Pine Nuts and Goat's Milk Should Get Allergy Labels, Say Experts

When I was a kid quite some decades ago I'd never heard of anyone with a food allergy. I'm not saying that food allergies didn't exist, it's just that in my circle—family, acquaintances, schoolfriends, radio, TV newspapers, etc. the subject was either never thought of or mentioned let alone discussed.

But we had heard of a few unfortunates who suffered hay fever in spring and some who had asthma but no one that I knew had these complaints. (Also, we had heard of people who'd gotten ill after being stung by bees.)

Let me illustrate how times have changed. At school, we'd swap peanut butter sandwiches without so much as a thought, teachers never mentioned allergies let alone warn about the dangers of swapping sandwiches.

One of the pleasures of going to Saturday arvo movie matinées was to share peanuts and peanut brittle which where I grew up was almost as popular as popcorn. Again, we'd never heard of anyone becoming ill from eating peanuts.

I have no knowledge of being allergic to any food, if I am then my response is so mild I'm unaware of it.

Similarly, these days I'm rather bemused when asked to wait 15 minutes after getting a flu or COVID shot in case I suffer an allergic reaction. I recall the mass school vaccinations against polio. We had 1000+ kids vaccinated between morning tea break and lunchtime—and there was no mention of allergic reactions and no one got sick (except of course for the small cadre of boys who suggested they miss the next class because their arms were sore—and no, they weren't excused).

Same with the army, you'd get multiple shots one after the other and there was no mucking about afterwards.

When someone of my vintage hears of all these allergies and the large numbers suffering from them one's first reaction is to think these poor delicate petals must be grossly exaggerating but clearly they're not.

It's clear that over the last 40—50 years something has changed dramatically. We've gone from something that was essentially unknown in the public consciousness to a well-known serious health issue that's now a problem for many people.