It’ll drive you nuts

The other day, my sister Sharon posted a comment on the Allergies on TV article saying that peanuts are a base ingredient of dynamite. Her and I have what I like to call Jeopardy brains – full of trivia useful for playing Jeopardy – which prompted me to think about other non-food items that contain peanuts. Since Liam is airborne-allergic to peanuts, he can react to things in the room without having touched them, and there are a few things that we’ve used before that we can’t use anymore:

• ant traps – Since ants like peanut butter, it makes good bait.
• bird food – Remember making suet and peanut butter bird feeders in grade school?
• pet food – apart from the nuts in bird seed, we noticed nuts were being used in the hamster/guinea pig food and bedding – did I mention Sharon likes animals?
• grass seed? – this one I’m not sure about, but the last bag of grass seed that I used said that it did not contain crushed peanut shells. Things that make you go “Hmmmm”.

• lip gloss – we bought some lip gloss at the store the other day that apparently contains almonds. The part of the tube with the ingredient list was against the cardboard package so we didn’t notice it until Krystyne felt her lips tingle.
  
  Interesting Note: ever since we stopped eating nuts, Krystyne and I have developed a sensitivity to them – kind of like our own little early warning system.

Since peanuts are a good, cheap  source of protein, it can be crushed up and added to a lot of things. And for us, it means that we need to read the label of more than just food items.

For those of you interested in the peanut = dynamite thing, here is the link to the article Sharon found.