Where The Road Ends

Brooklyn vibes

Lady Knights!

I have never seen another allergy that has been so viscerally hated and mocked by people working in education like nut allergies. I’ve seen fellow teachers cringe that their classroom was the “nut free” classroom that year. Support staff that are trained and willfully don’t follow cross contamination protocol in the lunchroom because it’s too “tedious” or “time-consuming”. Full preschools + childcare centers that refuse to accommodate nut allergies. Schools where the only free lunch is a PB&J. Before/after school programs and summer programs whose food curriculum has nuts and doesn’t provide an alternative activity.

Allergy discrimination is so so insidious and prevalent. It’s happening behind their back and it is everything from the exposure joke to possibly causing someone to go into anaphylaxis from willful ignorance.

I was not downplaying this. The stigma is real, and people are 100% willing to let people with allergies die.

When my mom tried to enroll me in preschool, the school principal refused any basic accommodations like asking everyone to wash their hands after lunch before re-entering the classroom, not bringing straight up peanuts to snack time, etc. There was no such thing as a nut free classroom at the time. The principal told my mom and me (I was 4 at the time and definitely in the room when this happened) “if she’s so sick, she belongs in a bubble, not at school.” THE FUCKING PRINCIPAL! My mom had to threaten legal action under the ADA to get them to comply.

Look, I was on a 504 accommodation plan under the ADA for the entirety of my formative education (elementary thru high school). That’s all 12 years!!! And yet I have had teachers hand me items I’m allergic to as a “reward”. I have had other kids intentionally try to send me into anaphylaxis. One girl in 3rd grade asked me why I “wasn’t dead yet” when she had put on a lotion with almonds in it and then held my hand. I’ve had other parents write letters to the school saying what a terrible inconvenience it was to them to not be able to send their kiddo to school with PB&J, demanding I be Removed to a special education only class if my “needs” were such a “burden” to others. During elementary school “parties” held in the classroom on holidays and for student birthdays, I was always sent to sit out in the hallway or go to the library, because even though parents were only supposed to bring safe foods into the room (they had a list of all my allergies) they never once got it right. Administrators fought me tooth and nail for the right to carry my epi pen and other meds on my person at all times. Why they thought I would start dealing benadryl on the playground, I do not know. At lunch, I was always sat at a specific segregated table labeled the “Nut Free Table” alone because who the fuck is going to sit there with the literally segregated outcast? But ONCE notably I was sat on one side of a line of blue masking tape down the table top with the rest of my class on the other. One side was the NUTS side!!! As if allergens would respect that tape barrier. (Spoiler alert: they do NOT!)

Literally from preschool to my senior year of high school, I was “the peanut kid”. Other parents gave my mom books about how to “cure your child’s food allergies from HOME” by micro dosing with things they are allergic to (please never ever ever even attempt anything like a food challenge with a known allergen outside of the care and supervision of a medical professional, holy shit that’s so dangerous). My mom joined the PTA in my last year of high school so that I could maybe participate in all the senior-focused events like pool parties and breakfast at school on the first Friday of the month. The number of times another parent either (a) decided it wasn’t worth it to care or (b) intentionally brought peanut products to an event to spite either me or my mom??? I literally could not count. It happened constantly.

College was better, but I still occasionally had people BALK when I asked them to please not eat a Nature Valley bar with whole nuts in it right the fuck next to me in lecture, thanks. Work parties and catered lunches were always impossible. A few conferences I went to as an undergrad were SUPPOSED to be nut-free, but always fucked up the catering. At one, they set up snack tables by every exit of the conference auditorium so that when people left after the talk, they all congregated around the exits and opened macadamia nut cookies and granola bars. When I had subsequently had a massive allergic reaction and needed help getting home (I’d walked) after taking like 200mg of benadryl, the staff offered me a stack of napkins and a lukewarm apology.

Food allergy is a disability which touches literally every aspect of a person’s life. Everytime I share with someone new about what it was like growing up with my allergies, they have never heard anything like it in their lives. They’re always like “holy shit, seriously??? People did that??? Kids tried to kill you??? Parents wanted you kicked out of the classroom????” Yeah, man. Yeah. My own brother (who doesn’t have any allergies at all) doesn’t understand why I don’t “eat more adventurously” and why I won’t travel internationally. So, saying it REALLY LOUDLY for people in the back:

I can’t digest legumes or alliums. Period. End of. It isn’t an immune response, it’s a poison response. Those are not foods, to my body. Those are poisons.

