Food allergies are bigger ills for minority, poor kids

As Emily Brown stood in a food pantry looking at her options, she felt alone. Up to that point, she had never struggled financially. But there she was, desperate to find safe food for her young daughter with food allergies. What she found was a jar of salsa and some potatoes.

“That was all that was available,” said Brown, who lives in Kansas City, Kan. “It was just a desperate place.”

When she became a parent, Brown left her job for lack of child care that would accommodate her daughter’s allergies to peanuts, tree nuts, milk, eggs, wheat and soy. When she and her husband then turned to a federal food assistance program, they found few allowable allergy substitutions. The closest allergy support group she could find was an hour away. She was almost always the only Black parent, and the only poor parent, there.

Brown called national food allergy advocacy organizations to ask for guidance to help poor families find safe food and medical resources, but she said she was told that wasn’t their focus. Support groups, fundraising activities and advocacy efforts, plus clinical and research outreach, were targeted at wealthier — and White — families. Advertising rarely reflected families that looked like hers. She felt unseen.

“In many ways, food allergy is an invisible disease. The burden of the disease, the activities and energy it takes to avoid allergens, are mostly invisible to those not impacted,” Brown said. “Black and other minority patients often lack voice and visibility in the healthcare system. Add the additional burden of an invisible condition and you are in a really vulnerable position.”

An estimated 6 million children in the United States have food allergies, 40 percent of them with more than one. Limited research has been done on race and class breakdowns. But recent studies show that poor children and some groups of minority children have a higher incidence of food allergies than White kids. They also show that the children’s families have more difficulty accessing appropriate child care, safe food, medical care and lifesaving medicine like epinephrine for them.

Black children are 7 percent more likely to have food allergies than White children, according to a 2020 study by Ruchi Gupta, a pediatrician and professor at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. To be sure, the study shows that Asian children are 24 percent more likely than White children to have food allergies. But Black and Hispanic children are disproportionately more likely to live in poor communities, to have asthma and to suffer from systemic racism in the delivery of medical care.

And finding allergenfree food to keep allergic kids safe can be costly — in both time and money.

“Many times, a mother is frank and says, ‘I have $20 to $40 to buy groceries for the week, and if I buy these foods that you are telling me to buy, I will not be able to feed my entire family,’ “said Carla Davis, a pediatrician and director of the food allergy program at Houston’s Texas Children’s Hospital.

“If you are diagnosed with a food allergy and you don’t have disposable income or disposable time, there is really no way that you will be able to alter your diet in a way that your child is going to stay away from their allergen.”

Fed up with the lack of support, Brown founded the Food Equality Initiative advocacy organization in 2014. It offers an online marketplace to income-eligible families in Kansas and Missouri who, with a doctor’s note about the allergy, can order free allergy-safe food to fit their needs.

Nationwide, however, families’ needs far outstrip what her group can offer — and the problem has gotten worse amid the economic squeeze of the pandemic. Job losses and business closures have exacerbated the barriers to finding and affording nutritious food, according to a report from Feeding America, an association of food banks.

Brown said her organization more than doubled its clientele in March through August, compared with the same period in 2019. And though it currently serves only Missouri and Kansas, she said the organization has been fielding an increasing number of calls from across the country since the pandemic began.

For low-income minorities, who live disproportionately in food deserts, fresh and allergy-friendly foods can be especially expensive and difficult to find in the best of times.