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The Allergy Prison (continued...) By SUSAN DOMINUS
Like the parents I had been interviewing, I suddenly wanted desperately to err on the safe side, and I, at that moment, was not on it. I ducked into a nearby restaurant's bathroom and washed my hands, rubbing suds into the crevices around my nails, checking to see if I had any traces on my sleeves. I decided ultimately to go ahead with the interview. When I arrived, Amanda was wearing a white T-shirt with the words "Sweetie Pie" on it in pink, swooping curlicues. "I don't like her," she proclaimed, pointing at me as her mother introduced us. During the 45 minutes I was there, I felt like an infiltrator. I was relieved when I left, as I suspect they would have been had they known.
There is no record of anyone ever dying of a food allergy linked to "natural flavors," but more specific labeling certainly would be a safe and inexpensive precaution. Preventing with total certainty the possibility of cross-contamination would be a trickier proposition. If every manufacturer listed every ingredient that might ever have brushed across a production line, ingredients lists would no longer serve as a useful filter. Everything would be off limits. But pure solutions, like constructing separate production facilities for products that contain allergens, would break the bank for most manufacturers. "There's no one way to legislate this or enforce it," says Susan Hefle, the University of Nebraska researcher. "Every manufacturing plant's concerns are different. And you can never guarantee absolutely certainty. How do you account for human error?" If plants devote massive resources to preventing the highly unusual prospect of a cross-contamination fatality, might other food-safety concerns fall by the wayside? The effort to scour and scrub any contaminants in the environment is particularly incongruous, given that hypercleanliness may have caused the spike in allergies in the first place. Human biology, it seems clear, will forever unleash unforeseeable responses to whatever controls we try to exert. The systems are too complex to imagine their innumerable pathways, the intracellular conversations too subtle to overhear in their entirety. Rook, the proponent of the hygiene theory, is nonetheless confident of a remedy. "If we want to put these microbes back into the environment, we can do it via oral vaccine," he says. In other words, reintroduce the uncontrollable, the dirt, the bacteria we exert so much energy expunging -- only do so in a highly controlled fashion. Clinical trials for just such a vaccine are already underway in England. But Sampson is more interested in cutting the allergic reaction off than in figuring out why it is occurring in the first place, and he is close to succeeding. He is currently in Phase 2 clinical trials for a drug called anti-IgE, which essentially blocks the allergy-triggering molecules from binding with the appropriate receptor. As for the various theories about why allergies have increased, Sampson is familiar with them all, but he doesn't subscribe to any one in particular. If he doesn't embrace the chaos, he accepts it. "People jump on theories left and right," he says, "but it's unlikely that the cause for a systemic change like this will turn out to be only one thing. It's got to be a variety of factors." He shrugs and throw his hands up, as if reaching for an answer among the invisible, spinning particles of space. "It's all up in the air."
Eric's allergies are now less severe than they once were, allowing him to expand the boundaries of his life, if only slightly. He can join his friends at dinner at a restaurant or sit with them in a cafeteria like Juilliard's, although he still can't eat there. Having lost his allergy to corn (and therefore corn syrup), he can finally indulge in some kinds of candy but never chocolate, which usually contains milk. He hasn't forgotten about his allergies -- thinking about avoiding certain foods "is like breathing," he says. But he doesn't seem anxious, and he doesn't seem to consider himself particularly deprived. If anything, an obsession with food safety has relieved him of a much more common preoccupation: an obsession with food itself, its reassurances, its reward. "I need food to get energy, so I eat it," he says. "I don't really care about food. If I can't eat a bag of potato chips, I'm not going to lose sleep over it." At this point in his life Eric seems faintly bored by the subject of his allergies; he's much more interested in talking about an upcoming all-state competition and his favorite instrument, the trumpet. As he describes playing it, he could as easily be mistaken for someone talking about eating a craved food. "The way it feels on your lips, on your tongue -- it's an emotion," he says. "Your whole body is involved. It feels happy. It feels exhilarating." The key difference, of course, is that when Eric is playing the trumpet, he's in control. When his lips are buzzing the right way and his tongue is separating out the correct notes, it's a thrill, he tells me, the resulting pure, clear tone one of life's few sure things. That's what he loves about music: the delivery it makes on a promise. Eric has internalized his parents' desire for fail-safe certainty. Fortunately for him, where he looks for certainty, he might actually find it. Susan Dominus is the editor of Nerve, a magazine about sex and culture. Page | ||
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uch of the policy driven by food allergies -- the precautions that schools are required to take, the scrutiny to which manufacturers are now subjecting themselves -- has been based on the somewhat quixotic goal of exerting total control over a given environment. The objective is to break down the components found in a shipment of grain or on a cafeteria tray and whisk away into the ether the stray crumbs, or even the imperceptible molecules, of a food found where they're not expected. A consortium of nine state attorneys general has petitioned the F.D.A. to issue new regulations that would require more precautions from manufacturers to prevent cross-contamination; despite the industry's voluntary accommodations, Congresswoman Nita Lowey intends to move forward with legislation that would require specific listing of "natural flavors" on packaging. 
t is hard to imagine how children who grow up burdened by the constant fear of poison -- fear that may only be compounded by their parents' concern -- ever make their way in the world. Would Dean Palin's daughter, Amanda, inherit her father's anxieties along with his malady? Would Maia Pillot ever eat calmly, having thoroughly outgrown her terror the way some kids do their allergies, as if by magic? I get one answer when I finally meet Eric Nathan, now 17 and an accomplished young musician, in the cafeteria of Juilliard School in New York. Eric is tall, like his father, Carl, but looser-limbed, more placid, with the slightly spacy look of a kid who is somewhere else, in a book or a sonata. It's as if his parents have done enough worrying for him over the years to free him up for other concerns.