AS MAD AS IT GETS

Rod Liddle on why the innocent peanut

is being hunted to extinction by the allergy police

IT's always a life-affirming moment — for me, at least. The aeroplane has groaned and wheezed its way up, up, above the city and — improbably, to my mind — established a sort of equilibrium with the ethereal new world around it. The engines begin to sound more at ease. Perhaps I won't die this time, after all.

And then, the seat-belt signs flick off, and from somewhere far down the aisle, towards first class, there comes the chinkety-chink-chink of the trolley. So, I am not going to die — and, better still, I'm going to be given a nice drink.

This rather lovely sequence of events occurred, in exactly the same way as they usually do, on a recent flight from Kampala to Heathrow. My companion on the trip was the editor of this publication who, during take-off, as I sweated with terror, slouched in his seat, oblivious to notions of mortality, reading a book about how the British Empire was unreservedly terrific.

Eventually, the trolley reached us. We were given a pleasantly chilled Pouilly Fume and — here's where the sense of euphoria and wellbeing dissolved in a microsecond — a `snack'.

Let me tell you about this despicable confection. Its basic ingredient was a reconstituted, premasticated cereal that had been sprayed with, or immersed in, the following: disodium guanylate, tocopherol, sorbital, glucona-delta-lactonc, monosodium glutamate, sucrose esters of fatty acids, hydrogenated goatshit. Sure, I made up the last one, and perhaps it is hypocritical of me to object to cocktails of man-made chemicals per se when they've given me such unrestrained pleasure in the, ah, distant past.

But what, instead, would I have been given with my white wine until quite recently? A packet of roasted peanuts (ingredients: peanuts, vegetable oil). This brave, nutritious little legume has been vilified, hounded and, to use the popular term, 'excluded' from public life. It has become the child sex offender of bartop snacks.

The cause of its banishment has been a ferocious campaign of 'education and information' by some of the multitudinous, largely American, anti-allergy lobbyists. Their relentless activities, together with the sulphurous whiff of personal-injury lawyers, have persuaded the major airlines — and soon, no doubt, schools and 'public places — to drop the peanut entirely.

Some people are allergic to peanuts. No one — from the evidence of the six or seven medical reports I've been ploughing through — seems to know quite how many, although all are agreed that the numbers are on the increase. Our own Department of Health (which, incidentally, offers sensible and measured advice on the issue) reckons it to be about one in 200 people. Of these unfortunate sufferers, some risk a state of anaphylactic shock if they so much as come into contact with a peanut. Anaphylactic shock is, without doubt, terrifying and potentially lethal. In very severe cases death can occur within ten minutes or so of peanut contact, unless the victim is treated very rapidly indeed with the drug epinephrine. Between 1994 and 1999 an estimated 20 people in Britain died in this way.

The danger, of course, is from bits of peanuts or peanut derivatives lurking in otherwise innocuous dishes. The vast majority of those people with an allergy are aware of this, and so they inspect the ingredients of everything they eat and carry epinephrine kits around with them. They are not likely to be gulled by naked, brazen, whole peanuts in bright-blue bags with 'Peanuts' written in big letters on the front.

And this is one of the reasons why the mindset is wrong and why the reaction teeters into hysteria and authoritarianism, No one could argue against clear labelling of foodstuffs and accurate information. But it is the implication that we are not to be trusted and are incapable of making our own decisions that grates.

A few years ago, the United States Department of Transport reacted to fearsome pressure from the lobby groups and enacted a law which meant that an individual on an internal flight could designate the row in which he was seated, and the rows directly in front and behind, a 'peanut-free zone', if he had a mind to.

I suppose that in the abstract this seems a fairly useful device. One could imagine declaring under federal law that the rows of seats around you must be designated a Gerald Kaufman-free zone, for example. But quite what danger is posed to the allergic individual by a person in the row in front eating a packet of peanuts I cannot comprehend.

This Department of Transport ruling may well ring a bell with smokers, that other beleaguered minority. The same rule for smokers was introduced many years ago on internal US flights. Since then, the law has been scrapped: there's no smoking at all, anywhere. And the same thing has happened to peanuts. All the major Western airlines operate a no-peanuts policy, although, as a helpful lady at American Airlines pointed out, they can't `mandate' people not to bring them on board. Not yet, maybe.

I'm not mad about peanuts, to tell you the truth. I mean, they're OK, but I don't obsess about them like I do about cigarettes or Kristin Scott Thomas. If I never eat another peanut, my quality of life will be diminished by an infinitesimally small amount. But it's this desperate and futile wish to avoid not merely a risk of death, but the risk of a risk of a risk, and the imposition of strictures on the rest of us as a result, that I object to.

There's a final irony. No one really knows why some people develop allergies to peanuts (or anything else). But, increasingly, it is believed that it might be something to do with our vastly increased obsession with hygiene; the immune system, deprived of real enemies, begins to attack `safe' products. In other words, our collective neurosis about disease may be causing the very thing that provokes such a neurotic reaction on the part of some (but not all) lobbyists.

Now they are developing a vaccine for those deemed to be at risk. Perhaps there will soon be a vaccine for those suffering from allergies to chocolate, shellfish, lactose, latex and a plethora of other substances which, presumably, have their own lobby groups campaigning for a total eradication. It's a shame they can't develop a vaccine to stop us dying in air crashes.

Rod Liddle is editor of the Today programme.