THE QUESTION
I sent my neighbours a batch of cookies at the beginning of the month, and when they asked if it contained any allergy-sensitive products, I said no. Turns out I forgot that I had used sesame oil in one of the cookies, and my neighbour had a pretty serious allergic reaction. Since telling me, they've stopped talking to my husband and me, and encouraged our other neighbours to dump my cookies in the trash just in case. It was an honest mistake!
THE ANSWER
It's a brave new world, isn't it? Kids who discover they're allergic to lipstick when grandma's kiss causes their face to swell up and break out in hives.
And when did peanuts become this deadly toxin? It's so weird. As a kid I happily munched my way through 100,000 peanut-butter sandwiches without second thoughts; so did all the other kids.
But now it's as though a single peanut crosses the threshold of a school, all the alarms go off, lights flash, everyone has to be evacuated and guys in haz-mat suits - or perhaps a Peanut Removal Robot - must be summoned to eliminate the offending legume.
I have a friend who, it seems, if he's been in a room where anyone has even been discussing peanuts, has to be jabbed with an EpiPen and carted off on a stretcher by paramedics.
When did all this happen?
I don't know, but it is what it is, and in this brave new world we live in, you wound up on the wrong side of the equation.
One can no longer afford to be sloppy and/or casual about these things.
It kind of kills me to say it, but since your neighbour asked, and you said no, there weren't any allergens in your cookies, and you might have killed him/her by your negligence, you owe your neighbour an apology-without-caveat, the most abject and therefore the purest form of apology known to man.
Say you're sorry, that you learned your lesson, and in the future you will be much, much more careful.
I know it's weird, and it's hardly festive to have to dispense this advice. But it's the way it has to be, I'm afraid, in the brave new world of late 2008.
David Eddie is a screenwriter and the author of Chump Change and Housebroken: Confessions of a Stay-at-Home Dad.