It's All About Cross Contamination

I think the hardest thing for people to understand about handling a peanut allergy is the idea of cross contamination. It's natural to think, "Hey, this is vanilla ice cream. Not peanut butter ice cream. What' the big deal? It's fine, right?" Not necessarily. Most ice cream manufacturers produce all their flavors on the same equipment. Thus there is the possibility that there are traces of allergens located in batches that aren't supposed to contain that allergen. The chance of this may be small, but for some allergy sufferers who are highly sensitive this could pose a problem. It is not a law that manufacturers need to disclose shared equipment on their labeling. They are only required to declare it when an allergen is purposely put into the recipe. For us, there are certain manufacturers who I've checked into more thoroughly and generally trust more than others. Brand names for example are safer than generics usually. In the case of ice cream we simply stick with the brand that Jack has eaten all his life and has been fine with.

Then there are all those products which have labels that have the following types of statements:

"May contain traces of peanuts"
"Manufactured in a facility that also processes peanuts"
"Manufactured on shared equipment with peanuts"

We strictly avoid these products. I liken this to asking someone, "If a product was labeled as 'manufactured in a facility that also uses cyanide', would you eat it? Would you allow your child to eat it?" I'm not normally a user of fear tactics, but for a peanut allergic child it really is the same thing. For some people that little bit of exposure poses enormous risk. Likewise, you can't just pick the peanuts out of the Chex Mix and deem it safe. You can't spread the jelly with the same knife you've just spread the peanut butter with even though you did wipe it clean.

Cross contamination is the hardest thing to explain to people.
Cross contamination issues are what make others think the peanut-allergic (and their parents) are paranoid. Obviously it's easy enough to avoid eating actual peanuts. That's why managing an allergy is really......all about cross contamination.

Here are some other links for information about cross contamination:
Cross-Contamination: What is Peanut-free?
Avoiding Allergy Cross-Contamination