To email school about them banning any food that "may contain traces of nuts"?

[PartyGoose]

Had an email last night from DD's school (it's a school that goes right through from 3-18 so covers all age groups) saying that as of today give us plenty of notice why don't you no food can be brought onto school premises that contains nuts or "may contain traces of nuts" due to a child with a severe nut allergy starting there.

I can't see how this is workable. It rules out about 50% of bought food, and 100% of food made/prepared in my kitchen as we eat a lot of nuts at home.

Obviously I am more than willing to avoid sending any food that actually has nuts in, and I'm going to take extreme care to check labels etc going forward.

But...surely they can't expect everyone to avoid anything that "may contain traces of nuts"? That's just not doable for most people.

@GenderCriticalTrumpets almost everything on your good to eat list contains or may contain my severe allergens: soy and milk.

A request to not have nuts in lunches - fine
A reminder that Nutella and many chocolate spreads contain nuts - fine
For severe allergies a request of no nuts for breakfast or teeth cleaning and handwashing - OK in extreme circumstances
May contain - really not workable.

My mother hand a severe allergy to the Solanaceae family (potatoes, tomatoes, chillies, peppers, paprika, aubergines) plus coeliacs disease. She had to accept that it was her responsibility to safe guard herself.

Nobody here has been unwilling to take two steps to the left to protect a child while they develop their own safe guarding skills. But banning all may contain foods is unreasonable.

Chunky kit kat have a may contain peanut and free nut warning on them, I think regular kit kats don't.

Most of that list is again not suitable for coeliacs, including kit kats.

My biggest issue with this kind of ban is the impact on the diet of all the other kids. And I'm not just talking about the protein advantages of nuts as many pp have highlighted.

Last week I was working through a budget with someone who had turned up for help at our foodbank. I was amazed at her shopping bill until she told me that her children's primary school had taken this same line - no nut traces as well as no Kiwi. Which had left this mother spending half her food budget on school lunches for 3 kids as they had to meet all these requirements. (She had no choice because the kids weren't eligible for FSM and she couldn't afford to pay for them at £7.50 a day or £37.50 a week). Her food budget for her family of 5 was £60 a week. She'd tried doing the foodbank favourites of homemade flapjack - porridge, butter and sugar as a filler - it got taken off the kids because it might contain nuts. Another day they had cheese sandwiches taken off them because 'somebody' decided the bread looked nutty - it wasn't it was basic brown (YS) bread. That day they gave the kids school meals - and told her she had to pay for it afterwards (and buy more bread for the next day).

I do absolutely feel for these kids and life is going to be tough for them. But schools really do have to think about how their rules impact others. Yes it's not nice to separate the allergy kid for lunch - but they are going to have to learn to eat differently to their friends. But it's also not nice to not have enough money to feed your family because the only way you kid can eat in school is by spending half your food budget on prepackaged expensive foods - and this in many areas will impact hundreds of times more kids.

Just try your best and don't feed DCs nuts before they go into school or send in nutty food for them

Try to send in foods that contain no nuts or nut oil, you can't control for the "may contain traces of nuts as that's most things (I have peanut allergy and know full well how much food suppliers "cover" themselves) .

Just be careful as there is a child with a severe nut allergy attending school. The child's parents must be very anxious as it'll be an anaphylactic level of allergy for school to send this letter out

This ^

Ah yeah my apologies I was only working from our nut allergy point of view.

Separate note - all the 'Free From' stuff we tried tastes like sadness.

'Free From' stuff we tried tastes like sadness. totally

Death isn’t really the only reaction that needs to be prevented. A reaction significant enough to interfere with a student’s ability to learn prevents the student from getting an education and represents a problem from a discrimination standpoint.

A school-wide ‘’ may contains’ ban may or may not be necessary, I really don’t know because we don’t know the school Arrangement or the child’s condition, but the child does have a right to an education free from allergic reactions even if those reactions don’t result in death.

Anyone with a real allergy knows 'may contain nuts' is a ridiculous legal disclaimer that helps no one. Companies slap it on everything to avoid being sued, even if the changes of coming across nuts are practically non-existent.

You know, life has traces of nuts. People eat nuts on public transport and wipe their grubby hands on the upholstery. You can't avoid the risk of nuts unless you literally live in a bubble, and that's a miserable existence, reserved only for the people who react to dust in the air rather than direct touch or consumption.

It doesn't sound like you have any direct experience of living with allergies. If you're the parent of a small child with allergies, trust me, you and your child will have a very different attitude later down the line. Plenty of people have already posted on this thread to agree with me that avoiding those disclaimer is no way to live.

Having allergies in the UK is not a big deal and you have to learn to live to it so you still enjoy a decent life. Having to ignore some bullshit disclaimers is a very small inconvenience. Coping with allergies in foreign countries is way more of a major adjustment (and plain impossible in some of them).

Maybe I'm using hyperbole when I say people will starve if don't eat food with the disclaimer on it, but they'll certainly have a miserable time of it. It's a big enough drag making sure your food doesn't have any actual nuts in it.

