What's the deal, Dairy Council?

Don't get me wrong. I grew up drinking milk like a good child. I drank 4-7 glasses every day because that soon was the only thing I'd drink. I gave up milk a little over a year ago as part of several other health choices to shake up my diet. I read some books about the dangers of animal products and how they really ain't as good for you as the corporations would make it sound. I'm not going to go on a vegan rant here. I'm not that strict a vegan anymore, but the truth of it is, I learned a lot. Specifically, the way that the meat and dairy industries have essentially put substandard products into our school lunch programs.

Yay.

So, on a fundamental level, it bothers me the way that milk is The Cafeteria Lunch Drink. Not only is it served, often without any other option for children who are allergic or lactose intolerant or being raised vegan or any other reason, but there are posters plastered all over the cafeteria. Images of popular children's icons (Miley Cyrus, the High School Musical cast, Shrek, etc) with milk mustaches with the phrase "Body by Milk" line the walls in almost any cafeteria. Now, I understand that if you're raising your child in a non-dairy way, you just send lunch with your child and forget about the school lunch. However, it's another situation where I feel like it's blatant propaganda. You must drink milk or you will not be healthy. (This, by the way, is not remotely true.) You will also not be cool. (This is also not remotely true, though fewer studies have been done.) I went to a school the other day where the only decoration in the cafeteria consisted of milk posters and magazine ads. Plastering the walls.

I found one school that didn't have one single milk poster. Only one, and it struck me so strange to not see a milk mustache that I actually wondered if I was in the cafeteria. I wondered if it had to do with the fact that this school had a child with such a deadly milk/peanut allergy that the child actually had to be partitioned off with cones so none of the other children went near him. I am dead serious. That's a whole other zany rant altogether.

I guess I just have a problem with advertising-as-decor. Children don't understand that it's an ad. It's the same as putting up posters for Coke or for a snack or for some hot new toy. I don't care who they have on the ads. They're still ads, trying to sell a product and convince a child that the product is not only good, but essential to your diet and level of coolness. It just skeevs me out.

I'm in ur school, rilin' up ur kids

September! Head back to school, kiddos! I'm currently going through a work lull, thanks to the end of summer camps. Afterschool programs won't start up again until October, so things are dragging. In the meantime, I take a little "mini-event" to schools in order to advertise the afterschool programs. I invade cafeterias, get the kids excited, and then force the lunch monitors to deal with the little hellions afterward...

Or at least, that's what I used to do. I was told that we have to work to calm the kids down so the lunch monitors don't kill us.

Doing the mini-events is AWKWARD. Imagine going to a place you've never been, in a place where people kind of don't want you, and then waiting around while all the kids stare at you like you're a sideshow act, waiting for you to start. You can't start until they're all settled, and you try not to watch them even though you hear them whispering about you. Then you have your five minutes of fame, the kids start asking you the same questions ("Can I try that?" and "Will we get one of those if we do the program?"), and five more minutes where all the kids run up to you while you have to tell them to sit down. It's like being a rock star or something, but it's also just plain weird. I have to imagine that it's what being a celebrity feels like. Yeah? Yeah. I'm a celebrity.

The Peanut Problem

When I was a child, my younger brother was diagnosed with a deadly peanut allergy. Ingesting peanuts, touching the oil, or breathing in the dust from peanut shells would send him into anaphylactic shock and probably kill him. Because of this, we had a strict set of rules to obey: making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich required two knives, one for each jar; everything had to be washed to keep peanut oil off of surfaces. My brother had to ask a friend if something contained peanuts before they traded or shared. He learned to read labels. We went through his Halloween candy and picked out anything with peanuts, which meant more Reese's for me.

And that was how it went. My brother never ran into trouble with the peanut allergy; his asthma and his animal allergies were more of a concern.

Now that I'm in a job that has me back in elementary schools, I've noticed a weird and slightly disturbing trend: the presence of the "nut-free zone." Classrooms are labeled "nut free." Certain isolated tables are labeled "peanut free." While I can appreciate a concern for an allergic child's well-being, why have peanut allergies been so blown out of logical proportion?

