hat are you most scared of? Perhaps snakes send a chill down your spine. Or heights leave your knees weak. Peanuts may sound like an odd source of phobia, but they have taken on an absurd bogeyman quality for me since my daughter was taken to hospital by ambulance after eating peanut butter when she was six months old. Just the sight of a bowl on a pub bar, or their shells discarded on the pavement, can raise my heart rate – even when I'm not with her.
Nowhere is the sight of peanuts more confronting than at 30,000ft, especially now when millions are jetting back from their holidays. Travelling with a severely allergic child can be a nightmare for all sorts of reasons, but the idea you could be sat next to a passenger consuming the very thing that has hospitalised them is its own kind of hell.
Most airlines will make an announcement asking passengers to avoid consuming nuts if you let them know that somebody in your party has a severe nut allergy. But I brace for impact when these announcements are piped out. On almost every flight there is at least one passenger who sighs or makes some inane comment, loud enough for everyone to hear, about how annoying it is.
Oh, I'm sorry – is not being able to eat nuts for a few hours inconveniencing you? Does one passenger's desire to consume peanut M&M's trump someone else's right to stay alive? I didn't realise the right to eat nuts was a civil liberties issue. How utterly absurd.
And yet, people get disproportionately upset about being told not to eat things. Chloë Dickson, who runs the Instagram account peanutfreezone, recently posted a horrifying video of her experience flying with a severe peanut allergy and a man behind her responding, "Really?" to an announcement asking passengers not to eat nuts. He "then proceeded to make comments throughout the entire journey about eating peanuts around me, along with two other people nearby," the caption reads.
I am mystified by this mean-spiritedness. Allergies are not a lifestyle choice but a medical condition. And yet, they seem to inspire a lack of empathy in the public consciousness. Perhaps it's due to a misunderstanding of what allergy actually is. For people such as Chloe and my daughter, we're not talking about skin irritation or a dodgy stomach, however unpleasant that might be. Anaphylaxis is a severe, potentially life-threatening allergic reaction that can affect multiple body systems and commonly impacts breathing or consciousness. The primary treatment is adrenaline via an EpiPen and it requires immediate medical attention.
But I suspect many people do know what severe allergy can look like, they just think this level of caution is overblown and are frustrated by having to make accommodations. Take a look at some of the comments under Chloë's post and you'll see what I mean. They are staggering in their stupidity. "Fly private or DON'T FLY AT ALL. Don't make other people's lives miserable just to please yours!" one reads. "I travel with a bag of peanuts for these moments," says another. There really are people who seem to believe that those with allergies should just not travel at all. Or not go out to eat. Or not be able to participate fully in life outside their own homes. I wonder if they would feel that way if it was their children who were diagnosed.
Allergic people can't be wrapped in cotton wool. Some of the best advice I got when my daughter was small, from an angelic NHS allergy nurse, was that you do your very best to keep her safe and then you carry EpiPens as your insurance policy. That's given me lots of comfort over the years when gauging risk. But when you're trapped in a metal tube in the sky with no possibility of medical attention, the stakes feel much higher.
What scares allergic people most is not necessarily the risk of an airborne reaction, which is vanishingly rare, it's the possibility of cross-contamination. That peanut dust on someone's fingers could then spread to the tray table, the seat, perhaps the toilet door. That a rogue peanut from a previous flight has fallen between the seats or touched the seatbelt. On quick turnaround budget airlines with minimal cleaning, the risk you may come into contact with the allergen starts to feel frighteningly high. And even tiny amounts of nut protein can trigger a life-threatening reaction for some people.
Banning nuts on planes seems like a no-brainer. And I say nuts because of all the common allergens, they are the least likely to be outgrown in childhood and have a higher rate of causing severe reactions. That means telling passengers not to bring nut products on board. But even just stopping the practice of serving them on flights would drastically reduce the risk of cross-contamination when travelling. And it would take the pressure off anxious, allergic passengers to advocate for their safety. Of course, no ban could be watertight, which is why airlines should make a blanket rule that anyone with severe allergy should be offered priority boarding to clean their own seats before takeoff as a precaution.
Allergic people shouldn't have to justify their medical needs to people who don't understand them. Banning nuts on planes could send an important message to the broader public. That people with allergies should be able to travel without fear. That compassionate societies make accommodations.