Nuts about nuts

A jaw-dropping story in the Toronto Star on Monday.  Donna G., a nice mom from just north of the city, wants her sons' school to uproot a group of recently-planted oak trees, on the grounds that fallen acorns pose a threat to kids with nut allergies, a group that happens to include her two boys.  Donna is chair of the school's allergy committee, a position that we seemed to manage quite well without, back in my schooldays.

Let's review some of the facts here, as they are set out by the Star.  About one child in six has some sort of food allergy; about one in fifty is allergic to peanuts, the most common groundnut allergy.  Amazingly, there don't appear to be any official statistics on acorn allergies. However, scientists apparently report no evidence that simply touching acorns has never prompted an allergic reaction in anyone, ever.  You would only be at risk if you ingested the damned things.

Aha, says Donna: there's the risk.  Acorns could be used to bully kids with nut allergies. (You think I'm making this up?  The Star article, which I well understand you may not have been able to read in its entirety, contains this direct quote from Donna's submission to the school authorities:  acorns “can also be used to bully and torment children.”)  It may not have crossed Donna's mind that with those few words, she gave the bullies at her sons' school an idea that they might not have come up with on their own.

This is all bad enough, but another story in the same issue of the Star suggests that Donna may not be the only person in her area suffering from a nut-induced lack of perspective.  Apparently many of the schools in the area ban nut-based products from kids' lunchboxes, presumably to stop gangs of predatory bullies from trying to force peanut butter down the throats of their classmates.  Some kids responded by taking sandwiches with a nut-free peanut butter substitute for their lunch, but now these are being banned too, on the ostensible grounds that they cause distress to the kids (or more likely, kid -- remember, only one child in 50 is at risk here) who are allergic to goobers.

Think I'm being unreasonable or lacking in empathy here?  I've had a lifelong allergic reaction to shellfish.  So I don't eat it.  I don't order it in restaurants and I can be a bit of a pain at cocktail parties because I won't tuck into the canapes until I'm sure there are no shrimp lurking there to get me.  It's never occurred to me to insist that restaurants that I frequent can't serve crustaceans to the rest of their guests, yet that's the equivalent of what Donna G. and the rest of the peanut butter Nazis up in Vaughan Region seem to want.

Donna insists she's "not a crazy Mom".  Jury's out on that one, Donna.