Recently, while watching Influenced, a satirical film about wealthy influencers and socialites, I heard the words “Food Allergy Ball” as part of a skit. The audience was expected to laugh. I couldn’t. It wasn’t because I lack a sense of humor. It was because those words immediately caused my brain to recall a memorial slide for those who passed at a real Food Allergy Ball.
That wasn’t the only scene that stopped me. Later in the film, a waiter asks whether anyone has food allergies. Several women answer dairy. The main character adds her own list: cilantro, blue cheese, and boots with open toes, folding a life-threatening medical condition into the same breath as a fashion preference. The joke depends on treating food allergy as something exaggerated or trivial.
This is the same way a true dairy allergy so often gets waved off as pickiness, or confused with lactose intolerance, which is uncomfortable but not dangerous. A true dairy allergy is different. Like any food allergy, it can kill. I’ve met a lot of people who don’t know the difference: the eye roll, the pause before someone asks if an accommodation is really necessary. That reaction doesn’t stay in a movie theater. People carry it into kitchens and dining rooms every day.
The film also pairs the “Food Allergy Ball” with a fictional charity called “Lipo for Manatees,” inviting the audience to see both as equally absurd. They are not. Manatees are not overweight; that punchline is invented purely to be laughed at, and nothing real is lost by finding it funny. Food allergy is not invented. It kills children and adults every year. That is why I couldn’t laugh. This is why I want to explain what a Food Allergy Ball actually is, and why one exists at all.
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I am the mother of a child with a life-threatening food allergy, and for several years I had the privilege of co-chairing New York City’s Food Allergy Ball. During my time as co-chair, I introduced what I hoped would become a lasting tradition. Each year, amid the fundraising and scientific presentations, the room would grow quiet as a memorial slide appeared listing the names of children, teenagers, and adults who had died from food-induced anaphylaxis during the previous year. Parents, physicians, researchers, volunteers, donors, and families sat together in silence. It was our way of honoring those we had lost and reminding ourselves why we had gathered. Every name represented not only a life cut short, but also a promise that we would continue fighting so another family would never have to endure the same loss.
I still remember staring at those names and noticing how young so many were. Fourteen. Sixteen. Eleven. Seven. Thirteen. Lives measured not by the futures they would build, but by birthdays they would never celebrate. It was never the easiest part of the evening, but it was always the most important.
I assumed those names would always remain at a distance. Then one Thanksgiving, they weren’t. While visiting family in Florida in 2016, I opened an email. I can still feel the sun on my face and the slight breeze that afternoon, the exact moment before everything changed, telling me that eleven-year-old Oakley Debbs, the best friend of one of my son’s classmates, had died from food-induced anaphylaxis. My heart broke for his family. Almost immediately another realization followed: We would have to add Oakley’s name to that year’s memorial slide.
Some memories are visceral that way. I don’t have to try to remember them; I simply close my eyes and I am there again: the sun in Florida, the room falling silent as the slide appeared each year. Both are etched into me the same way, not as something I recall, but as something I still feel.
Months later, I watched Oakley’s father speak through tears to a room filled with children about his son’s age, including my own son. Watching a grieving father look into those faces is something I will never forget.
That is what came to mind when I heard the phrase “Food Allergy Ball.” Not glamour. Not performative philanthropy. A memorial slide. Oakley’s father. The families left behind.
As I finished writing this essay, I found myself reporting for Allergic Living on yet another tragedy. A lawsuit alleges that sixteen-year-old Jason Hu died after eating an airline sandwich he had been assured was safe despite his severe food allergies.
Jason was not an influencer. But less than two years earlier, someone had died the same way inside the very culture “Influenced” satirizes. Dominique Brown, a thirty-four-year-old Disney enthusiast and co-founder of a popular online community, attended a holiday event in Los Angeles hosted by the retailer BoxLunch.
According to other attendees, she ate something after being told it didn’t contain the ingredient she was allergic to. She began reacting almost immediately and she did not survive. If anyone needed proof that food allergy can kill someone whose entire life plays out in front of a camera, it had already happened.
Whether in restaurants, workplaces, schools, or airplanes, these tragedies share a common thread: Someone underestimated the risk.
Over the years I have watched misinformation and mockery migrate from television screens into classrooms, restaurants, workplaces, and airplanes. I have seen children bullied because of their food allergies, teenagers embarrassed to disclose a life-threatening condition, and travelers hesitate to ask questions that could save their lives because they feared ridicule or dismissal. That embarrassment has a direct cost: A young person who doesn’t want to be doubted again may simply order from the menu as written and trust it to be complete.
Entertainment shapes culture. Culture shapes attitudes. Attitudes shape behavior. Behavior shapes outcomes.
I am not suggesting the filmmakers intended to mock people living with food allergies. Their target was likely influencer culture, not patients. But intent and impact are not the same. A joke comparing a fatal disease to a shoe preference reinforces the misconception that food allergy itself is exaggerated.
No one would write a scene mocking a diabetes foundation gala or a cancer fundraiser in quite the same way. Those diseases retain their seriousness even inside satire. Food allergy too often becomes the joke itself, not just the vehicle for one. Sadly, that difference follows people outside the theater: into kids ridiculed at lunch tables, into adults whose coworkers decide their allergy is negotiable. Words become actions. I’ve spent a decade documenting where they land.
Food allergy advocacy is not performative philanthropy. It is grieving parents who choose to fight after burying a child. It is physicians searching for better treatments, researchers pursuing new discoveries, volunteers dedicating countless hours to education, and donors investing in work that saves lives.
Nearly a decade after I first wrote about entertainment’s portrayal of food allergy, I wish I no longer had to make this argument. Instead, children and young adults continue to die from food-induced anaphylaxis while many of the same misconceptions persist.
One punchline is safe when nothing behind it is true, like the manatees needing liposuction. The allergy punchline only works when the audience already believes that a food allergy is exaggerated enough to be funny. That is the misconception I have spent the past decade trying to correct.
Perhaps the real question is not whether people living with food allergies have lost their sense of humor. Perhaps the question should be, after all these years, why society still has not learned what should never be a joke.
Lianne Mandelbaum is a leading advocate for airline safety measures to protect food-allergic passengers. As president of No Nut Traveler and airline correspondent for Allergic Living, she drives policy change by collecting testimonials from food-allergic families to share with lawmakers, media, and advocacy groups. She can be reached on X @nonuttraveler, Facebook, and LinkedIn.
A sought-after speaker and media source, Lianne participated in a Medscape panel on emergency medical kits on planes and contributed global data on airline travel and food allergies at the GA²LEN Anacare Anaphylaxis & Food Allergy Forum. Her travel tips were also featured by Stanford’s Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy Research. She also appeared on Bloomberg to discuss the challenges faced by food-allergic travelers and advocate for policy changes.
Her advocacy led to a Department of Transportation ruling recognizing food allergy as a disability. She co-designed a global air travel and food allergy survey with Northwestern University’s CFAAR, which was presented at AAAAI and published in The Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology. She is the co-author of “Understanding Experiences, Barriers, and Facilitators of Safe Airline Travel—A Global Survey of Food Allergy Patients and Caregivers” (The Journal of Allergy & Clinical Immunology). She also contributed to “10 Practical Priorities to Prevent and Manage Serious Allergic Reactions: GA²LEN ANACare and EFA Anaphylaxis Manifesto” (Clinical and Translational Allergy) and “Ever Treat a Patient on a Plane? Why Med Kits Need an Update” (Medscape). Additionally, she collaborated with stakeholders to include anaphylaxis and necessary medications in the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024.
