Before 1980, peanut allergies were rarely mentioned in medical literature or the media, said Miranda Waggoner, a postdoctoral researcher at the Office of Population Research in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Her article on the subject, “Parsing the peanut panic: The social life of a contested food allergy epidemic,” was published recently in the journal Social Science & Medicine.
From your link - “the same number of people die each year from peanut allergies as from lightning strikes”
Good article. Quoted from it:
“While eight foods account for over 90 percent of food allergy reactions, including milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, soy and wheat, the peanut allergy has arguably received the largest share of medical and social attention,” Waggoner writes in the paper. Among the possible explanations: the severity of allergic reactions to peanuts and the harmful potential of such a mundane food, Waggoner said.And it's also another easy way to dump on the South, since peanuts, peanut processing and "goober peas" (boiled peanuts) are prominent food industries in the South.