Shell-shocked: as peanut allergies among students rise, college foodservices rethink training

Nation's Restaurant News, Feb 10, 2003 by Paul King

"It is the first time on their own for many of these students, making their own choices," McNitt explained. "Some of them don't want to call attention to their differences. They're asserting their independence."

And even when students are identified, the challenge of protecting them is compounded by the fact that on many campuses students aren't required to eat in the dining hall connected to their residence unit.

"We can deal with the problem only as long as the students eat in their own dining hall," Yale's Davidson noted.

Because that provision can't be assured, education has become a much more important component in the training of kitchen staffs.

"The last thing we want to do is ban all foods that have nuts," said Ben Hernandez, brand manager for Aramark's Campus Services division in the Southwest. "Our rule is educate, not eliminate."

Hernandez explained that campuses in his coverage area are required to post at each station signs identifying foods that may contain nut derivatives. In addition, when menus are planned, workers will identify recipes that contain nut products and communicate to all staff the importance of knowing what is in each item.

"This can be done through employee meetings, bulletins, newsletters, video, until they are so sick of hearing about it that they will know it like the back of their hand," Hernandez said.

But if peanut-containing foods aren't eliminated, they often must be segregated to protect the severely allergic.

"We have a student living on campus who loves our cookies," said Frank Bibbee, marketing manager for Aramark at Eastern Kentucky University, Richmond, Ky. "But her allergy is so severe that the peanutbutter cookies can't even touch other cookies. So we rearranged the baker's racks so that the peanut butter cookies sit on their own shelf with the Rice Krispies treats."

Even when all precautions have been taken, the chance for an allergic student to come in contact with a taboo item, such as peanuts, still exists. Harvard's McNitt presented a cautionary tale of how easily it can happen despite foodservice's best efforts to protect students.

"We had a student in summer school this past year who had an allergic reaction," she related. "This was a student who lived with us during the school year and had been identified as having a nut allergy. She knew what she could and couldn't eat. It took us a while to find out what had happened."

The culprit, it was discovered, was an apple-crisp dessert, one of the student's favorite foods and one whose recipe does not call for nuts. But a frugal cook inadvertently added some.

"We discovered that, on the same day, the kitchen made an apple crumb cake for a catered function," McNitt explained. "The crumble topping contained nuts only because it had been requested by the catering customer. There was crumble left over, and the cook added it to the apple crisp.

"It was such a small thing," she added. "Everybody was doing the right thing. The cooks added nuts to the crumble to please the client. The leftover crumble was added to the apple crisp so that it wouldn't go to waste."