If you're going to be ridiculous about your disclaimers, don't expect other people to indulge you. And TBH, I think you're doing more harm than good. Force other parents to pointlessly police their food in this way, and with the amount of resentment that will build up, they're more likely to snap and stop checking at all. And that's when accidents happen.

Oh, someone's certainly very anxious. Not sure if it's the parents or the school, but this level of anxiety is not healthy.

The allergy is likely to last the whole child's life. They can't live this way forever, it's just no way to live.

As you and I know, food suppliers cover themselves to the point where their disclaimers are unhelpful, and you have to actually read the list of ingredients yourself to work out whether there's an actual danger. But having a real allergy and managing to survive to adulthood with one apparently won't satisfy some of the anxious parents on this thread...

This is an 'unexpected consequences' thing, and it's dangerous. The intention was to make life safer for nut-allergic people by insisting manufacturers make it clear on the packaging if a product contains nuts.

So then, if the packaging doesn't say it contains nuts, it doesn't contain nuts. That was the intention, any way.

But if you're a manufacturer, you've now got the choice between spending thousands and thousands of pounds on processes and machinery to make sure there are no nuts in your product, or spend next to nothing changing the label to say that it may contain nuts. Of course, the second option is easier, cheaper and safer.

So now there are many products that almost certainly don't contain nuts that say on the packaging 'may contain nuts'.

And of course nut-allergic people know this, and make their own assessment as to whether the product really contains nuts. Otherwise they'd be avoiding a lot of perfectly safe products. On the other hand, they're not getting reliable information, so at some point they're likely to make a mistak.

The whole process is not only useless, it's actually made things riskier for people with a nut allergy.

@theobligatorynamechange

Force other parents to pointlessly police their food in this way, and with the amount of resentment that will build up, they're more likely to snap and stop checking at all. And that's when accidents happen.
I think I've made it clèar in my comments on this thread that the 'may contain nuts' thing is only relevant to people who actually have a nut-allergy, and not to people like the OP. I've already said I think the school has got it wrong here.

It doesn't sound like you have any direct experience of living with allergies. If you're the parent of a small child with allergies, trust me, you and your child will have a very different attitude later down the line.
My child has been living with allergies (nuts and others) for 15 years now so we've quite a bit of experience at this stage.

Anyone with a real allergy knows 'may contain nuts' is a ridiculous legal disclaimer that helps no one. Companies slap it on everything to avoid being sued, even if the changes of coming across nuts are practically non-existent.
You are wrong. Anaphylaxis groups say that eating the 'may contain' products if you have an allergy is risky. The risk any one time may be small, but if you eat these products consistently, then the probability is you'll react sooner or later.

Studies have shown than a certain percentage of foods labelled this way actually do contain nuts or nut traces ( between 5 - 8% of at least some batches of the products, depending on the study iirc). And yes, sometimes companies slap on the label to cover themselves. And sometimes they don't and there actually is a risk. In some cases, different products are manufactured using the same equipment at different times. So say, a chocolate bar with nuts is made, and then a chocolate bar without nuts. The first batches of the plain bar off the equipment are far more likely to have nuts or traces than are later ones. Thus you can eat that brand regularly and all's fine - until one day it isn't. (I've personally found a big chunk of nut in a supposedly plain chocolate bar.)
The problem for allergic consumers is that it's hard to tell which companies are giving genuine warnings and which are not. And there's really lots of products around where you don't have to take that risk.
I think you're giving people dangerous advice here @theobligatorynamechange, I really do.

Also, as others have said too, @theobligatorynamechange, I don't have any real problems buying nut-free products in the supermarket. It takes some adjustment at first, but there are plenty of products out there that are safe to eat if you look for them.

So we're not at all miserable and we don't expect anyone to indulge us either.

YANBU
Why does everyone has to suffer because of one person?
It's ridiculous. That child should know not to eat other kids's lunches.

To be fair, the child may be very young. Typically, fewer accommodations are provided for older children (or adults).
I do think the school is going too far in this case, but going nut-free (as opposed to 'may contain nuts-free') is fairly common in schools for young children. Allergic children often need a bit of time to learn to behave safely around food.

And, yes, I also agree with @Pickabearanybear.
Younger children are often messy eaters and this needs to be considered as part of a risk assessment too.

I'm not going to "be that arsehole" though

I keep on saying, I won't send anything containing nuts!!!

As well as the fact that younger children's sense of personal space is very different from that of adults!

What you're doing is fine @PartyGoose.

The school have taken it too far here.

They do if it's your child at risk from anaphylactic shock.
They do if you nearly lost him aged 2 due to the same allergy. It's not a fucking fad you know, its LIFE THREATENING.

i will never understand why allergies are catered for like this, with all parents and students being, in most cases, very affected, yet disabilities aren't catered for with even half as much care and attention.

@Lacedwithgrace as a disabled parent of a peanut allergy sufferer I agree that all adjustments should be made for those that need it and it's a scandal that this doesn't happen .

I'm a disabled parent of a disabled allergy sufferer, it's nice to know I'm not alone in thinking this! If it's possible to make a school a nut-free zone, why can't it be made an accessible and inclusive school too?