WHEN EDIBLES ATTACK.(The Talk of the Town)(the Food Allergy Ball)

The guests at the Food Allergy Ball, a black-tie gala that took place at the Plaza Hotel last week, were drawn from that class of New York society which includes Fortune 500 C.E.O.s and senior partners at corporate law firms and exclusive interior decorators: the fortunate few who are largely sheltered from many of life's afflictions. But food allergies--the symptoms of which can range from mild nausea at a bite of shrimp to convulsions brought on by the mere inhalation of a cashew fragment--can strike even the most pampered New Yorkers, and, more significantly, the children of the most pampered New Yorkers, for whom a rogue peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich in the lunchroom can present a deadly threat. This fact helps explain why the Food Allergy Initiative, a nonprofit organization that was founded six years ago, has already raised a total of nine million dollars for research and education.

"If you're not going to do it for your kids, who are you going to do it for?" said Todd Slotkin, the Food Allergy Initiative's chairman and a senior executive at MacAndrews & Forbes Holdings. Slotkin's food-allergy activism was activated by the diagnosis of allergies in his twin sons as toddlers, after he unwittingly fed one of them a nut-laced cookie while on vacation in Nantucket. Slotkin suffers from the usual anxieties of parenthood--what are your kids doing, and who are they doing it with?--amplified to an excruciating degree. "My sons are eleven, and in a few years, I hear, they will start to kiss other people," he said as he tucked into a feast that began with a grilled-eggplant terrine (comprising twenty-one ingredients, all carefully enumerated on the menu), and explained that for his boys a make-out partner who had recently eaten a nut-studded brownie could prove fatal.

Sharyn Mann, the F.A.I.'s vice-chairman and the mistress of ceremonies, was motivated by similar concerns: her daughter, Tamara, suffers from severe food allergies. Mann wore a strapless black gown and a spray of black feathers in her upswept hair, in keeping with the black-and-white decor inspired by Cecil Beaton's set designs for "My Fair Lady." Mann had managed to enlist ten cast members of the show's London revival to fly over and perform, and friends of Mann testified that her maternal vigilance was as impressive as her eventproduction talents. "I was there the first time her daughter turned blue," said Wanda Dworman. "If she went anywhere, she couldn't eat anything outside of water or jello." Dworman described how her own consciousness about allergic reactions was raised ...