Resist the anti-peanut people

OPINION:

Now that children are back at school, mothers and fathers everywhere are once again consumed with all that goes along with being a parent from September to June: standardized testing, extracurriculars, campus safety (sadly), social concerns and more.

One thing they shouldn’t have to worry about — but do, thanks to the anti-peanut brigade — is lunch.

In recent decades, a relatively small percentage of parents, teachers and administrators have been increasingly aggressive in pushing to ban peanuts and other tree nuts from school lunches, not just from the lunches of nut-allergic students but also from all children’s lunches in a specific classroom or school.

The meteoric rise in peanut allergies of late, they say, makes that PB&J on wheat you’ve been packing your third-grader approximately an order of magnitude more dangerous than a water cannon.

So, to sum up: Quit it or teach your kid yourself in that peanut-filled land mine you call home.

Although the District of Columbia Public Schools does not ban nuts, and some classrooms may allow them in lunches and snacks, the district does “not serve meals that contain peanuts or tree nuts,” and its teachers and staff are prohibited from serving them. Oh, and “individual schools may choose to be peanut and/or tree-nut free.”

In Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland and Arlington Public Schools in Northern Virginia, individual classrooms may be designated nut-free upon parental request because of a severe allergy.

Here’s the kicker: Tree nut allergies are not triggered by inhalation or touching of nuts. The allergens must be ingested for an anaphylactic or other reaction to occur. They are not airborne. So if John has a peanut allergy and sits two desks away from Sally, who has peanut butter crackers for lunch, he won’t have a problem as long as he doesn’t share her food.

Banning her snack from the classroom is overkill.

Maybe Sally is, like my own progeny, an incredibly picky eater and tree nuts are among her main food sources. No problem, says the anti-nut pack. Simply swap in sunflower seed butter on her sandwiches.

The left likes to dump on Republicans for policies that supposedly disenfranchise the working classes; this is a prime example of the kind of hypocrisy that group generally embraces without a trace of irony. On a recent day at a Washington-area Giant Food, a 16-ounce jar of sunflower seed butter was selling for $8.99. The same-size container of peanut butter was going for $2.50. (Never mind that sunflower seed butter is highly unlikely to be ubiquitous on the shelves of stores in “food deserts.”)

Making tree nuts the villains of the food pyramid means forcing lower-income families to forgo an inexpensive, calorie- and nutrient-dense food source and then telling them to spend almost 260% more on a substitute, for no good reason. If that isn’t out-of-touch elitism, then I don’t know what is.

Schools would better expend this effort by encouraging and overseeing the good hygiene habits that all children resist, such as regular, thorough handwashing, particularly before eating, and covering noses and/or mouths when coughing or sneezing.

Although peanut allergies have been on the rise among children (from 1997 to 2008, childhood peanut allergy rates increased more than threefold), the trend is likely to reverse in the coming years. That’s because the American medical community no longer advises parents to wait to give peanut products to babies.

In Israel, peanut allergies among children are far less common than elsewhere, owing largely, recent research confirms, to the early introduction by most Israeli mothers and fathers of the popular, low-sugar peanut snack Bamba. In a 2024 study, “feeding children peanut products regularly from infancy to age 5 years reduced the rate of peanut allergy in adolescence by 71%.”

So this school year and beyond, let’s relax the absurd rules made by individuals who believe that banning all potentially troublesome things will solve every problem. By and large, the parents of children with nut allergies have made their kids aware of said allergies, and these youngsters know exactly what they can and can’t eat. Forcing other students and their families to abide by diets they have no reason to be on is nanny-state overreach, and we should reject it.

• Anath Hartmann is deputy commentary editor for The Washington Times.