Parents angered by son's suspension over peanut cookies ["You cannot speak to the principal,"....]

NJ.COM ^

[Sub-Driver]

SOUTH ORANGE, N.J. (AP)

[ShadowDancer]

The question isn't whether it is worth a PB & J. The question is, do you love your child enough to do the right thing for them? We all know are children are special. The child with a peanut allergy, though, should not affect 400 other children because of his allergy. If it's that severe, he should be homeschooled. End of story. I get wanting to keep your child safe. I don't get outright selfish behavior which is what that teaches.

[AzSteven]

Why can't you get an allergy to stuff that you don't like? Seems unfair...

I have an allergy to poison oak... and I hate the stuff...

Homer

Mmmmmmm... delicious poison oak....

/Homer

[Lockbar]

About 20 years ago I was at a convention when one of the attendees ate some egg roles at a hospitality/welcome party. Later than night his throat swelled shut and he suffocated before the paramedics arrived. It turns out he knew that he was allergic to anything made of peanuts. The egg roles were cooked in peanut oil, which is not unusual for oriental foods and snacks. Its too bad he died, but he should have been more careful himself.

[colorado tanker]

Alright, kid, this is your last chance. Put the cookie down and slowly back away!

Good. Call in the HazMat Unit! All personnel don protective gear and keep clear - uncontained peanut butter cookie on the floor.

[stands2reason]

Anyway, let me go on record as saying that next to Oreos, these are the best tasting mass-produced cookie on the market.

I agree with you, but with an asterisk. Until Walmart stopped making them (I'm assuming they did, I can't find them anymore :() their All-Butter Oatmeal Cookies were the best storebought cookies ever.

[hunter112]

My question is this: At what point do you think it's improper for the minority to affect the rights of the majority? If one kid in ten had a risk of a severe reaction or worse, that's more than prevalent enough to ban a particular food. What if its only one kid in a thousand (about the student body of many schools) or one kid in a million?

Practically every food substance can cause an allergic reaction in somebody, if you look hard enough. Where do we draw the line?

Please don't misunderstand me, freedom to eat a PB&J is not a Constitutional right. We all gave up our rights to be protected by the fire-resistant properties of asbestos, because some people got cancer from it, and I think that it was a worthwhile trade. Clearly, the peanut is not an essential in any human diet, and if there are inherent properties about peanuts (like the volatility of the oils cited in this thread) perhaps they are like the other substances we have banned that only affected a relatively few people.

But where do you draw that line?

[mississippi red-neck]

Looks to me if she is smart enough to be a teacher she would be smart enough to not put any peanut products in her mouth. Why do people wish to turn everyone else's world upside down just because they have a little problem or a particular dislike. I'm allergic to tomatoes,however I grow some of the most beautiful tomatoes you have every seen in my garden because my family and friends love them.

[Your Nightmare]

It's risk vs. return. The majority eating peanuts in school is not worth risking this serious of a health issue for the minority. If this allergy only caused discomfort, then no big deal. But kids are dying from this.

BTW, how do you think a child would feel if they brought a PB&J to school and it caused another child to go into shock, possibly die?

[packing heat]

The name here is a misnomer. The ideals of the Nazis were extremely right. So far right, they actually disagree with Republican ideas. (Obviously)
Let me do a little more research and get back to you.
But for now, please call them Socialist pigs for my sake.

[packing heat]

Good point.

[Your Nightmare]

You don't have to eat peanuts to have a reaction.

[packing heat]

Nice acronym. However, they were a group from the right.

[Oztrich Boy]

When Nutter Butters are outlawed, only outlaws will have Nutter Butters.

"Stay back. I've got a cookie and I'm not afraid to use it!"

[Oztrich Boy]

Next it will be the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Peanuts

It's already the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives

So it'll be BATFEP.

[Nataku X]

I got so tired of the "Nazis were liberals" and "Nazis were conservatives" debates, I actually did something unthinkable... I looked their platform up for myself.

The name is not a misnomer. They are NATIONAL SOCIALISTS. They are nationalists, in which they support a strong military, are against illegal immigration, and are jingostic. All of which leans towards the conservative side of things. But they also support subsidized low-cost housing, public utilities, and health care--and generally do not trust big business. All of which leans towards the liberal side of things.

So it's half and half... People just take either "National" or "Socialist" to suit their own agenda and ignore the other half.

[NathanR]

The ideals of the Nazis were extremely right.

It seems to me that if they were actually "extremely right" Hitler would have been advocating the return of the Kaiser. Granted, that the people who actually believed in the "Socialist" part of "National German Socialist Workers" party, were purged, but Stalin did the same sort of thing in Russia.

[gitmo]

Folks with nut allergies have the same obligation diabetics have ~ namely, READ THE LABELS. And if there are no labels, don't take the risk!

Apparently you don't understand. Some people with peanut allergies can die from airborne peanut allergins, or from touching something that someone who handled peanuts has touched. Every year, kids die at schools from contamination of playgroud equipment or of school bus benches.

My son almost died from eating pizza at a Chucky Cheese in Florida. We read the ingredient list. A lot of kids had emergencies in the area. It turned out the flour had been contaminated with peanut dust at the flour factory.

[muawiyah]

Best keep your kid at home. We even have peanuts growing wild around here!

Now, about Chuckie Cheese ~ I don't recall it having any labels! On the other hand it is formulated such that if a kid turns it upside down the stuff stays stuck to the dough side.

Diabetics don't (shouldn't) eat pizza anyway, and certainly not the special ingredients in Chuckie Cheese.

The good news is Smirnoff Ice supposedly has no carbs. On the other hand it still has alcohol and that can be a problem for folks with liver or kidney damage from diabetic conditions.

I was thinking of buying some and seeing if I could evaporate the alcohol.

[hunter112]

But kids are dying from this.

OK, and I admit, some months ago when I first encountered threads of this nature, I was in disbelief about a product that I've always considered safe. Then, I found myself dealing with it in an angry manner, and suggested that the susceptible kids be cocooned in a special school. Now, I read the posts in this thread, and I'm starting to understand and empathize a bit more.

Still, what proportion of kids being severely allergic (you can define that as at near risk of dying, or worse) does there have to be, before we just go ahead and ban peanuts? One in ten, yes, I'd tend to be in favor of it. One in a million, I'm not.

BTW, how do you think a child would feel if they brought a PB&J to school and it caused another child to go into shock, possibly die?

Horrible, of course. But I'd expect that same kid to feel equally as bad if he came to school with a cold or flu that another child caught, and, in a freak occurrence, died from. In the latter case, we'd certainly want to counsel the child who carried the illness that it was not their fault, that things happen. Why wouldn't we do the same thing with the PB&J incident? If there was no overt threatening involved (and its not too clear to me that in the present case what the threatening behavior was), then I'd have to assign it to the "stuff happens" category.

Clearly, we'd all rid ourselves of cold and flu germs, if possible, they do no one any good. But peanuts are a food substance that does no harm to the great majority of people. In my mind, it takes a higher threshold of harm to ban peanuts, but its not an insurmountable threshold. What should that line be?

[gitmo]

You guys grow peanuts in Indiana? We have lots of peanut farms down here, but I thought they were just in the South.