Simon mentioned peanuts in his post about milk & Dr. Spock, and it reminded me of something that's been sticking in my craw... This is from an article that appeared in a teen-oriented newspaper insert magazine called *react.* It was from the April 20-26 issue. The article is entitled, "Look Who's Wheezing." It discussed why "more teens than ever before are suffering from life-threatening allergies." Among the reasons they listed: bad air, bad insects (cockroaches), bad weather, bad everything else (here it listed cigarette smoke, stress, too much time indoors and too many pets). The one that bothered me was this: "Too much PB&J. To develop a food allergy, you have to have had a lot of contact with it at a young age. Americans eat an average of 11 pounds of peanuts a year, and 90 percent of us have our first taste of peanut butter by age 2. But for allergy sufferers, even a tiny amount of a peanut product can cause a shock, which in a small percentage of cases can be fatal. To protect sufferers, many schools have declared classrooms peanut-free and set up "no-peanut zones" in cafeterias. 'We had a big debate in our school when they banned peanut butter,' says Michael Bordonaro, 15, a sophomore at Trinity School in NYC. 'But once they explained that kids could really die from this, we understood.'" I have several problems with this: 1) It doesn't necessarily take a lot of contact to have a food allergy. All it takes is once. Or sometimes it takes years and years and you suddenly find yourself allergic to something you've been fine with all this time. (I know, the symptoms could have been more subtle this whole time and they're finally come out full blast.) 2) If schools are really doing this banning of peanut products, I think they're setting themselves up for having to do the same for those allergic to milk or wheat or eggs or other common food allergens. After all, they're supposed to treat all the students equally. 3) Is the percentage of those allergic to peanut products really that high? Earlier in the article it says that "a recent Johns Hopkins study showed that the number of kids allergic to peanuts--one of the most serious food allergies--doubled from 1984 to 1994," but it doesn't say what percentage that is. Again, unless the percentage is way higher than I think it possibly could be, they are setting themselves up for having to eliminate every product to which a certain percentage of the population is allergic. What do you all think? Margo Mead Portland, Oregon [log in to unmask] - sent via an evaluation copy of BulkRate (unregistered).