Peanuts
 

Working on the theory that a randomly chosen topic can shake out all sorts of weird stories from dwellars, I decided to make a thread about peanuts. What strange facts, amusing anecdotes, or perilous encounters, can you share that relate in some way to peanuts?

Here's mine:
Many years ago I was hanging out with a friend, Jeremy, and, among other things, eating some M&Ms he had brought.
"I think these taste better than the regular M&Ms" he said, "They have peanut butter in them."
As a habitual prankster I sat up, looked worried, stopped eating, and demanded "do these have PEANUTS in them???"
He took the bait: "YES! WHY????"
"Good!" I replied, and popped another into my mouth. "I like peanuts."

He called me evil after that. :devil: He may have been right.

A day later we were with a mutual friend and Jeremy retold the story, and we had a good laugh.
Then he added "...and it really freaked me out because the earliest memory I have is of my younger brother being rushed madly to hospital with a severe peanut allergy..."

:eek:

The brother lived, I am very glad to report!

Lots of peanuts are grown locally around here. For years people, mostly men, would bring a sample of their "Hot boiled peanuts" to various work sites for people to sample. It is like a competition among the old guys to see who has the best hot boiled peanuts. We had never heard of such a thing until we moved from the North to the South. During the time of maturity you will see stands along the road selling Hot Boiled Peanuts. Some are very tastey, some are like mush, some are under cooked and difficult to eat. The best ones are infused with a hot sauce during cooking that makes them spicey. Tales from the South.

Oh it's not fair. I used to like peanuts. Especially peanut butter, or chocolate bars with peanuts in mmmm....and my dreams still occasionally include some peanut brittle....

Anyway. Nuff of that. Can't touch 'em.

The old classic: I was at a bar and I looked at the bartender very sadly. He asked what was wrong. I choked up a bit and said that the guy down the bar had peanuts, and I had none. I said I had peanuts envy.

I got my peanuts. Anyway, that is an oldie but a goodie.

there called goobers, aren't they?

My fave goober story is Brer Rabbit and the Goober patch...do you know Brer Rabbit in Oz, Zen?

Weird, I was thinking about Brer Rabbit and Brer Bear and Brer Fox the other day.

that is weird. Why were you thinking of them? Student recall them to you? ;)

I understand this feeling completely.

I don't know. I was driving home from work and the briar patch and the whole thing popped into my head. As is evidenced by many of my posts, it doesn't take much to trigger obscure pop culture references in my head. I was thinking about the whole tar baby thing. Weird.

whatever you do, don't throw him in that briar patch! Anything but that!

lol

Brer rabbit did make an appearance in my childhood.

He's probably been ecologically corrected to Brer bandicoot by now. "Oh please don't throw me into the endangered native grasses!"

Oh, never fear, he has been. I bought a Brer RAbbit book down in NOLA. All cleaned up, it was. Disappointing. The whole POINT is the vernacular.

You're gonna love my nuts
 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0cgQkT4ScQ

Wonder if they did this on purpose.

An interesting bit about tar baby origins, from wiki.

I grew a peanut bush as part of a school project once.

It did not produce any viable peanuts, although it did try.

Does anyone else here refer to "male" vs. "female" M&Ms?

Green m & m's make you horny, that's all I know. ;)

Peanut allergy?

Mrs. Dar does. Pretty much every time the topic of M&Ms comes up.

When I was growing up in the mid 70s my friend's dad owned a beer distributor, which ran out of the local mall.

What? Yes, this was the 70s, and in the forever-changing face of retail, "shopping centers" were transforming into "malls" by adding roofs. And anything might be sold there. This store offered cases of beer to the external-facing side, and to the internal, soft pretzels and bags of roasted peanuts.

The cool part about this was that the peanuts were roasted right there in the store, something you just don't see nowadays. A red-hot roaster sat spinning in the back room. You could buy bags that were still hot, having just been roasted.

My friend was 13 and it was sometimes his job to sell the peanuts and pretzels. His dad was an evil racist, and was teaching his sons to be evil and racist. Therefore, my friend explained to me that the niggers always wanted the well-done peanuts which had been roasted to a darker color.

I had been carefully raised to not be evil or racist, but I always accepted his talk with no objections. That's the nature of power when you're 13.

But sure enough, when I hung out there, I saw that his observation was true. Black people were generally the people buying the well-done peanuts.

Since then, I have preferred the darker peanuts.

I'm going to make a general observation about the black folks who visited my IHOP when I was waiting tables at that venerable establishment: when they said they wanted their eggs "scrambled," they meant drippy and not really cooked.

The greatest peanut-related incident in Cellar history starts on page 5, post #73 of this thread. . . . ƒuck peanut guy

flint is crazy.

