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.
But an essay by Harvard doctor and social scientist Nicholas Christakis in the British Medical Journal -- which I read in between my perusal of Classical Philology and the IEEE Journal of Quantum Electronics -- makes more or less the same argument. Christakis, who did a famous study showing that having fat friends makes you fat, wrote that parental responses "bear many of the hallmarks of mass psychogenic illness."
If you don't think allergic reactions can be caused by mass hysteria, then you don't know about the uncontrollable dancing that gripped thousands of Europeans between the 14th and 18th centuries, or that the South Korean government recently issued a consumer safety alert saying that electric fans can asphyxiate you if left running overnight, after news reports of several deaths. You, in short, have never looked up "mass hysteria" on Wikipedia.
Since food allergies kill about as many people as lightning strikes each year, we probably don't need to ban peanuts from schools or put warnings on every product saying it was "made in a factory that also has a break room where a guy named Dave often sneaks in a King Size Snickers despite this 'diet' he says he's on."
