Parents angered by son's suspension over peanut cookies ["You cannot speak to the principal,"....]

NJ.COM ^

[Sub-Driver]

SOUTH ORANGE, N.J. (AP)

[steve-b]

The accusation is one worth taking seriously (the allergy is very real and dangerous to the afflicted) if there is good reason for considering it credible. However, this case doesn't sound very credible -- it rests on the unsupported say-so of another child (and if it turns out that she made it up, that, too, should be treated as a serious offense).

[Hank Rearden]

Put the Peanut People in their own little cocoon school and let the normal kids eat normal food.

Like peanut cookies and PB&J sammiches.

[radiohead]

Now I'm starting to crave some...

I never tried these until I had some at a school function (kinda funny, considering all the brouhaha, but we are adults and I guess no one thought about allergies).

Anyway, let me go on record as saying that next to Oreos, these are the best tasting mass-produced cookie on the market. Bar none.

[Your Nightmare]

There is also speculation that peanut allergy is triggered by use of lotions containing peanut oil on infants.

[spodefly]

... early exposure to peanuts prior to being above 1 year old....

I grew up on a peanut farm, and played on top of giant piles of peanuts in drying bins when I was very little. I should be dead now, right?

[hardhead]

Me too. I and everybody I knew, grew up eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and munching on a bag of fresh roasted.

Its obviously a conspiracy by Jimmah Cahrter!

[sonserae]

You know, schools are focused on the wrong things now-a-days!!
No wonder the kids are graduating from high school not knowing how to read...the principal is too busy dealing with peanuts.

[DB]

Yes, I understand.

[luvbach1]

George Washington Carver, invented scores of uses for the peanut, from synthetics to peanut butter. Does exposure to peanuts in all their multitudinous forms also risk allegic reaction?

[scab4faa]

At my daughters school there is 1 kid who is allergic to peanuts. if my anyone brings anything into the school that has peanuts in it they have to sit at a special table by themselves so the 1 child won't be exposed to any peanuts.

[Doctor Stochastic]

Mostly it's the oil. Peanut oil is getting much more use (because it's good for cooking in) lately. Peanut oils are volitile and a real problem. It's more like a poison gas release that affects only a few people.

Fortunately, not many people have this allergy (else there wouldn't be any people.) Most food allergies are avoided by just not eating the foods. It's harder if everything may be cooked in peanut oil or not depending on the spot price of vegetable oils.

Hey, it's natural. PETA will be happy. (Belladonna is natural too.)

[madison10]

I'm ten years older than you, never knew of anyone allergic to peanuts or products related. However, I've met at least one child in the past year who has an extreme reaction to peanuts, peanut butter & anything related. She knows enough not to eat cookies unless she is sure.

Why does it seem the allergy just popped up? Good question. Maybe it has something to do with the processing either in the field or factory.

[lilylangtree]

Wonder if these are Ketchupman's cookies?

January 28, 2004 (The Hill)

How did the Kerry cookies crumble?
By Sam Dealey

To hear Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) tell it, his brief foray into the cookie business in the late 1970s gives him a leg up on the concerns of small-business owners. Earlier this month, the Democratic presidential candidate introduced his small-business program with vignettes from his own cookie-making experience.

Yet all that experience kind of, well, crumbles, in the mind of David Liederman, another cookie entrepreneur. Liederman, the founder of the David’s Cookies chain, claims Kerry ripped off the idea from him.

“The bottom line is he just stole it from me,” said Liederman, now a restaurateur and real estate developer in the New York City suburbs.

The Kerry campaign sharply dismissed Liederman’s charge.

“Clearly, the guy who started David’s Cookies didn’t invent cookies,” said spokesman David DiMartino. “John Kerry absolutely denies this charge.”

Kerry’s former venture serves as the backdrop for a number of campaign publicity measures designed to woo voters. In a Vogue magazine profile last year featuring the presidential candidate in surfing wear, Kerry discussed the cookie business at some length.

After dinner one night in Boston, Kerry said, he and a friend had a hankering for cookies. Their search took them to Faneuil Hall. There was no cookie store to be found, but there was an empty retail space. An idea was born, and a store soon followed. The pair named their shop, Kilvert & Forbes Ltd., after their mother’s maiden names, and eventually sold their interest when Kerry’s political career intervened.

