Cafeteria eating with food allergies

[SPOAKmom]

Recently I have been asking the question of how can you eat in the cafeteria safely?  I was wondering if anyone has a food allergic child that orders hot lunch?  Here are the questions I have if so;

-how old is the child?
-is the cafeteria staff trained and how are they aware of the food allergic child?
-are the ingredients posted for the lunches (online or printable guide) to help identify which lunches are safe?

Would love to hear from those who feel safe ordering at school.

[SPOAKmom]

Thanks for the feedback.  I personally will not let my son eat in the cafeteria as I am aware of many loopholes and we have ANAPHALAXIS, but some food allergic parents do let the children eat in our cafeteria and I was wondering how other district cafeterias help to make the allergic child feel safe and what steps these parents take in order to feel safe ordering.

One of the biggest obstacles I would face even if I did let my child eat from the cafe would be that the ingredients are not listed anywhere and I would have to go up to the school and check the boxes each time.  Also, they do substitute products last minute without advance notice.

[ChitChatNine]

We made that mistake in middle school.  My daughter figured since she was "only" allergic to plums, latex and nothing would happen (she wasn't allergic to nuts at the time).

One day she had a bad reaction which almost needed the Epi Pen (75mgs of Benadryl and bright red ears and red rash on body but responded to the Benadryl).

She ate a bagel .. and the fresh plums were in a basket right next to the bagel --- seems that probably a plum got knicked and the juice went onto the bagel she ate.  Same reaction (actually worse) happened from a plum and she's Rast Class II positive to plums w/reactions.

The cafeteria agreed to move the plums from the bagels moving forward and they used vinyl gloves.

The other reaction was an apple crisp .  . . turns out that probably the apple portion had plum juice in the container as a juice .. another reaction.  I was told that oftentimes institutional restaraunt type of packaging sometimes uses plum juice vs. apple juice as a juice in their packaging.

Those were our experiences.   It's a chance/risk taken by an allergic child without a doubt is my feeling from our own experiences and what she was allergic to, we "thought" could be controlled.

C~