Editor of Allergic Living says Chatelaine article about peanuts was "insensitive" and wrong

Gwen Smith, the editor of Allergic Living magazine (right, below), has taken serious umbrage at an article in the December issue of Chatelaine that questions the ban on peanut products in schools.

In an opinion post on cbc.ca, she calls the article by freelancer writer Patricia Pearson -- featured on the cover as "The Making of the Peanut Allergy Myth" -- "insensitive", "cynical" and "snide".

In the telling, the writer skewers the hard-won accommodations in schools to protect food-allergic children, confuses facts and statistics, and never pauses to speak to a principal or a parent of a child who has experienced anaphylaxis, the most serious form of allergic reaction.

She goes on...

But what is disturbing is not just Ms. Pearson's insensitivity to a diagnosed medical condition.

It is that this article ran in Chatelaine, the warm, sensitive, loyal best friend to Canadian women and their children....

In Canada, getting taken down in Chatelaine is as close as it gets to being kneecapped by Oprah.

She notes that Chatelaine editor Maryam Sanati not only backs up her freelance writer, by "perpetuating her writer's misinformed assumption that the dramatic rise in food allergies is a myth."

Smith was at one time editor-in-chief of Elm Street magazine and assistant managing editor at Maclean's and the Globe and Mail, and started Allergic Living in part because of her own allergies to soy, shellfish and peanuts. The current issue of Allergic Living features on its cover stories about monitoring allergic children in schools and dairy allergies in schools.