A Nut Allergy Skeptic Learns the Hard Way – TIME
Aug 20
Illustration by John Ueland for TIME
Joel Stein has a knack for writing articles that raises the hair on the back of people’s necks. (See his article “Have Americans Gone Nuts Over Nut Allergies?”
This time he gets his own, though not in a way I would wish on ANYONE.
A Nut Allergy Skeptic Learns the Hard Way
By JOEL STEIN Saturday, Aug. 14, 2010
Years ago, sitting on an ear doctor’s examining table after causing my inner ear to bleed for days by puncturing it with a Q-tip, I looked up to see a framed copy of a column about how stupid it is to put Q-tips in your ears. It was a column I had written. When you publish hundreds of obnoxiously self-righteous proclamations, some of them are going to cause you embarrassment. Which doesn’t seem all that big of a deal when you also have blood leaking from your ears.
At the beginning of last year, I wrote a column that questioned whether the increase in food allergies among children was a matter of overreporting. It began with this carefully calibrated thought: “Your kid doesn’t have an allergy to nuts. Your kid has a parent who needs to feel special.” After that, I got a little harsh.
(See nine kid foods to avoid.)
The column was not the first thing that came to mind after my 1-year-old son Laszlo started sneezing, then breaking out in hives, then rubbing his eyes, then crying through welded-shut eyes, then screaming and, finally, vomiting copiously at the entrance of the Childrens Hospital emergency room an hour after eating his first batch of blended mixed nuts.