Changes

|title=May Contain Nuts

|author=John O'Farrell

|date=March 2006

|isbn=0552771627

}}

Just to get the obvious out of the way, 'May Contain Nuts' is a funny, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny book. It starts out very promisingly: as a farce, really, an almost (but not quite, so as not to alienate the potential readership) biting satire on ridiculously competitive urban upper middle class parents hot-housing their children into Prokofiev appreciation and contract bridge, children scheduled, tutored and stimulated; never left alone to do 'whatever', never let go. Satire on paranoid parenting with mothers checking every label of every foodstuff and not allowing an 11 year old to walk down the road to a newsagent, never mind travel on a bus to school. Satire on public (private) education system of preparatory schools and secondary colleges thriving on pretence, snobbery and unshakeable belief that children who don't get the right education - paid for education, of course - will inevitably end up as drug addicts, prostitutes or Blockbuster Rentals clerks.