Anyway, a while ago I read a thing about a girl who tragically died at camp when the mess hall served her a Rice Krispies treat that had peanut ingredients in it. She'd eaten the same treat at the same camp before without incident, but the recipe was changed without informing her. Her medication to treat the allergy didn't work, and she died.
There are a lot of people I know who treat this as a result of people claiming they or their kids have allergies when they haven't been diagnosed with them. The implication here is that when people claim they're allergic to things they aren't, or say their kids are allergic when they aren't, it becomes a sort of collective "cry wolf" effect where people stop believing that anybody has a legitimate allergy. This then results in people being more careless about accommodating allergies because they assume the default is to lie.
Before I go into why exactly this is bullshit, I'd like to discuss a few reasons somebody might want to fake an allergy. If you're uninterested and want to read about accessibility instead, I encourage you to skip down to the next heading.
Although I am simplifying by just saying "food" here, this essay also counts environmental and animal allergies:
- They have weird symptoms that they either know are mitigated by avoiding a particular food, or that they suspect are from that food.
- They don't have an allergy, they have an intolerance or toxicity reaction, but people don't understand the difference so they just cave.
- They strongly suspect an allergy, but don't have easy access to an actual diagnosis.
- They have some sort of ethical or religious restriction against eating a particular food or food group, but people don't accommodate them.
- They strongly believe a food is bad for them for whatever reason, but everybody else thinks it's wholesome and necessary.
- They desire attention or prestige in communities where dietary restrictions are considered "in."
I'll talk about the last one first because I'm sure that's what people are assuming when they get all up in peoples' case over an alleged fake allergy. When people accuse others of attention-seeking, what they often fail to recognize is that attention is important to a person's sense of self. There are always people who try to fluff up their uniqueness because that's a quality that's valued in a lot of cultures. It's just important to recognize that they're not just doing this for the hell of it, they're probably attempting to fulfill a very real human need.
The others, though, are a lot easier to talk about.
The first three are all cases in which have well-documented, obvious reactions to a particular food... or who at least have obvious reactions to something. In fact, if you look at the forums of literally any diet out there, you'll find people who are desperately looking for dietary cures for all sorts of ailments that are associated with the foods we eat. Itching, asthma, difficulty maintaining a preferred weight, gastrointestinal distress, acne, malaise, aches and pains, depression, these are all things that are dramatically reducing peoples' quality of life that can be tied to diet but are typically treated with pharmaceuticals instead. And while I maintain using pharmaceuticals to treat these things is perfectly fine, many people don't want to do that--or they can't afford to!--and so they search desperately for a dietary cure instead. In many cases, cutting out a particular food entirely is the way to go, and it's just easier to say "I'm allergic" than to explain in any more depth.
An allergy is a specific type of response to a food or environmental allergen. Not all food issues are actually allergies... celiac disease is different from a gluten allergy, lactose intolerance is not the same as a dairy allergy, and there are toxicity reactions as well. For instance, I often will tell people I'm allergic to morel mushrooms. They make me puke my guts out. It's awful. But it's not actually an allergy, it's a toxicity reaction.
Next we have people who have no actual documented reaction to a food, but who have some other reason for avoiding it. A non-allergic paleo eater, for instance, might claim to be allergic to wheat, dairy, and/or peanuts when they merely don't want to eat them because they believe they're sub-optimal foods. An observant Jew or Muslim might claim to have a dairy and/or pork allergy (yes, pork allergies exist). A vegan might claim to be allergic to eggs. After people who are assumed to claim an allergy just for attention, these are probably the most reviled. And if you're the kind of person who claims this... well, cool it. Here's why.
People who claim to have allergies when they haven't been diagnosed with them are doing it because they have a hard time getting accommodated any other way. And that's really sad.
Listen, if you were to ask me if I think being a vegan is a great idea, I'll say "fuck no" and give you all sorts of reasons why vegan mythology is crap and vegan diets are sub-optimal for you. But vegans still should have every right to have good-tasting, reasonably-healthful food available to them.
When they don't, that's when you get people who claim to be lactose-intolerant people with egg and fish allergies who were all bitten by Lone Star ticks. Non-vegans can be extremely defensive about vegan diets and it can be hell trying to convince a non-vegan that vegan options are necessary. And the same can be said for any dietary restriction out there. I mean, I knew a woman who intentionally put bacon fat in a meal and gave it to a Muslim child just because she hated that child's parents. As a paleo eater I've been constantly nagged at by people who take it personally when I don't want to eat their pizza or cinnamon rolls, who constantly say things like "just one won't hurt you" but who guilt you until you eat at least five of 'em. So in an environment where people are constantly pressuring people who have ethical, religious, or health preferences that forbid eating a particular food to eat things they don't want to, it gets pretty goddamn tempting to just say you're allergic to it.
People have the right to have their food accommodations met even if they don't have a life-threatening allergy. Other people just don't recognize that.
Oh, and I also should mention... did you not notice that people are flippant about allergies regardless of whether or not there are fakers out there?
Seriously. You can talk all day about how people claiming fake allergies are making it hard to take people with real allergies seriously, but it won't change that people have been exactly as shitty to people with life-threatening allergies since forever. The victim blaming and charges of oversensitivity laid on people who have such allergies is mind-boggling, and it has nothing to do with fakers.
Consider that Jack Halberstam article a while ago where he rails against scent-free policies at conferences (among other things). The assumption he made was that people are getting more and more sensitive... the reality is that people who have extremely uncomfortable or even life-threatening allergies to scents just weren't going to those conferences because they weren't being accommodated. Speaking of scent-free policies, I have gone to two "scent-free" policies where people wore scents just to spite the policy... knowing that those policies are in place because people have allergies.
In another case, a woman I know who is allergic to mosquito spray worked at a summer camp. Literally the only thing people needed to do to accommodate this was to make sure she wasn't in the general vicinity when spraying it. She still wound up in the hospital that year, and when I tell this story people are more likely to complain that she shouldn't have been working at a camp than they are to recognize that other people failed to accommodate her.
At the same camp I tried desperately to get the cookstaff to mention when their desserts contained common allergens like peanuts and tree nuts after two horrifying incidents. In one a child came up to me with a half-eaten cookie. She was allergic to tree nuts, but the cookies looked like they only contained chocolate chips. In another, a child almost ate a peanut butter cookie when she was deathly allergic to peanuts. They never acknowledged this extremely simple request.
Just look at the time and energy people take out of their busy schedules to complain about the basic decency of accommodating for allergic people. There's a project called the Teal Pumpkin Project that aims to make Halloween more accessible for children with food allergies. It's a voluntary program where you paint a pumpkin teal and you put up a sign indicating that non-food treats are available at your house for children with allergies. People had the gall to complain about this being "oversensitive." They do the same about peanut allergies (even in schools where there are documented cases of children with severe allergies to peanuts).
This attitude is not caused by fakers or self-diagnosers. It's caused by a chronic, long-standing lack of concern for accessibility and lack of accommodation for peoples' food requirements, regardless of why they have those requirements. We can't blame non-allergic people's speculations and fibs for what is a wide-reaching, societal problem.
