Peanut butter and egg-free baking

In this world of medical advancement I always find it strange that there are far more diseases and allergies around than there were way before our modern times. Or is it that we just didn’t know about them back then? I guess now that people can fly between countries rather than walk means that the world wide spread of things like aids and bird flu, that probably did exist all that time ago, can now spread on a global scale. And we know about all this stuff because of so much global media.

This morning the office conversation was about someone’s friend with a toddler and their difficulty in finding a suitable birthday cake to take to creche for the toddler’s first birthday party. Apparently the creche (and this is common) has all these rules about what kids are allowed to take to eat – whether for parties or in their lunch boxes every day: cakes and baking must be free of eggs and nuts, and a wheat-free alternative must be offered; no peanut butter sandwiches are allowed for lunch – even if your kid is not allergic to nuts, peanut butter is not allowed to be in the creche breathing space. This seems oxymoronic in today’s world where a lot of parents seem to work whilst raising children and don’t actually stay home baking like my Mum did.

In then end the toddler’s parents sent them off to their first birthday party at creche with an eggless, nutless, un-iced fruit cake from Common Sense Organics. Yum. Poor kiddies.

As a kid I remember eating and drinking everything! Including the sand in the kindy sandpit (whether it had dogshit in it I don’t know … and dogshit was entirely possible because back then the kindy was not fenced with a 6-foot high concrete wall topped with barbed wire with a security guard out front). And so far I’m not allergic to anything and am pretty healthy (mental health aside!!)

Why has everything changed so much?