Current mood:

hungry

Bye bye, PBJ. Hello, hypoallergenic nutrition bars.
When I was a kid, the only people I knew with allergies were adults who had hay fever. Everybody in my class ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and had a thermos of milk for lunch. Nobody went into anaphylactic shock. Nobody got the shits so bad they had to stay home.

In high school, my best friend was so allergic to bees that he had to carry a little "My First Heroin Addiction" self-injection kit. This was considered to be way cool and bizarre. Peanut butter had gone out of vogue, but Planters dry-roasted peanuts hadn't and were still a popular care package item. Milk was out, but milkshakes were in. And we all ate pasta. Nobody died in the cafeteria.

In college, I bumped into my first Celiac sufferer - but she was rail thin, pale and a vegan to boot. Definitely in the "not healthy" category. Even so, half of us thought she was just faking it to get off the meal plan. Peanut butter was back in, since now we could choose to eat it and even assign doing so some kind of pomo-ironic meaning, milkshakes at Chick'n'Ruth's were way in but even I was beginning to feel the tummy rumblings of a lactose intolerance that would still take more than a decade to identify.

Post-college, most of the people that I knew still lacked any food or environmental allergies (except it was now vogue among the annoying birdish-looking non-smokers, especially girls, to claim to be "allergic" to cigarette smoke. Yeah, whatev.) But then suddenly the late-Boomer parents and early-GenXers were starting to report really bizarre allergies in their kids. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches were now lethal weapons. If the nuts didn't get 'em the wheat gluten would. And the lactose-free milk industry started booming, springing up just in time to offer gastric relief to the teeming millions (myself included) who had begun to find that a simple glass of milk could turn them into toxic gas factories.

Between 1997 and 2002 alone, the rate of children suffering from peanut or other nut allergies in the US rose from 0.4% to 0.8% - doubling in only five years to one out of every 125 kids - and up from practically 0% in the 1970s-1980s. It's gotten so bad that some schools are considering adopting official "nut-free" policies. Gluten intolerance now effects 1 out of every 133 Americans. Lactose intolerance is up from 1 in 19 in 1983 to 1 in 9 (11%) just 25 years later. By some estimates, Irritable Bowel Syndrome now affects almost 10% of Americans to one degree or another.

Folks, something ain't right. I don't know if it's the aluminum in the cans, all the preservatives, or the high-fructose corn syrup, but we're killing ourselves. Worse, we're denying our children the joy of noodles with spicy peanut sauce and a mango lhassi.