Sweethearts Candy Blog's

In my travels around the Internet lately, I've encountered a troubling "backlash" against peanut/nut-allergic kids and their parents. And this backlash is cropping up in the darnedest places!

Case in point: this morning I opened an e-mail from a recipe newsletter and was looking for a banana bread recipe. (It's cold here in Chicago and I've got brown bananas. Perfect!). One of the links took me to a recipe for Double Banana Bread. Turns out that the recipe contained nuts galore (including a nut-crunch cereal) but here's what really caught my eye: the posts below the recipe. Apparently--and I'm playing detective here based on what the posts had to say-- a few people must have mentioned that the recipe was not "nut-allergy friendly." These posts have been deleted, however. All that remains are posters having absolute fits about the people who had chimed in about nut allergies.

The nut allergy posters were told to "shut up," (and I quote: "everyone with nut allergies shut up!") and to "stop making life miserable for the rest of us," called "a bunch of whiners" and accused of being "the type of people who would sue the sidewalk if their kid fell down on it."

Huh??? How have things gotten so out of hand? Why are people so angry at folks with peanut and nut allergies?

I have one idea. Unlike other medical conditions, food allergies inconvenience (that's the word I hear the most anyway) other people, especially parents of school children. For example, if your child has something like asthma or diabetes, most likely other parents won't hear about it, unless they are close friends of the child with the medical problem. They won't get notes sent home with lists of foods, they don't have anything they have to do unless they choose to associate with the child having the medical condition.

A lot of people don't want to make adjustments for others' needs. And not to sound super-sappy, but: wouldn't the world be a better place if we did?

For people who aren't parents and who are upset by those who are vocal about their kids' or their own nut allergies--what can I say? Walk a mile in our shoes and then we can talk.

I can choose to leave nuts out of a banana bread recipe or any recipe for that matter. That's the easy part. What I can't do is prevent other people from being angry at my child for something that's not her fault--or mine. And that makes me sad.