’s as though having hair-trigger antibodies was fashionable and the list of antigenic dangers were picked from glossy catalogs. Peanuts and Shellfish are now the low-brow players, kids have developed slicker allergies to stuff like vanilla, oranges, grass, wool, green beans, popsicles, cotton, bleach, ice, shadows, Christmas trees, rollerblades, rainbows, and Calypso music.  Yeesh, if the world has become so toxic, why the hell do these dingbats keep having children? 

   Often, when some moms hear of my culinary background they’ll ask if I can come up with some really good recipes for their kids who can only eat, well, almost nothing.  I gave it a shot once for a cousin of a good friend.  But only once – just looking at the mom and her allergy besieged boy I felt guilty trying anything. He looked ill, pale like he’d been sick for a while and hadn’t eaten…

I pass on such requests nowadays – it feels more like helping a parent with their tragic fantasies rather than helping a kid eat happier.  

   Another itching, burning, asphyxiating question is this: what drove those 12,000 studies mentioned in the article and what does it benefit doctors to just give the green light on allergy diagnoses to so many patients?  During some reading for this post I came across this tidbit – A doctor diagnosed a woman with a cilantro allergy because eating Indian food made her mouth itchy.  Makes my ass itchy; should I carry an epinephrine injector in case I pass gas after some vindaloo? Cripes, I shoulda gone to medical school.  How hard could it have been to get through it?