Over the last couple of weeks, as the conferences of our ruinously divided political parties have played out against the Brexit backdrop and the former foreign secretary and top Europhobe actor, Boris Johnson, has done his best to grab centre stage, there have been other stories to provide far from light relief but a change of focus. In particular, because we all love to bash success given an excuse, the well-known chain of sandwich and coffee shops, Pret a Manger, has been under an undesired spotlight after the inquest into the death two years ago on an aeroplane of a highly allergic 15-year-old girl after she had eaten a Pret sandwich bought at the airport. The coroner found the company’s food and allergen labelling to be inadequate, although Pret has always had signs suggesting anyone uncertain of ingredients in their products should ask staff. Since then, a second death from allergic reaction, of an adult dental nurse, from my part of the world in Wiltshire, has also been laid at Pret’s door.
Sad, difficult and complicated cases and, for the purposes of this piece, I am most interested in that of the child and the issue and origin of childhood allergies which, I think I am right in saying, may not always continue — or remain as strong — into adulthood. I have read that there is concern about a rise in allergies among children in India just as there is here, and I notice in some reports attention drawn in particular to returning non-resident Indian children and the differences in percentages between poorer rural children and middle-class children exposed to urban pollution, often extreme, and to what may be generalized as Western diet and lifestyle. To generalize further over a point most of us understand, rural children are less likely to suffer from allergies in India just as they are in Western Europe, most obviously in countries with a continuing real rural/urban divide like Poland rather than somewhere like the United Kingdom where boundaries are more blurred. The waters of such statistics are muddied by issues of poverty and deprivation but these appear to impact more on long-term life and health expectations than childhood allergy figures.
The so-called ‘hygiene hypothesis’ of recent decades is presently being dismissed as dangerous by medical scientists faced with growing antibiotic resistance worldwide and the spread of related resistant strains of previously treatable diseases. The hypothesis which makes complete sense to most of the mothers I know suggests that if your child has spent time in a ‘dirty’ environment, on the floor, on the ground out of doors, in close proximity to animals and eating foods that have not been sprayed, injected or modified in some way, scrubbed and sterilized or had every vitamin processed or frozen out of them, who cares by the way if an insect does go down with that lettuce leaf or the sandwich fell on the floor before it was eaten? — it will have stronger natural immunity to just about everything. In addition, if that child has tried every sort and kind of food from a young age, it is less likely to become allergic to one.
Sadly, the concern over antibiotic resistance may indeed make constant hygiene more imperative, but the biological sprays and scrubs that mean hygiene today as opposed to the basic soap, water and common sense of the past, seem likely to produce their own bad results in lowered immunities and the numbers of those suffering allergies. It is hard to imagine that any amount of ‘clean eating’ or other individual food fads and fashions will solve that conundrum but then mine is a very old-fashioned view of a problem that will probably be solved with a human diet of allergen free food grown in a test tube. I recently noticed how much very basic and very fresh food all over Central Asia tasted like the food of my rural childhood as opposed to food here now and I don’t much look forward to the loss of more of that taste of reality, a carrot out of the garden, milk and cream from a local farm and meat, don’t scream please vegetarians, that had a proper depth of flavour. Lucky me to have grown up on all that.
To return to the question of Pret a Manger and the child who died so tragically. I have questions of my own that I have tested on other mothers both older and much younger than I. The girl concerned was known to be allergic to a range of foods; it is believed to have been the sesame baked into the bread of her sandwich that caused such an extreme reaction that the two adrenaline autoinjectors known as Epipens that she carried with her at all times failed to work. Enquiries are being made into the necessary strength of these pens but that is yet another matter. What I want to know and have discussed with others is how, why on earth, any parent would allow their child to eat anything from any fast food chain in a crowded airport where someone might only have touched the packaging of a food item with hands tainted by nuts or dairy produce or whatever the relevant allergen, let alone what might or might not somehow be inside a sandwich made on premises be they industrial or private restaurant where other allergens are in use? That is a very long question but I mean, would you?
Most people I have canvassed say the children they know who are severely allergic carry their own food, made at home, in the case of a nut allergy in a house where no nuts ever pass the door, and sealed in plastic boxes. Nut allergies being so dangerous and so prevalent, schools here are increasingly ‘nut-free zones’ and, difficult though it must be, parents are generally incredibly careful to police the daily environments of their own and other severely affected children they know. Of course, they are, children’s lives may depend upon it. Now the child in question was 15 years old and from all accounts very adult but in that case she also must have known there was always a risk in buying and eating food that had been made outside her own home. Her father was with her, didn’t he think it was a bit like playing Russian roulette?
The chief executive of Pret a Manger has apologized to the family: too little, too late, they have said and the company is revising its food labelling to include precise lists of ingredients on every package. I’m sorry too for the family concerned and the poor woman from Wiltshire. All the same, would you risk it?