A London, Ont., school board has banned peanut butter substitutes simply because they could be confused with their peanut counterparts, angering parents already frustrated by efforts to find an acceptable lunch their kids will eat.
In a recent memo, Thames Valley District school board director Bill Tucker wrote that “any products considered to be a peanut butter replacement are no more appropriate in our schools than regular peanut butter.”
I was going to say, "You've got to be joking", but I stopped at the point where it clicked into my head that truth is stranger than fiction.
Where to begin: One kid out of a hundred has peanut allergies, while one kid out of three gets bullied. Is it so hard for the kid to wear one of those silicone bracelets with a colour-code meaning, "don't feed this kid peanuts"?
I knew a guy who was so allergic to sea-food that if his little finger brushed the surface of deep-fried shrimp and if he were to brush his lips with that little finger, he would die. Nobody ran out demanding all Chinese restaurants to banish deep-fried battered shrimp, therefore someone with extreme power had a kid die from a peanut allergy, and made a life's mission out of it.
Ever wonder how kids get peanut allergies?
It's because a baby's stomach has pores in it for the first six months after birth. That's so it can pass immunoglobulins from the mother's milk into its blood-stream undigested. If effect, the kid is living off its mother's immune system for the first six months.
If the mother does not breast feed, rather, chooses to feed the newborn adult foods, then proteins from that adult food can slip through those pores into the baby's bloodstream, and the worst are vegetable proteins.
It sets the stage for the baby's developing immune system to tune-up a hyper-awareness and sensitivity to those proteins, and it can happen beyond peanuts. People have had immune systems sensitized to wheat protein, such that they can never eat bread nor pasta (real meat-and-potatoes guys by virtue of necessity).
So the first thing a mother is telling me when her kid turns out to be peanut-allergic is that she wouldn't breast-feed him, plus she had the audacity to spoon peanut-butter into his mouth in the first six months. Breast-fed baby's have low rates of allergy. Feed the mother so she can feed the kid, and let's save ourselves a tonne of costs doing healthcare and stressing people out about peanut-butter, when frankly I eat about half-a-pound of it a week and I am not going to stop. It's the best way to restore soil after cotton-plants have leached the ground. Cotton is a huge nutrient-sucker, so farmers cycle in peanut-crops in order to restore the soil with it's nitrogen-fixing legumeness.
Why do politicians pick on something like peanut-butter? I bet it's because the other problems are beyond them, so they pick on something they can get a grip around. Peanut butter. The world is collapsing, we're living in one of the few places with enough natural resources to wall ourselves in if necessary, and they pick on peanut butter.
How about if someone were to navigate around the MBA's (Must Botch Amazingly) and get some money to Canada's A+ agricultural researchers to genetically refine a form of peanut capable of growing at this latitude plus, oh gosh, along the way drop the gene making the protein babies can be sensitized to?
Given the cost of "managing" peanut allergies, I bet it would be cheaper to just produce a northern non-allergenic strain.
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