I found this whimsical peanut shower by Lou Beach in the New York Times. Yes, that New York Times.

While visiting my homeland of Ohio this week, I learned that my youngest niece has developed an allergy to chestnuts. Chestnuts! Victorian open-fire roasting events and turkey-stuffing festivals will never be the same for her, that’s for sure. And then just a couple days later, my friend Dave was laid low (very low, sadly) in the middle of a wedding celebration due to his unfortunate exposure to pine nuts. It seems that everybody has an allergy to something these days, which begs the question—what exactly is going on here?

To be sure, food allergies are not a new phenomenon. Sir Thomas More implies in one of his books that King Richard III knowingly used an allergic reaction to strawberries to accuse one of his lords of poisoning him, and subsequently demanded his head on a platter. Yeesh. In more recent history, Bruce Lee, the martial arts star who may or may not have suffered from a family curse, died from an allergic reaction to aspirin.

But if you think that allergies seem like more of a problem now than they were, say, when you were a kid, you’d be right. Reports of food allergies have definitely gone up, though determining exactly how much is a sticky problem, both because people tend to go to the doctor more for these sorts of things than they did a couple generations ago and because people confuse food allergies with food sensitivities. (An allergy is an immune system response to something; if dairy makes you gassy, you’re just sensitive to it, not allergic to it, you big crybaby. Guess I’ll stop saying I’m allergic to hops…)

Even accounting for these over-reporting and categorization errors, there’s still a lot of wacky food reactions going on out there of late, and no one is totally sure why. The frontrunner explanation is something called the “hygiene hypothesis,” which posits, basically, that we cleaned up too much and our immune systems got wimpy. People who live on farms, for example, who are around lots of kids and animals and other things that city people generally find smelly, have significantly fewer allergies. The “allergy epidemic” may also be related to overuse of antibiotics and less varied microbiomes. (Don’t even get me started on microbiomes. I’m dangerously close to bringing up fecal transplants here, something I do more than the average person.)

Of course, the people who came up with the hygiene hypothesis are probably the same doctors who told us a few years ago that you should not, under any circumstances, eat peanuts while you’re pregnant and should not feed a peanut to any child under three. Now they say that doing that probably increases your kid’s chances of developing peanut allergies. Thanks, guys.

Anyway, there has been some success in recent years with exposure therapy, increasing a person’s tolerance of an allergen to the point where it becomes less dangerous, at least, if not exactly benign. But you should only do this under a doctor’s supervision, obviously. For now, Dave, skip the actual pine nuts and just practice looking at this picture. Stare ‘em down. Show ‘em who’s boss. And then go make a nice walnut pesto.