If my memory serves me well, in grade school in the 1960s, it was very common for my fellow classmates to discover a peanut butter and jelly sandwich when they opened their lunch boxes. That is why it strikes me as funny when I see that peanut butter is now almost universally banned from schools.

It happened during the 1970s and 1980s when ecological poisoning became a national obsession. Vocal parents, convinced that their children were allergic to peanuts, lobbied school officials to have peanut butter banned. The officials capitulated and the ubiquitous peanut butter and jelly sandwich became a victim of the craze.

You may ask why should anyone care? After all, it’s not a big inconvenience and that’s true if looked at as an isolated case. However, it was not an isolated case but instead the beginning of a long list of prohibitions that would be rolled out in subsequent decades to avert ecological poisoning. During the COVID hysteria, it culminated in children being forced to wear masks.

The idea of widespread ecological poisoning retains its allure with a large segment of our population who fear the clear, odorless gas, carbon dioxide, which happens to be the basis of life. The notion of ubiquitous poisoning appeals strongly to the same type of person who accepted theories about race-poisoning a century earlier. Am I being inaccurate in comparing them? I think not. What was taken as the truth by a large percentage of Europeans in 1925 is no less foolish than our present-day climate cult gospel. Let us not forget how we arrived at our present point in time. To quote Milan Kundera, “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Image generated by AI.