"For the past decade, studies have shown that introducing allergenic foods in infancy, as the immune system is developing, can help the body recognize food proteins as harmless...."

From "Peanut Allergies Have Plummeted in Children, Study Shows/Doctors have long recommended that infants avoid peanuts. But in 2017, experts officially reversed that guidance, and food allergies decreased sharply" (NYT).

Fear not, Andrew Sullivan. This must be satire, because some students have allergies, some are vegetarian, some have religious restrictions, etc.

I'm afraid this isn't fake. But it's the most honest explanation of "equity" I've yet heard. Redistribution pudding followed by a topping of racial revenge. https://t.co/ElhxYQ08py

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) February 15, 2023

No teacher concerned with "equity" would just risk allergic reactions, feeding pork to Muslims and Jews, and meat to vegans.

ADDED: The Sullivan tweet has disappeared, so let me embed the video he was commenting on, because it is an amusing satire and Sullivan's mistake is interesting evidence of the blurring of real life and satire:

I started a COMMUNIST style lunch distribution in my 4th GRADE CLASS! It’s going great! #Communism #capitalismsucks pic.twitter.com/nQIyRw29Ch

— Kali Fontanilla (@KaliFontanilla) February 15, 2023

"Enough already with the dogs. In addition to not wanting to deal with some annoying idiot's dog at work, I have even less interest in dealing with annoying idiots who think it's okay to bring a dog to work."

That's the top-rated comment at "How to create a pet-friendly office that everyone can tolerate/Here are some best practices for companies who want to welcome pets at the workplace" (WaPo).

Time to rethink that word "everyone." Unless... to quote another comment:

Outrageously inaccurate headline at The Washington Post: "'It’s embarrassing to the kids': Students who owe lunch money will only get a cold jelly sandwich, district says."

I talked about this headline with Meade for about 10 minutes before I read the text of the article. I was saying things like... What do you think a school should do about kids who are not qualified for free lunch but just don't have any money to pay for lunch? They  show up and say they're hungry. What if you just give them a jelly sandwich? After much talk, I took the position that it needs to be a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Just a jelly sandwich is kind of mean — though it's not that bad if they also get milk — so make it peanut butter and jelly and it's fine. Meade considered letting them go hungry — they'll learn something — and I was proposing that schools just give free lunch to everyone — that's how we skew here at Meadhouse — but we both agreed that a peanut butter and jelly sandwich would be an unassailable solution.

Now, I'm reading the actual text of the article:

When students in Warwick, R.I., line up in the cafeteria next week, they’ll have no shortage of lunch options. Do they want a chicken Parmesan melt? Hummus and fresh vegetables with tortilla crisps? Pizza? Sweet potato tater tots? A burger? Something from the deli bar? Or, in the popular all-day-breakfast category, pancakes with a cheese omelet and a side of bacon?

But for some, making a decision won’t be necessary. Starting on Monday, any student with unpaid lunch debt will be automatically given a sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwich instead of hot food, the city’s school district announced on Sunday. Officials told the Providence Journal that the policy is necessary because the district is owed tens of thousands of dollars in lunch money, on top of contending with a budget deficit in the millions.

What?!! A sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwich instead of hot food! It was never a jelly sandwich at all. It was one-up on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich: a sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwich! Well, what is the problem??!

But critics argue that since children have no control over their parents’ finances, they shouldn’t be penalized or potentially subjected to public humiliation because of their inability to pay.

“I just don’t think it’s fair to hold the kids responsible,” Heather Vale, who has two children attending a middle school in the district, told WLNE. “I think it’s embarrassing to the kids because now everyone’s going to know why these children are receiving the lunch that they are.”

It's not that it's a bad lunch, it's that it's a stigmatizing lunch. Having a sandwich for lunch is humiliating, embarrassing? A sandwich is the classic American lunch. A sandwich is what I had for lunch at school every day throughout childhood. I brought it from home, like nearly every kid in the school. But in the framework of Heather Vale, it's embarrassing because the child is deprived of choices that were available to other kids. It seems to me, every kid is eating one lunch and the lunch a child is seen eating doesn't scream out this child is eating this lunch because he had no other choice. So how can it be embarrassing?

Here's an idea for the deep empaths of the Vale variety. Make a nut butter and jelly sandwich for your child, wrap it up and put it in a bag, and send the little darling to school with it. If the kids with conscientious parents are eating sandwiches too, they'll provide camouflage for the the kids with school-imposed sandwiches. And here's another idea for you empathetic parents: Pool the money that you're saving by not buying school lunch, and see if you can accumulate the amount that will eliminate the tens of thousands of dollars in shortfall, and then donate it to your lovely city of Warwick, which has been patient with your deadbeat neighbors so long and has been charitably handing free lunches to kids who are not even low-income enough to get in the free-lunch program.

