Okay, I admit that’s my first reaction, and I’m a terrible person.
But, you know how cool those kids in grade-school thought they were for having to go down to the office and use their asthma inhalers? Sometimes I get the feeling that allergies are, if not Munchhausen Syndrome, possibly psychosomatic. And I question the prevalence of specific allergies to a given time period. Why do certain allergies suddenly appear and everyone is affected, from all ages? I could follow the logic if an unknown element had instantly been introduced into the environment, but that’s not the case. I could theorize that there’s latent genetics at play, only just now impacting humanity from years of exposure, but that wouldn’t explain why these allergies effect people of disparate age groups.
Gluten allergy? An allergy to processed grain–the staple that allowed humanity to transition from neolithic hunter/gatherers into permanent farmers? The event that allowed us to discover beer? That has to make you feel pretty pathetic as a human.
But I must jest at the flagship ridiculous allergy: peanuts.
This got me thinking: perhaps we’re just so numerous as a species, there’s a statistical probability that anything we could possibly think of, someone has an allergy to it. To confirm this theory, I searched for the first random common edibles I could think of, and appended them with “allergy” into Google. As it turns out, people are allergic to soy, fluoride, and mint. It actually became a challenge to find something to which people don’t claim an allergy. There’s even a banana allergy.
Still, after they confiscated my daughter’s yogurt because it had a compartment of nuts to mix in, I felt compelled that, on the next random event this school drags me to, I’m going to first rub myself down in peanut oil and then shake everyone’s hand.
–Simon