First came a call from the Wall Street Journal last summer. Then the New York Times. Suddenly, Anne Munoz-Furlong, head of a little-known organization dedicated to food allergies, was being christened the authority on peanuts.

She was quoted in just about every newspaper story that followed. Television beckoned. There were guest spots on radio shows across the country. Invites on the lecture circuit picked up.

Everyone wanted to hear her views on the latest media hullabaloo: Why the ubiquitous and beloved peanut butter sandwich was now a deadly lunchtime snack for some.

Airlines had planned peanut-free rows on planes. Schools had banned all peanut products from the cafeteria. Parents fought to protect their severely allergic children from coming into contact with the peanut.

The peanut wars were on.

The media were in a frenzy, delighted that Mr. Peanut was on the ropes and Munoz-Furlong was jabbing him with a flurry of body shots. In a few weeks time, she became synonymous with peanut-bashing.

It's been a bruising, confusing whirl for Munoz-Furlong, as she enters her 15th minute of fame (the newspapers and television have gotten bored with peanuts and are moving on).

Having been both lauded and pilloried, she is wondering if her message was heard above the din of parent vs. parent, peanut industry vs. airline industry, school vs. school.

"I'm not entirely sure anyone was listening," says Munoz-Furlong as her doe-brown eyes float toward the ceiling of her Northern Virginia office. "There is so much emotion about this. People are threatened. They don't understand. They hear only what they want to hear."

Everyone involved, it seemed, took sides; few were willing to compromise.

On one side were parents fearful that their children could become fatally sickened by the peanut. They were unyielding and wanted peanuts banned.

On the other side were peanut-industry growers and shellers who were puzzled over what all the fuss was about. Peanuts are practically a staple food, they shot back. Now it was being vilified by overreacting parents.

In the middle was Munoz-Furlong. She wouldn't support banning peanuts outright. She preached tolerance and understanding.

Eventually, both sides turned on her. Some parents accused her of being in the pocket of the peanut industry. Some in the peanut industry painted her as a hysterical woman out to ruin their livelihoods.

"This is going to be a long, long process," she says with the weariness of a soldier on the night before yet another day's battle.

Not working from home

It wasn't supposed to turn out like this, says the 45-year-old wife and mother of two daughters.

Sitting in her sprawling, first-floor corporate office in the Washington suburb of Fairfax, Va., she is perfectly coiffed in a coral-colored suit. Her desk in impeccably neat and her mostly female staff is busy with the day's work.

She is in her second home, the offices of the Food Allergy Network, a nonprofit organization she founded in 1991 as a source for parents, doctors and schools who needed practical information about food allergies. She says the network has 19,000 members. There is a staff of 13.

"This is a business," she says defiantly. "I hate it when people hear that I'm a mother and think I'm working from my kitchen."

She zigzags from her office at one end of the corporate suite, past the secretaries, order-takers, accountant and product storage room to the meeting room at the other end and makes a sweeping gesture with her hand. "See, I'm not in my kitchen."

Her fervor catches her off guard, perhaps. She smiles and softens.

"But if that's the only way they can accept it " she says, her voice trailing off.

Still, it is a family-like setting here, and Munoz-Furlong is the queen mother. Pictures of children who have been helped by the Food Allergy Network line the walls of one hallway. She proudly points to the artwork by dozens of elementary-age schoolchildren who depict kids with food allergies.

"Children aren't the problem," she says. "The adults are. Children understand when other children have food allergies.

"Adults scare me."

Lately, Munoz-Furlong has been getting hate e-mail.

For a moment, she marvels at why adults would become so enraged over peanut allergies. But then she looks back to just a few years ago when her infant daughter, Mariel, was allergic to all dairy products.

It was a tough time for her young family.

Been there

"I've walked in the shoes of these people," says Munoz-Furlong.

There was nothing like the Food Allergy Network when she gave birth to Mariel, her second daughter. In 1984, at just 9 months, Mariel was diagnosed as being allergic to dairy products.