Alliums include: garlic, onions, shallots, spring onions, chives

Legumes: peas, beans, soy

These are some of the most common foods in the world. They are in every ethnicity’s cuisine. They are in everything.

I too have had people say I should kill myself rather than live with the inability to have garlic and onions. I have had the “we should all stop eating meat” crowd tell me that I’m “throwing a tantrum” and that they’d rather have me die of malnutrition than let me eat the only protein I can digest. I was punished over and over and eventually kicked out of a homeless shelter for having “too many dietary restrictions”, even after getting a doctor’s note from the doctor that diagnosed me.

IBS is not uncommon, it’s so common that a lot of people assume common adverse reactions to FODMAP foods are normal when they are signs of IBS–and it’s a continuum. Some people, like me, absolutely cannot eat what their triggers are, but there are other FODMAPS they’re fine with. Some people have milder responses to FODMAPs. Some people, like my mom, basically can’t eat ANYTHING triggering or they are violently and dangerously ill for sometimes weeks on end. And sorry to talk about gross body stuff, but diarrhea can kill you, particularly if you do not have ready access to sanitary toilets and water and the ability to lay down (I was homeless on the street when I was diagnosed with IBS, I did in fact almost die).

Imagine having food poisoning all the time.

I am not in any way saying it is as sudden in its lethality as anaphylaxis.

But it wears you down. It takes away hundreds of sources of nutrition. I struggle with things like vitamin D deficiency, iron deficiency, scurvy, and on and on. The list of triggers is as long as my arm and it’s mostly vegetables. It isn’t just one food that makes me sick, it’s hundreds. Whole chunks of the food pyramid are just poisonous.

The prejudice is the same. The danger of someone else poisoning you on purpose, out of spite, is the same. The inability to eat adventurously is the same. The inability to engage in the most basic of human social behaviours, sharing food, is the same.

Because to many people, we are both the same thing: A Picky Eater.

And being A Picky Eater is apparently a capital crime, as in the punishment is death.

You are cut off from a huge source of sensory play and enrichment. You are cut off from doing anything but cooking from absolute scratch. You are cut off from a huge piece of human social experience. You are cut off, as illustrated above, from education. These are not small things. These severely lower your quality of life every second of the day. They isolate you from having friends or meaningful social interaction or an education. They force you to pick between not eating at all and using up all your energy on cooking from scratch; guess which choice I usually end up picking when I’m too depressed!

All because other humans will not accommodate you.

Because food allergies and intolerances don’t HAVE to be a disability. It doesn’t have to be this way. Abled people MAKE it one, for no good reason than laziness and cruelty.

And dietary restrictions are seen as something of a luxury, I can tell you that right now. Hospitals, asylums, shelters, group homes, schools, charities, rehabs, and other institutions simply will not accommodate anyone with food allergies or intolerances in my experience–like at all. Period. They would rather you die. I actively dread the idea that I might end up in one again someday, because I know I’ll starve to death while being blamed for it and mocked the whole time.

I don’t even bother asking for accommodation anymore, I simply tell people I will not go out to eat with anyone, I will not accept food gifts from them, if they want me to come over they have to let me cook, and the isolation and depression are the price I have chosen to pay for my safety. But I can only do this because I’m no longer homeless and have the luxury of a kitchen and a private home. That is not a guarantee for many, and it wasn’t always for me.

A rare piece of Texas prairie has been saved from future development

The preserve is one step closer to its 30,000-acre goal. 

A protected piece of the Katy Prairie is now off-limits to future development as conservationists continue expanding one of the Houston area's most important natural landscapes. The Coastal Prairie Conservancy announced this week that it has permanently protected another 60 acres in northwest Harris County, moving the nonprofit closer to its long-term goal of conserving 30,000 acres on the historic Katy Prairie. The preserve encompasses about 20,000 acres across western Harris and Waller counties just west of Houston. Located in the Upper Cypress Creek watershed, the newly-protected tract includes native prairie, seasonal wetlands and working agricultural land. According to the conservancy, preserving the property will help support wildlife habitat, provide natural flood storage and maintain the area’s natural landscape as development continues to spread across northwest Harris County...