Chapter One

Foreword

I first learned about food allergies when I was six years old. The family that lived across the street had four children; the youngest was nicknamed “Eggs.” I didn’t know who first called him Eggs; all I knew was that he couldn’t eat eggs and that he was constantly itching his arms and legs, which were covered with thick, scary-looking skin that scabbed. I didn’t know anybody else like that; in fact, I was actually more familiar with kids with polio. It wasn’t until I was a third-year medical student working in pediatric dermatology that I saw a second person with food allergies. Three years later, when I worked in the Bronx during my residency, I saw more cases of food allergy, mostly in children rushed to the emergency room with hives or wheezing after eating a food they were allergic to.

After moving to California, I seemed to see such cases even more frequently. During my first week of training in allergy and immunology at UCLA, I was asked to consult on an eleven-month-old boy from Arizona who weighed only ten pounds. He looked malnourished and had a rash around his mouth. My attending professor suspected child neglect or abuse, and we all expected him to thrive within days of being in the hospital. Time passed and he remained ill, with vomiting and diarrhea to boot. I checked up on him while a nurse was feeding him a cow’s milk—based formula from a sippy cup. He knocked the cup over and the formula poured onto his legs. Red blisters formed where the milk had spilled. At this point it became clear that he was allergic to the very milk with which we were trying to nourish him back to health. We stopped all forms