The news actually came as a relief to Munoz-Furlong, who, for those first nine months of Mariel's life, simply could not comfort her child. Mariel rarely slept, cried all the time and vomited constantly. She didn't take to breast-feeding.

"I kept taking her to the doctor and they told me I was too nervous, that I should relax," she says. "Then she was put on some sleeping pills."

Munoz-Furlong says she was uncomfortable with her infant being on a drug. And she felt something still wasn't right with Mariel.

"I drove to Children's Hospital one day," she says. "They put us in touch with [an allergy doctor] even though other doctors had said earlier that she was too young to have allergies."

Within 72 hours of discovering Mariel's allergy to dairy products, the Furlong family would seem like a new one.

"She stopped crying. It was amazing, like someone had turned off the noise," she says.

Then the guilt set in. She realized that every time she had given Mariel a bottle in hopes of comforting her, it had made things worse. She felt as if she had hurt her child.

It was like water-drip torture, she says. "I felt there was nothing I could do to help."

So she began searching for help with her allergic child. What could she feed her, how was she to know which foods contained dairy products? Even traces of milk (or eggs) in food was enough to cause a reaction in Mariel.

But it seemed as if there was no one out there to help. So Munoz-Furlong took control herself. For school birthday parties or Halloween and Christmas gatherings, she made food for everyone that her daughter could enjoy, too. She didn't want Mariel to feel like she was isolated.

But she learned quickly others weren't always sympathetic.

There was the time when another mother at Mariel's school felt like Munoz-Furlong was dictating what her child could eat. So the woman brought in cake and ice cream. Little Mariel was forced to eat crackers.

"She basically said. 'Screw you, I'm bringing cake and ice cream,' " Munoz-Furlong recalls, her voice cracking. "I remember my daughter came home from school saying 'I hate this allergy.' How could a parent be so cruel? It still makes me cry thinking about it."

Even family and friends did not understand why Mariel needed to avoid dairy products. They tried to comfort her mother with old wives' tales, like the one about giving kids a little of the food that they are allergic to so their bodies can get used to it.

Enough, she thought. She'd had it with people who just didn't get it. That sparked the idea of the Food Allergy Network -- a newsletter of recipes and allergy information. It did start in her home. But in the basement, not the kitchen.

Supplying information

Dr. Hugh Sampson, chief of pediatric allergy and immunology at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, met Munoz-Furlong two years before she began the Food Allergy Network.

She was writing articles for a group called Mothers of Asthmatics. He liked her zeal for wanting to educate the public about medical issues. When she asked him to head a board of scientists, professors and doctors to make sure that the information given by the Food Allergy Network was correct, he heartily agreed.

"If you have a cause," Sampson says, "she would be the best person you would want on your side. She is incredibly dedicated and very empathetic."

He says her best skill is that she can take a pile of medical-science mumbo-jumbo and make it understandable to the average reader.

"The thing that has been terrific about our relationship is that I can give something to Anne and she humanizes it," Dr. Sampson says.

Jeannette Anderson, president of the American Peanut Council, an organization that represents most members in the U.S. peanut industry, has been working with Munoz-Furlong for years. BTC The two have had even more contact in the last three months because of the media frenzy.

"She is not a table-pounder and she is not a totally behind-the-scenes person," Anderson says. "She is very articulate and comes across very intelligent. She has a lot of credibility. A lot of the media have tried to look at this as 'Who is on this side and who is on that side?' But it is not an issue where anyone has chosen a side. We try to complement and support each other."

Munoz-Furlong is trying to march forward with her message of tolerance and understanding of people with food allergies. She says that after this latest bout with the media, she's wiser and not as naive. It takes not only education, but persistence she says.

"Twenty years from now?" she says incredulously when asked how long she'll fight this battle. "I hope I'm not doing this 20 years from now.

"I have other issues. Other passions. But I won't stop until we are in a place where people accept it," she says. "There will be training in restaurants and schools. People won't resist or laugh."

She nods her head and smiles, then looks out of her office window. "It will happen in 20 years. Maybe sooner."

Pub Date: 11/09/98