Anyway, I'm irked about the headline. I spent a lot of time thinking about how bad it was to offer a child a mere jelly sandwich as a lunch, but that was not the case at all. There's so much difference between a jelly sandwich and a sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwich. Fake news!

ALSO: It's funny to say "cold jelly sandwich." No one wants a hot jelly sandwich. There's just this idea of "hot lunch." You see that in the phrase "a sunflower seed butter and jelly sandwich instead of hot food." But what is important about hot food for lunch — or for any meal, really? This is a separate issue, the emotional meaning of hot food. I'll just gesture at it for now.

IN THE COMMENTS: I am informed that I am out of step with the times: You can't have peanut butter in school anymore. Of course, that's why it's sunflower seed butter. And note that I did say, "Make a nut butter and jelly sandwich." Make a nut butter sandwich that's not the dreaded peanut.

Kangatarianism.

I learned a new word (and a new concept):

Kangatarianism is a recent practice of following a diet which excludes meat except kangaroo on environmental and ethical grounds. Several Australian newspapers wrote about the neologism "kangatarianism" in February 2010, describing eating a vegetarian diet with the addition of kangaroo meat as a choice with environmental benefits because indigenous wild kangaroos require no extra land or water for farming and produce little methane (a greenhouse gas), unlike cattle. Advocates of kangatarianism also choose it because Australian kangaroos live natural lives, eat organic food, and are killed "humanely". For similar reasons, Australians have discussed eating only the meat of Australian feral camels ("cameltarianism").

That's from the Wikipedia article, "Kangaroo Meat," which you either know or don't know why I'm reading. For those not yet up to speed: "Chef fired after serving kangaroo meat to Nebraska students" (Fox News):

On Oct. 10, a Potter-Dix Public Schools cafeteria served a chili including a mixture of beef and kangaroo meat, according to the release. Head Cook Kevin Frei told Superintendent Mike Williams that the kangaroo meat was added because “it is a very lean meat.”

While the superintendent stated that he does not believe that the kangaroo meat was unhealthy or dangerous because it met USDA standards for sale, the district vowed to not serve food of this nature again. “If a family wants to eat exotic foods, they can do so on their own time — not at school,” Williams said.... “It is without a doubt not a normal staple of our diet and will not, nor will any other non-staple foods, be a part of the potter-Dix meal program.... I apologize for the anxiety and any harm that this has caused individual students and /or families.”

I agree that parents should always know what animals the school is feeding to their kids, but I don't like the way the solution is always to fire the employee. Why didn't the head cook know how people in his town would react to serving "mystery meat" that turned out to be from an animal people in the area don't normally think about eating? Maybe he is too foolish and reckless for the job, but I feel for him.

What he did is not as bad as putting meat in a dish that people believe is vegetarian or presenting pork as beef or beef as pork. The cook had rational reasons for using kangaroo meat rather than other meats. Kangatarianism makes sense to some people. But if you're a cook in Nebraska — or an anything, anywhere — you can be too rational. You've got to have a feeling for how irrational people react to unusual things.

I have exactly one other association when it comes to kangaroo meat: It's what "This American Life"'s Ira Glass fed to his strange, dangerous dog:

[Our rescue pit bull Piney] needed a strict and disturbingly expensive diet of one protein and one starch for 8–10 months until he would become allergic to it. Then we’d have to switch to another protein-starch.

We’ve gone through a series of food combinations: there was pork and tapioca, then rabbit and sweet potatoes. We would go to the store once a week to pick up 6–8 rabbits and the guy at the store would say, “So, are you havin’ a party?” You don’t want to say, “No, I’m buying eighty dollars’ worth of rabbit for my dog.” You feel like an ass. And it’s weird to be feeding an animal that’s cuter than your pet to your pet. After that we went to bison, which I thought was extinct, and switched to kangaroo about six months ago. There’s a butcher out in Woodside, Queens, that you have to go to for kangaroo....

"Our film should not have made light of Peter Rabbit’s archnemesis, Mr. McGregor, being allergic to blackberries, even in a cartoonish, slapstick way."

Apology of the day, from "Sony Apologizes After ‘Peter Rabbit’ Movie Exploits a Food Allergy, Upsetting Parents" (NYT). The rabbits attack a man by slingshooting a blackberry into a man's mouth.

When the rabbits fire a blackberry into Mr. McGregor’s mouth, [said Kenneth Mendez, president and chief executive of the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America], “there’s a close-up of his face, and it’s him holding his neck like he’s choking.” When Mr. McGregor collapses and appears to be dead for a moment, the rabbits cheer.... “Making light of this condition hurts our members because it encourages the public not to take the risk of allergic reactions seriously, and this cavalier attitude may make them act in ways that could put an allergic person in danger.” 

