Pick your battles, friend, lest you sound like an ass:
Your kid doesn't have an allergy to nuts. Your kid has a parent who
needs to feel special. Your kid also spends recess running and
screaming, "No! Stop! Don't rub my head with peanut butter!"
Yes,
a tiny number of kids have severe peanut allergies that cause
anaphylactic shock, and all their teachers should be warned, handed
EpiPens and given a really expensive gift at Christmas. But unless
you're a character on "Heroes," genes don't mutate fast enough to have
caused an 18% increase in childhood food allergies between 1997 and
2007. And genes certainly don't cause 25% of parents to believe that
their kids have food allergies, when 4% do. Yuppiedom does.
I
first had this thought seven years ago, when I wrote a short story that
very few people read because, unlike most people, I was kind enough not
to show it to anyone. In one pointless digression, I described a future
allergy epidemic in which not only nuts but malt, guar gum, gluten and
corn cause kids to blow up like balloons in Macy's Thanksgiving Day
parade. It subsides only after the FDA declares the allergies entirely
psychosomatic.
You can see why I didn't send that story to the New Yorker.