In North America, peanut allergies are a huge thing and every school is a peanut free zone. Teachers are allowed to eat it in the staff room but if a student is caught with peanut (or general nut) products in the class they will be isolated and sent down to the office to eat their lunch. This often comes with some shaming/admonishment from staff and sometimes other students.
In high school it’s more liberal. Elementary schools (up to grade 8 or 14 years old) are an absolute no-no.
Is this common place in your country?
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Since in Sweden lunches are free, we don’t bring food to school, nothing more then fruits. But in my kid school is nut free due to being on the countryside and we have 2 kids who allergic to peanuts which is aggravated by birch pollen.
It is non-existent. If there is something that can kill you – it is your problems to avoid it. Honestly that allergies stuff is very subtle/private here. Most of the time allergics never bother people around about their conditions.
Tho packages of almost all products consist some form of warning: “this product might contains traces of nuts/packaged in the building where we working with nuts”
In Germany, I know that my neighbors opted to sent their kid with many allergies to a private school because the public one could not provide allergen-free lunch (there was an option for him to bring his own lunch, but it was complicated as well). I don’t really know the details.
In Turkey, I have no idea, it certainly wasn’t a thing in my time. Now many more kids go to private schools, I don’t know if they offer allergen-free options. There is definitely not a thing as peanut-free zone anywhere.
I don’t think anybody tries to make it a whole-school policy, it’s up to the parents and child to deal with it if they have some allergy. Definitelly no ban on nuts or such and also peanut butter is not really used much here. So it’s only about what snacks kids bring and that’s usually bread or rohlík with some cheese or something or some cookies which nobody controls, it’s up to you, and then lunch is just a normal dish from school kitchen.
At least when I went to school 10 years ago this was absolutely no topic.
Non existant. I’m sure there are allergies but I’ve never met anyone with any. Seems to be way less common so it’s a non issue.
I’ve literally never heard about ban on essentially anything in Czech schools. Both with food and other items. We rely on some basic inteligence. When I was still at “high school” one of my friends had some airsoft gun club or something like that right after school so he had to take the gun with him and no one saw it as any problem (and it never was and hopefully never will be). So no, we don’t have a ban on peanuts.
allergens are specified on the menu, school lunches included.
That was just never a topic at all at any of the schools I went to. No matter what age. In fact the school kiosk sold stuff with nuts in it like pastries filled with nuts or snicker and on multiple occasions our teachers brought nuts or cakes with nuts in them for us (like for the classroom Christmas party). I have a nut allergy and I don’t think I or my parents ever even told anyone at school officially. I just didn’t eat these things. But also my allergy is fairly mild, idk what would happen if someone had a deadly nut allergy.
Never heard of any ban on any type of food at my school. If someone was allergic to anything it was their job to avoid it.
When did this start in the US? In the late ’90s and 2000s when I was in school, peanut butter and jelly was what you were given if you forgot your lunch money and we sold candy including Snickers and Reese’s in the cafeteria after school to raise money for our study abroad programme.
We don’t even have lunchtime in school, we just eat snacks during the breaks and no, we don’t have any rules about allergies
Never heard of something like that. Is the kind of dangerous peanut allergy where people can die just from inhaling allergens from peanuts someone eats in their presence really that prevalent in the US? Otherwise I don’t see the point of making every school a peanut free zone by default. Especially if it means shaming and ostracizing healthy kids.
There was a staff member in my son’s kindergarden who had a nut allergy so parents were asked to tell her whenever a shared food (like a birthday cake) contains nuts. But that was pretty much it.
There wasn’t any norms in my time and I doubt if anything has come up since. School lunches are free, there probably were rules to discourage bringing anything eatable (snacks, candies) to schoo or at least it didn’t really happen. Obviously school has to provide allergen free lunches for those who need them, but nuts are not really used in Finnish cuisine anyway.
I’ve never heard of this here, certainly not in my daughter’s schools or those of her friends.
Sometimes particular classes (primary school) might be nut free if a member of the class has a bad allergy
None. Here in Croatia there are no lunches because kids are at school for 4-6 hours, they have snack-break for 15 minutes so they bring food with them or buy something in closest bakery and most students go outside to eat (lots of schools, especially elementary don’t allow eating in classroom).
Pretty much nonexistent at least when I was studying
No procedures. In the rare circumstances that allergic kids are so severely allergic, that breathing peanut butter was a problem, then only in that class would there be some restrictions specific to the problem.
It’s a non-issue because peanuts or other nuts are not a common thing to eat for lunch, anyway. Peanut butter is squarely associated with Americans and the Dutch and is not popular at all in Belgium.
A food allergy in general affects about 3% of the population and an extreme food allergy only affects 0.1% percent of the population.
So, at first I maybe should point out that where I grew up it was the norm to eat lunch at home with your family, so our school did not have a canteen. But even if you brought food to school there was no guideline for that. But parents were made aware by the school that one of the kids got a peanut allergy and therefore occassional birthday cakes and such things should not contain them.
There are no regulations for this. Peanut allergy is really rare here.
There was nothing in place in my schools in France.
There are also [studies](https://www.businessinsider.com/america-high-rate-peanut-allergies-compared-countries-2018-10?amp) showing that avoiding all nuts actually make the population more likely to be allergic, so it could be a deliberate policy to expose kids to allergen quite young.
It’s more of a “you problem” over here. It’s the school’s responsibility to make sure nobody forces your child to eat them, but it’s 100% you’re responsibility to make sure your child understands the consequences of eating them.
If your child has some mental issues, then the teachers have a bit more responsibility, but not to the extreme of the US.