The playgrounds where I go with my children are overrun with joyful kids. They’re also overrun with food.
Other parents may not notice that fact, but I do: my two-year-old daughter, Claire, is allergic to peanuts, tree nuts, eggs and dairy, and many common playground snacks would be dangerous to her if she ate them.
I don’t think it’s an overstatement to say that allergic families live in a parallel universe in which what is harmless to everyone else requires extreme vigilance from us.
In the months after Claire’s diagnosis, my relationship to food changed so much that I felt as if I had woken up one day, still living in the same country I’d always lived in, but no longer able to speak the language.
Around other families – at a picnic for my husband’s colleagues and their families, for example – when I watched other children handle food, I felt like they were holding tiny snakes. Maybe the snakes were poisonous and maybe they weren’t; maybe they’d escape, and maybe they wouldn’t. But this is the comparison that’s ultimately stayed with me: being the parent of a child with food allergies is like someone suddenly telling you the colours orange and grey are harmful to your child. I can guarantee that you’d soon realise orange and grey are everywhere.
On a recent afternoon trip to the playground, I noticed the cheese crackers first. They were sprinkled, some already crushed to a powder, between a climbing toy and the swing set – presumably a snack that some kid had spilled. When we got home, my husband told me he’d also seen an almond by one of the slides.
The next weekend, at a different playground, two open containers of melting milkshakes sat on the miniature metal picnic table, and leftover chocolates dotted the mulch. After my four-year-old daughter, who doesn’t have allergies, kept trying to pocket little chocolates, I finally picked them up with a tissue – I didn’t know if they contained nuts – and threw them away myself.
One of the first things that I realised after Claire’s allergies were diagnosed, shortly before her first birthday, was that I had to accept the fact that the world is full of people who have just eaten a peanut butter sandwich and haven’t washed their hands. There’s a lot I can’t control. But I am hopeful that if parents of non-allergic kids had a better understanding of how scary their children’s ostensibly harmless snacks are, they might act differently.
So here is my plea: if your child snacks at the playground, please don’t let her run around while she’s eating. Please don’t leave the food unattended and accessible to other kids. If your child spills, help her clean it up. And after she’s finished, please use wipes to wash her hands, not antibacterial gel; hand sanitiser doesn’t kill the proteins in most foods that cause allergic reactions, and tiny amounts of such proteins can be lethal.
How much of a threat does, say, a little boy munching yoghurt-covered pretzels really pose to Claire? The biggest risk, of course, is that she’ll get hold of one and eat it, which would probably cause her to break out in hives; my great fear, the great fear of any parent of an allergic child, is that it would result in fatal anaphylaxis.
Claire also has a contact reaction to dairy, meaning that her skin breaks out in a rash in the places where dairy has touched it, without her having eaten any. If I thought the chances of any of these reactions occurring were truly high, I wouldn’t take Claire to playgrounds in the first place. But still, whenever allergenic food is present, it’s nerve-wracking.
The eight most common allergens, accounting for as many as 90 percent of all allergies, are peanuts, tree nuts, milk, eggs, wheat, soy, fish and shellfish. As every parent of an allergic child knows, these ingredients hide in surprising places – there can be milk in potato chips, say, and manufacturers often make dried fruit on the same equipment with nuts – and I don’t think it’s realistic to expect people to pore over ingredient labels if they don’t need to.
That’s why my preference would be for kids to avoid eating food at playgrounds altogether, but I understand this possibility is probably about as likely as my laundry washing itself. – Slate / The Washington Post News Service