Ah yes, the Great Disabled Peanut Debate of 2007.

Princess of the Ryche's nickname since birth has been Peanut. Will she become as bitter as RKZ? Or allergic to herself? Or not be able to eat burgers or hot dogs?

We could start a pool!

I predict she'll become allergic to wheelchair ramps and refuse many offers of marriage from hot dog vendors. One of those vendors will be in a wheelchair. One of them will have the other half of the amulet she's worn around her neck since her mysterious birth.

oooh - tell me the hot dog vendor won't be selling Devil Dogs in Florida.....

I thought about that, asked the Universe, and She said, "NO, it shall never be a Floridian," so; that's all settled. I was worried, too. He's been known to kill wives who leave him...

;)

you know I was talking about Radar, right? (See hot dog stuff thread.)

Yup. Peanuts are one of those foods that make my lips go numb and my throat start to tighten up a little. I've never had a full blown anaphylactic response to peanuts (though I have to other foodstuffs), but I figure it's probably not worth taking the chance, since I do react a little.

Heehee, so was she. I forget what thread that was.

guess I missed the wife killing thread........whew!

It was a beaut! :lol:

It's wise to be cautious with something like that.

I'm sorry to hear that, Dana.

A friend of mine with nut allergies didn't know she had consumed something with nuts in it -until her forehead swoll up - she looked like a gorilla. Luckily no anyphalactic reaction, so we all had a really good laugh and took lots of pictures.

Have you seen the movie Hitch?

I really like Snoopy.

The thing with Charlie Brown and Lucy and the Football makes me sad no matter how many times I see it.

Haven't seen Hitch, Dar. Guessing thre's a similar scene?
And gotta love ya Wolf. Schroeder was my favorite. Where else can a 6 year old boy be referred to as a "pianist?"

Hitch is one of the better recent rom-coms. And there is an allergy/expanding face scene.

I had a Schroeder sweatshirt when I was a kid (I played piano). On the back it said, "To those of us with real understanding, music is the only pure art form."

Oh I hate when that happens. I've had similar reactions to other things. Can be quite amusing. But walking around like a beacon isn't much fun.

I had a work colleague (and psycho-friend, but that's another, very long story) who had to carry round ready loaded adrenaline shots. She once went into shock because her boyfriend had eaten something with chilli powder in it and kissed her about an hour after. Full on ambulance and intervention job.

I've only ever had two really serious (potentially lethal) allergic responses that I can remember. Though I believe I may have had one as a toddler as well. The last one was, I dunno, fifteen years ago, or something like that....actually, no, more like twenty. So, I figure I'm not such a risk these days. One of the full on responses was to egg when I was a kid. I now eat eggs as a regular part of my diet and don't react.

Remember that Canadian girl who was supposed to have died from a peanut butter kiss? It turns out that's not what she died from.

I guess beware of asthma if you have other allergies.

I think it was the thread about the woman with 38KKK breasts. It drifted some.


Dana, do you carry an epi-pen?

that explains a lot. they must put them in many different foods...

If peanut cake meal is used in the culture medium during vaccine manufacture... is it possible that a few stray peanut proteins could remain in the finished product? If so, could those proteins, along with the adjuvents in the vaccine, designed specifically to illicit an immune response, cause or contribute to a peanut allergy?

I had no idea about the peanut cake meal thing, but I've been blaming all these new-fangled vaccinations for things we used to just get as children for the rise in peanut allergies ... think back ... if you're over or around 40 ... while you were growing up did you know anybody with a peanut allergy?

I don't remember knowing anyone with asthma, either ... well, except for that one weird fat kid that wheezed all the time and had a note to skip gym. Actually, I made that up. He wasn't overweight.

I had asthma

(I got better)

It was no party. Made the ER a couple times.

Rather than the vaccination theory, I favour the hygiene hypothesis. Our immune systems are (roughly) bored because of the super-sterile environment we raise kids in, and will attack anything that looks suspicious - pollen, dust mites (i.e. asthma), peanuts, etc etc.

Did you know that the words vaccination and buckeroo are related?

One theory also put forward is that people with allergies (of any kind) tend to have baby eczema of some kind, which means they usually end up with cremes being applied. Many of the steroid based cremes apparently have/had peanut in them (like with the vaccines). It's thought this might have sparked off sensitivity in youngsters.

On the peanut allergy incidence rates: one problem with ascertaining any rise in cases is that prior to it becoming something everybody knows about, peanut allergy deaths may well have been misdiagnosed as something else.