I recently had two epic peanut freakouts happen in the same day. The first went thusly:

It was the first day of an AAW where kids are encouraged to bring a snack. The first arrival has a trail mix snack that includes peanuts. Mother says that she knows peanut allergies are a problem and asks if we have an allergic child. Our rosters normally display any of this allergy information. Seeing that we had 22 healthy kids, we allowed the child to have his peanut snack.

Unfortunately, we had incomplete rosters. The second child to come in had a parent bearing an epi-pen and explaining very slowly that her angel has a peanut allergy and if she comes near peanuts she will surely die, and you'd better be trained in administering an epi-pen. We explained that this other child had a peanut snack but, knowing about nut-free tables, we said that we would sit her on the other side of the room and make sure the area was washed. The mother started to hyperventilate and tears filled her eyes. "That's just not acceptable," she said.

Not acceptable? My brother grew up with the same allergy and if I had a peanut butter sandwich, he could sit at the same table as me. He just knew he wasn't allowed to touch my damn sandwich. We were telling this mother that the child would be sitting at a separate table, which is exactly what's done in cafeterias these days. No more, no less.

We then conceded that we would split the room in half and have half the group go into another room to eat snack, while the peanut-contaminated child sat with the other half to eat. Even this wasn't good enough, but we finally got the mom to agree to this. She still looked ready to sob her eyes out, and asked us to make sure everyone washed their hands and the tables were cleaned.

Needless to say, nobody died that day.

I'd think this is just an isolated incident of parental paranoia but that evening I had a similar issue:

I was working the box office for a children's theatre performance when a young mother of a five-year-old girl came up to me. She had the same symptoms of the mother earlier in the day: glassy, watery eyes, shortness of breath, a panicked expression. She came to me to complain about the number of peanut candies that were offered at our concessions stand, and said there were more than last year, and if we're going to sell candy at a children's theatre, how dare we sell peanut candies! Because, she reasoned, if a strange child she doesn't know sits next to her peanut-allergic angel, and that strange child has a Reese's, her child will breathe in Peanut Fumes or the strange child will wipe his sticky Peanut Hands all over her and she will die. She was requesting a peanut-free section of the theater or for us to stop offering peanuts altogether.

Are you fucking serious? Would you go to the Cineplex and tell them to stop offering peanut items because children might be allergic? If your child has a chocolate allergy, do you do the same thing? Where the hell do you get the gall?

I understand that a peanut allergy is a serious one. It can kill your child. It can kill my little brother. I grew up in that environment. Has the peanut allergy gotten so much worse in the last 20 years?

Honestly, I don't think it has. In fact, I'd be willing to bet it hasn't. I'm going to blame the media on this one. Yes, a peanut allergy is deadly. So are a lot of other things. There have been so many horror stories about peanut allergies in recent years that it's sending new, frightened parents into a frenzy. If we were publicizing a deadly horse allergy or a deadly pickle allergy, we'd have a similar problem. Parents of young children are the worst kind of crazy and the media feeds on it. You can't turn on the news anymore without a story of a child dying because of this, that, or the other thing. Parents are scared. Unfortunately, we're also growing up in a time where lawsuits and making the Establishment solve your problems take precedence over personal responsibility. When I was a kid, it was all about teaching a child to read labels and how to handle themselves in a peanut-filled world. Nowadays, it's all about vilifying peanuts and all peanut products. It's about ostracizing kids who are allergic and making them sit at separate tables. It's about making kids who like peanut butter feel like bad people because they might kill their best friend. It's about laying the responsibility on everyone else instead of yourself and your child. Blame the schools, blame the food manufacturers, blame other kids and other parents. You force them to step up but don't take any steps yourself to make your child self-reliant.

It's necessary to tell school employees, camp counselors, and anyone who will be dealing with your child about any allergies your child may have, particularly if they're severe. On the other hand, it is not our responsibility to change the rules for your kid and change things for everyone else unless things are so bad that your kid will die otherwise. And if that really is the case, you might want to consider locking up your kid and never letting her go outside of her sterile, perfect environment.