“It was a late-night inspiration,” Kerry told Vogue. “I had always had this entrepreneurial piece of me, and I saw it as a great business opportunity.” And this experience, Kerry continued, “stood me in great stead on the [Senate] Small Business Committee.”

However, Liederman recalls a different version of how Kerry’s cookie venture crumbled.

“Some guy who called me up was John Kerry, in ’79 or ’80,” Liederman recalled. “He said he wanted to come down and talk to me about franchising. He came to the office and said he had an incredible space in Boston, which was Faneuil Hall. He said he needed some plans and some layouts and all sorts of things to get the approval of the landlord.”

“So I gave him the layout, the package, and he went back and I didn’t hear from him for six or seven months.”

Then one day Liederman got a call from someone who said they’d seen one of his stores in Faneuil Hall. Not having a store in Boston, Liederman decided to have a look for himself.

“It was a direct, 100-percent knock off of David’s Cookies,” said Liederman, from the appliances to the shop’s design to the cookies themselves. “If you had walked into a David’s Cookie’s store in Manhattan at the same time he opened ‘John’s Cookies’ in Boston, you couldn’t tell the difference.”

In his 1989 autobiography “Running Through Walls,” where the charge first appeared, Liederman wrote that he challenged Kerry on the origin of his business. “I told him he had stolen my idea, and he replied: ‘You’re absolutely right. I am a politician; I shouldn’t be in the cookie business, so let me sell you my store,’” Liederman wrote.

Liederman never bought the store, he said, because Kerry was operating it in violation of his lease. “He was supposed to be selling jams and jellies, not cookies,” he wrote.

DiMartino denied the exchange took place. “John Kerry does not recall having the conversation Mr. Liederman discusses in his book,” he said. “The facts included in Mr. Liederman’s complaint don’t match reality.”

Still, if he wants it, Kerry hasn’t quite lost Liederman’s vote.

“I’d support anybody that wasn’t Bush,” he said. “If Kerry got the nomination, I’d absolutely support him — although Bush never stole David’s Cookies from me.”

[madison10]

The peanut. Really.

[HIDEK6]

In that case, where is the outcry to legislate peanut-free bars?

[VRWC_minion]

Typical parents who are in denial that there kid has behavior problems. This kid is going to be impossible to control after he sees how well he gets his parents to jump thru hoops for him.

The very last thing parents should ever do is to let their kid think their is any daylight between the adults in his life especially the teachers and the parents. In my opinion these parents have no clue what a monster they have just created.

Finally the quote

Jules had brought the cookies to class in his pocket and showed them to some classmates, before one of them — a girl who does not like his son — told the teacher that Jules had threatened to expose her to the cookies, his father said.

Anyone think this "girl who does not like his son" is in the minority ?

[madison10]

Shhhh. Don't give them ideas.

You've heard that some schools have "peanut free" zones in the cafeterias where kids cannot eat anything with peanuts-no pb sandwiches, no peanuts, no candy w/ peanuts, etc.? It's almost like the second-hand smoke issue: the few have power over the many.

[bondjamesbond]

My older brother was deathly allergic to peanuts since he was a baby, and he was born in 1959. This allergy nearly killed him several times as a child.

He's better now, but still cannot eat them. It used to be he could not breathe if he was even near peanut butter. The oils in the air were enough.

So, yeah, the allergy is real.

There are a lot of facts to be determined in this case. Apparently the child admits that he knew that the teacher was deathly allergic, and brought the cookies to class anyway. Apparently he admits that he knew that it was dangerous to the teacher to have them there.

This should be enough to have the child disciplined severly, IMHO. But I will allow as to how my personal experience may make me an unreasonable judge in this case.

If, in fact, the child threatened to expose the teacher, or told other children that he was going to expose the teacher, then the district should throw the book at him.

Some people die of such allegies by accident. But if a person dies as a result of intentional exposure, it is a serious crime. Nobody would be laughing if the kid had a vial of cyanide. The peanut butter can be just as dangerous, if a person has a severe allergy.

[Mr. K]

Yes it is very real folks, I know 2 people with it

[Chewbacca]

The irresponsible person who should be held responsible is the adult or child who brought them and handed them out during this poor boys social studies party.