Peanut butter and stinky tofu

This was originally going to be a long, complex, drawn-out post on culinary and cultural sensibilities. Then my dear dear friend from home, Flavia, got on Skype and an absolutely wonderful, and necessary, conversation ensued. It is now midnight. Hence, this post just got preemptively abbreviated.

Peanut butter. Quick, name the single most common allergy for kids in the United States. Peanut butter, right? OK, so that may actually be the second most common, after milk, but still! I worked as a nanny for four years and as a childcare provider in various other forms for pretty much as long as I can remember (I started helping at church when I was just 10 myself), and one of the biggest taboos in every childcare setting in America is never bring anything having to do with peanuts anywhere with kids, ever (unless they're your own and you just want a PPJ in the privacy of your own home, but even then you should be careful).

Which is why today, I had a minor freakout when I realized that the jam I was bringing for our blind taste test (this week's vocabulary: jam, pepper, salt, butter, sugar, ketchup) had been contaminated by peanut butter. (Because, really, why dirty two knives?)

I brought it to school anyway, though, after carefully getting the jam from the bottom of the jar without disturbing the potentially contaminated bits on top (never an easy feat), and asked Maggie that we ask the kids to make sure no one was allergic before doing anything with the jam. Her reaction: huh?

Apparently, peanut allergies aren't really a thing here. In fact, we asked all of our five 5th grade classes today, and had not a single peanut allergy in the bunch. We had a few milk allergies (proving the point in the link above, I suppose), and so duly avoided the butter for them, but no one was allergic to peanuts! It was truly dumfounding.

Stinky tofu. This is a much more minor point; something that honestly could have fit in a Facebook status. It would have said "that moment when you're driving down the street and smell something that reminds you of delicious cheddar cheese. And then realize it's stinky tofu." I'm holding out some hope that there actually is a place on Zhongshan selling cheesy goodness, but it's unlikely. More probably, my sense of smell is officially shot to pieces by Taiwanese sensibilities.