I had severe allergies, eczema and asthma from a very young age and I was very much not raised in a sterile envrionment. I was raised in a normal 70s house with cats and dogs and dust and dirt and all the rest of it. Didn't even have a duvet til I was 10, we had blankets and sheets. I and my friends played in parks and derelict factories, the old dentist surgery (amazing what you can find in a dentists bins!) and so on. My immune system was not bored. It had plenty to do with all the normal toxins and dangers of the world and a tidy, but not over clean home.

I only lived in a 'sterile' environment between ages 12-14, and that was as a response to severe allergies rather than the cause of them.

No I didn't, how?

The hygiene angle makes sense in theory, but in reality not so much (I don't think people are nearly as clean as they think they are, think kitchen sponges etc. - tons of germs)... Look at college dorms and day care centers. They should be the healthiest places around, plenty of germs and over crowding to keep the immune systems of those within entertained - instead they are generally the source of the outbreaks of measles and meningitis etc. that you see on the news.

'cept that the immune system is largely trained in the first year of life. By the time they make it to college (or daycare, in a large number of cases) the immune system is as trained as it's going to get.

Proponents of the "leaky gut" theory (which I subscribe to at least insofar as it can lead to autistic behaviors) say that it is the fact that these foods are getting out into our bloodstream where they shouldn't be which causes the unnatural immune response. A majority of autistic kids also have eczema, allergies, asthma, and/or chronic ear infections, and when they go on the diet all of these symptoms miraculously clear up as well--even if they were allergic to say, eggs, which they can still eat on the diet.

Do they have any theories on what has made more recent generations guts leakier than the previous ones?

All infants have an "open gut" (it benefits their immune system), which is the reason for the recommendation to avoid giving them anything but breast milk for the first 6 months, and common allergens for at least a year.

Food allergies can cause skin reactions, and can also cause skin reactions in the intestines. The damage from that can cause the leaky gut.

I couldn't tolerate breast milk. Talk about making the family nuts. :haha:

That used to be a pretty common diagnosis Bruce but it's very unlikely that it was actually true, although it's likely that you couldn't tolerate something in your mothers breast milk.

My daughter could not tolerate cow milk proteins and projectile vomited all over the place for the first few weeks of her life until I got my system clear of dairy. Even non-dairy creamer in my coffee would set her off, so I had to be really careful. I didn't give her anything but breast milk until she was almost 11 mos because I was afraid she would have bad reactions to other things, but she's healthy as a horse now... never been to the doctor because of illness, never had an antibiotic or anything.

What you are experiencing is known as a sensitization reaction. You are having pre-anaphylactic or anaphylactoid signs and symptoms. The bad thing is that you will not know when the big one will come. But your body responds a little stronger after each exposure. You may want to consider obtaining an epinepherine auto-injector from the local hospital of pharmacy to keep in your purse. It may save your life some day. Just a thought.

I agree. I am not sure that we can blame vaccinations for much of this. I think it has more to do with the food manufacturing end and how that may have changed as well as how our diets have moved to things that are more fast food and processed foods.

Merc, can you explain in further detail why you look to fast/processed food as the peanut allergy cause?

I think one argument for the vaccine or baby lotion theories, as opposed to diet, is that the age of diagnosis/onset is lowering as the prevalence is rising. This suggests that first exposure is happening earlier - possibly even earlier than peanuts *should be* in an infant/toddler's diet at all. I can't imagine that people are becoming less careful about this with as much press as it's gotten... but who knows.


Incidentally, we just got home from my 9 y/o nephew's birthday party. Of 10 kids, 2 of them (unrelated) have severe peanut allergies.

I think it generally because peanuts have found their way into many processed foods that are fed to children at an early age.

FDA Inspections Find Undisclosed Allergens In Processed Food


http://www.cspinet.org/new/allergens.html

http://kidshealth.org/parent/nutriti...t_allergy.html

http://www.beyondapeanut.com/Peanut_...formation.html

In the end I think the jury is still out on the why from a professional standpoint.

http://www.faiusa.org/?page=peanuts

Unusal case report of an infant with a peanut allergy:

http://www.breatherville.org/2009/02...llergy-puzzle/

from the above link:
Another possible source of exposure:

http://www.babygooroo.com/index.php/...-the-big-deal/

So as we can see the possibility of early exposure to the antigen can occur through a number of potential sources. But again, I don't think anyone can be sure. One thing is clear is that the statistics of incidence of the allergy have grown exponentially.

Thanks Merc, interesting stuff. I am/was under the impression that food labeling had been improving, but not for any good particular reason... just seems that there's more of it and it's more thorough than when I was a kid. If it's not accurate though...
I wonder if there was a change in food labeling or enforcement in the 90's that's relevant. Definitely worth looking into, and it's pretty clear that the FDA is friggin joke.

I would like to read more about the severe reaction in the 3 mo old infant, if you come across anything.