Food allergies are soaring, and hundreds of moms are fed up with ‘dangerous’ jokes about them

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Following a Saturday Night Live skit that mocked people with peanut allergies, suggesting they should just “take a Benadryl” and shut up, moms of the severely allergic have been speaking out on social media. Such jokes, they say, gaslight people with allergies and contribute to bullying that can turn deadly.

“Satire is so powerful—it can highlight social flaws. But to us, there’s blind spot about food allergies to begin with, and this type of joke just magnifies it,” Lianne Mandelbaum, mom to a 19-year-old son with a deadly peanut allergy and founder of the advocacy website the No Nut Traveler, tells Fortune.

Today, 33 million Americans are living with food allergies—representing one in 10 adults and one in 13 children, according to Food Allergy Research & Education. Of those adults, 51% have experienced a severe reaction, while 42% of the children have, with emergency room visits for such reactions more than doubling between 2008 and 2016. And its prevalence among children has been on the rise for decades—up by 100 percent between 1997 and 2021.

It’s why SNL’s Instagram post of the skit—featuring recurring character Miss Eggy on a tirade about airplane food, including a complaint about how peanuts are no longer served—has racked up over 2,200 comments, a great many of them sharing personal experiences with allergies and calling out the joke as “unbelievable,” “ridiculous,” “ignorant,” and “dangerous,” particularly in light of it being National Asthma and Allergy Awareness Month.

NBC did not respond to a request for comment.

Mandelbaum’s posts on the joke, featuring a photo of her son holding a sign that says, “My food allergy is NOT funny,” have racked up more than 300 comments across her social channels. In it, she writes, “I’ve seen my child’s life almost slip away after a peanut exposure. I’ve given epinephrine while my hands shook. I’ve begged strangers for compassion in places where help was far away. This isn’t a joke. It never was.”

As one commenter on the SNL post points out, “Allergies are not a choice, and the fear when you’re at 35000 ft on a plane when you have an allergy is real! The more that anaphylaxis is made out to be humorous the more dangerous it is …More compassion is needed!”

What is a severe allergic reaction?

A serious allergic reaction, called anaphylaxis, is a serious, rapid-onset reaction to an allergen—be it food, medicine, latex, insect bites, or something else—in which your body’s immune system sees something as harmful and reacts, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.

Symptoms may include itching, swelling of the lips or throat, shortness of breath, dizziness, or stomach pain, and can lead to death if not treated promptly with an injection of epinephrine (typically through an Epi-Pen). Further treatment may also be necessary.

Taking an antihistamine like Benadryl, as Miss Eggy suggested in her skit, is not considered a first-line treatment for anaphylaxis, and the idea that Benadryl will stop anaphylaxis is a myth, according to the Allergy & Asthma Network.

In fact, the first thought Mandelbaum had upon hearing the joke was about a 13-year-old girl who died of a peanut allergy reaction back in 2013; she was given Benadryl first, and then epinephrine, but it was too late. After the SNL skit aired, Mandelbaum heard from the girl’s mother, who told her, “I can’t believe that myth is still being perpetuated 12 years after she died.”

Can’t people with allergies take a joke?

At least one commenter on Mandelbaum’s Facebook post—a mom of kids with serious allergies—could take the joke, and felt it was important to be able to laugh at the situation.

Comedian Judy Gold, author of the book Yes, I Can Say That: When They Come for the Comedians, We Are All in Trouble, agrees. “We need to laugh now more than ever,” she tells Fortune. “No comedian, when writing their jokes, is thinking about your personal issues or childhood traumas, they’re trying to get a laugh. Do you really think she is saying, ‘I want kids to be hurt or die from an allergic reaction’? No. It is a parody. She is doing a character. Ego Nwodim [the actress] has a degree in biology.”

But, notes Mandelbaum, “This isn’t about being simply offended. It’s about speaking up when repeated jokes normalize ignorance that can cost lives. If your lived experience with allergies is different, that’s valid—but it doesn’t negate the very real danger others face every day.”

Such jokes, she says, lead to taunting and bullying in the real world, whether on airplanes or at workplaces or schools—as was the case in Texas last year, when a teen football player’s locker was stuffed with peanuts by his teammates, who knew he was deathly allergic (the mom has sued the school district). Years before, teens were charged with purposely exposing a girl to pineapple, knowing she had a severe allergy to the fruit.

One in three kids with food allergies say they’ve faced bullying because of it, according to a recent study, including by having an allergen waved in their face, thrown at them, or intentionally put in their food.

For airline travelers, even adults, bullying is a constant threat, too. That’s according to a 2024 study out of Northwestern’s Center for Food Allergy and Asthma Research and published in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, which found that 98% of allergic fliers have anxiety on planes because they don’t know how they will be treated. And 31% chose to stay silent about their allergy because of fears it would be ill-received.

Jokes like SNL’s, maintains Mandelbaum, do not help.

“People have been incredibly kind to my son and looked after him, but other people are just not as fortunate,” she says, “and we have to stick up for everybody… This is a real-life disability.”