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peanut dust bioterror
Monday, May 31 2004
Our friends from Brooklyn: Ray, Nancy, Nancy's sister Linda, and Linda's boyfriend Adam, had been in the Adirondacks this weekend attending a wedding of one of Nancy's Christian cousins. It had been a sociological experience for this band of world-weary free thinkers, and they'd seen Jesus references stuffed into all sorts of improbable places. And they'd also eaten a lot of bad food. Who knew that there are people who serve cheese puffs at their weddings?
Meanwhile we'd been hosting Ray and Nancy's dog Suzy. The four all headed back to New York City today, but Ray and Nancy's car was having trouble, so they decided to leave it (and Suzy) with us until next weekend. Once they got to our place we all headed out for lunch at the Rosendale Café, but it was closed so we went to the Egg's Nest in High Falls instead. It's a place supposedly famous for its overstuffed sandwiches praesu cuisine, but more impressive perhaps is the number of roosters and vintage toasters they've managed to attach to their walls. We got to talking about peanut allergies and Nancy told us something she'd heard about someone suing Southwest Airlines to get them to stop serving peanuts, since all the resulting peanut dust in a closed environment can have deleterious effects on people with peanut allergies. This got me to thinking about a novel form of bioterrorism. Someone could hire a cropduster and fly over an urban area releasing hundreds of pounds of peanut dust. A terrorist might kill ten or twenty people that way (and, due to Darwinian effects, do wonders for the future of casual peanut eating).
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