Maybe it's time to take all the violence in cartoon/cartoony shows seriously.



But some people think there's something special about violence that makes use of a pre-existing health condition. The TNT in Looney Tunes could blow up anybody, but a blackberry is only dangerous to those who are already struggling with a disability. It's hard to think of other examples of children's stories like that. I thought of Captain Hook, so cruelly tormented by Peter Pan, who took advantage of the disabled man's fear of the crocodile, and yet we're all susceptible to the depredations of the crocodile.

The cat.

This is basically halfway to being a children's book pic.twitter.com/DjwUPHy9Wz

— Erin McGuire (@e_mcguire_) November 29, 2017

ADDED: I found that tweet via WaPo, which has photos of Max, various efforts to write the children's book that the original tweet said was halfway written, and details of the library's ordeal ("An employee is very allergic to cats, and some people worried Max would get locked inside"), and the news that Max isn't being allowed to free-roam outdoors anymore ("He’s going crazy. He cries and howls and paces around, looking out the windows. I’m really hoping he takes to walking on the leash").

And you know, the kids, like all kids, loved the rock, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.

The inventor of the Pet Rock has died. "Gary Dahl, the man behind that scheme — described variously as a marketing genius and a genial mountebank — died on March 23 at 78."

Shouldn't that be a genial genius and a marketing mountebank?

One night in the mid-’70s, he was having a drink in Los Gatos.... The bar talk turned to pets, and to the onus of feeding, walking and cleaning up after them.

His pet, Mr. Dahl announced in a flash of bibulous inspiration, caused him no such trouble. The reason?

“I have a pet rock,” he explained.

A pet rock, Mr. Dahl quickly realized, might just have legs.

“People are so damn bored, tired of all their problems,” he told People magazine in 1975. “This takes them on a fantasy trip — you might say we’ve packaged a sense of humor.”

Meade sent me that link along with a second link, which he thinks is good material for a bloggerly riff: "Scott Walker, Allergic to Dogs, May Run Against Political History."

Jeb Bush can lament how he lost a Labrador (named for his brother Marvin) to cancer. Marco Rubio has a Shih Tzu, with a name like a gift from heaven: Manna. Ted Cruz goes one better: His rescue mutt is called Snowflake. (“Dear Jesus, please, please, PLEASE bring us a puppy,” his daughters prayed, according to Mr. Cruz’s Facebook page.) And if Mr. Walker makes it to November, he could face Hillary Rodham Clinton and her toy poodle, Tally.

Mr. Walker, who gives a gloomy stump speech filled with “worry,” perhaps could use a four-legged image softener of his own. But he is allergic to dog dander, an aide confirmed.

And in that, he is running against the long sweep of United States political history. If the ritual for presidential candidates wooing American voters had a handbook, “must love dogs” would be somewhere near the front....

Meade thinks Scott Walker could get a Pet Rock and go all Nixon....



And you know, the kids, like all kids, loved the rock, and I just want to say this, right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we are going to keep it.

Kids with peanut allergies now want $20,000 allergy service dogs to accompany them everywhere.

Allergy Alert dogs are "capable of sniffing out a single peanut in a pile of leaves."

"[I]nfants whose parents sucked on their pacifiers to clean them developed fewer allergies..."

"... than children whose parents typically rinsed or boiled them. They also had lower rates of eczema, fewer signs of asthma and smaller amounts of a type of white blood cell that rises in response to allergies and other disorders."

ADDED: Saliva is underrated. From the chapter about spit in Mary Roach's "Gulp":

We are large, mobile vessels of the very substances we find most repulsive. Provided they stay within the boundaries of the self, we feel no disgust. They’re part of the whole, the thing we cherish most.

[University of Pennsylvania psychologist] Paul Rozin has given a lot of thought to what he calls the psychological microanatomy of the mouth: Where, precisely, is the boundary between self and nonself? If you stick your tongue out of your mouth while eating and then withdraw it, does the ensalivated food now disgust you? It does not. The border of the self extends the distance of the tongue’s reach. The lips too are considered an extension of the mouth’s interior, and thus are part of the self. Though culture shifts the boundaries. Among religious Brahmin Indians, writes Edward Harper, even the saliva on one’s own lips is considered “extremely defiling,” to the extent that if one “inadvertently touches his fingers to his lips, he should bathe or at the least change his clothes.”

The boundaries of the self are routinely extended to include the bodily substances of those we love. I’m going to let Rozin say this: “Saliva and vaginal secretions or semen can achieve positive value among lovers, and some parents do not find their young children’s body products disgusting.”

There is no hypoallergenic dog.

Somebody tell Barack Obama. If your daughters really are allergic to dogs, they're allergic to the dander, the skin cells, which the dog has whether he sheds or not...



... whether he has hair or not.