Peanut Allergy

We are moving to Shanghai within next 2 months.

My youngest daughter has peanut allergy and we are concerned about restaurants cooking with peanut oil.

Does anyone have a similar problem? Is this a real issue? All advice welcome.

Hi there,


Same thing here: we are moving to Beijing next year with our 5-year-old daughter allergic to peanuts. I see that Georgielily's message was posted 3 months ago... any feed-back on what daily life is like now that you're there?

We have now been in Shanghai for 1 month. My daughter goes to the British International School in Pudong. She is the only child there with peanut allergy. All the staff have been trained to use an epipen in case of emergency and my daughter carries her epipen in a bum bag. The catering staff are not allowed to use any peanut products (trace products cannot be helped) and my daughter is eating school dinners. The main problem is other children bringing nut products to school. My daughter will not accept sweets, cakes or biscuits form other children. Biscuits are a big problem as most contain nuts even if not mentioned in the ingredients.

When eating out, my wife and daughters are not very adventurous so we tend to stick to western style restaurants like Blue Frog. Most hotels avoid cooking in peanut oil and use bean oil instead. The rest of the time I cook for my girls from scratch so I know exactly what they are eating. Alternatives to peanut oil (sunflower, corn, olive) are readily available in the supermarkets.

My advice is just be ultra cautious and if you employ an Ayi she will need to phsically shown in the supermarket what not to buy.

Well, we are more adventurous eaters and have done okay in China, admittedly with a lot of precautions. From day one, we carried a piece of paper which we showed to the server in restaurants. Written by a Chinese friend, it said our daughter was allergic to X and would have to be taken to hospital and might even die( using lots of !!! marks) if she ate any food containing x ingredients. The paper listed the ingredients and asked the waitress to suggest non allergic food items, and also asked her to show the paper to the chef and so he could make sure that no food selections contained the offending ingredients. I also asked my Chinese speaking doctor to explain to ayi and driver (and I explained to company translator) that even the tiniest, trace amount of peanut could kill my daughter. Once ayi and driver understood fully, they became our allies in this whole thing. We gradually lost our dependence on the paper, and started taking our ayi or driver along with us to make sure the restaurant cooking staff knew the importance of NO PEANUT. If necessary, we got the translator on the phone to explain to the restaurant staff. Don't imagine that western restaurants are any safer than Chinese ones: they all use Chinese staff and communication is the key issue! Communication about the allergy was also one of my highest priority goals in my language learning. I struggled and struggled (and struggled some more!) to be able to pronounce "huasheng" and "guomin" with the right inflection and then to put that into the sentence: "Ta dui huasheng guomin!" (sorry if my pinyin is awful, this translates as "She has peanut allergy!"). Since I'm illiterate in the Chinese grocery store, my ayi also reads all food labels on packaged foods to screen what is safe, and SHE has taught ME which packaged foods are safe and which are not. Unfortunately, I suspect that ingredient labels are incomplete here because they don't seem to mention whether the cookies were made using equipment that also has been used to process peanuts, but we've never had a problem so long as we read the Chinese labels. For times when Ayi is not with me in a grocery store, I also practiced how to ask total strangers to read the label for me and tell me whether the product has peanut in it (something like, "Wo kan bu dong Zhonghua Ce, qing wen, zhege you meiyou huasheng?") Something that has not yet been mentioned is the "anaphylactic action plan." This is a piece of paper which says she has the allergy, tells the symptoms of an anaphylactic attack, and has written instructions about what to do in case of anaphylactic attack (what meds to give, emergency transport to hospital, who to call, etc). My daughter is supposed to carry this paper in the same location as her epi-pen. Everyone with an anaphylactic allergy ought to be carrying such a paper, and this should be translated into Chinese.

Thank you all for your comments and pieces of advice! Hopefully the situation will be manageable for us as well... :)