Thread by @seananmcguire

Organizing a dinner for a large group of nerds is wild, because we range from "eh, don't like the taste of cilantro" to "if a walnut enters the house, my flesh will boil from my bones and my skeleton will rain down fire upon your family as it crumbles."

Here's a fun fact about people with life-threatening food allergies: most of us have been exposed to the things we're allergic to at least once by "friends" who thought we were exaggerating.

I nearly died at a writer's conference that listened to my saying "I am very allergic" and heard "so we can put it on everyone's plate but yours, got it." The oils went into the air, I stopped breathing.

So most of us are either unwilling to eat around anyone we don't trust implicitly, or we are like heralds of the apocalypse. "I will die, do you understand, I will die" is said four or five times before accepting an invitation to dinner.

And an allergy that isn't life-threatening yet can BECOME life-threatening after repeated exposure. If I didn't consent to you triggering my mild allergy, and you did it on purpose, you're not funny, and you're not a friend.