Bloodlust

I like to listen to podcasts while I’m making dinner. I think lots of people do. They’re often entertaining or enlightening; sometimes the voices just keep us company.

Last week I became obsessed with an update of an update of a rerun from Radiolab (WNYC Studios). It’s called “Return of Alpha Gal,” and it stems from a story first run in 2016 – a decade ago.

I wanted to despise this woman talking at first so fervently about her love for eating meat. She was so passionate and specific – a Peter Luger Steak House credit-card carrying carnivore. The affection she had for the snap of a hot dog when she bit into it. A backyard barbecuer of lamb and ramps (wild onions).

Jesus.

It was the foraging for those ramps that got her. Actually, a tick got her dog first, then transferred to Amy Pearl’s arm while the two slept.

And in the tick spit that entered Amy’s bloodstream was a dose of alpha galactose, a sugar molecule that most non-human mammals have. As the tick pulls out blood, he or she pushes in saliva, a cocktail of anticoagulants and alpha-gal. This exchange is how scientists believe the sensitization happens.

While alpha-gal is fine when passing through the human gut, the skin’s immune system treats the tick’s saliva as a foreign attack, flagging alpha-gal itself as an invader.

So the next time Amy eats a steak, things go sideways. She’s developed alpha-gal syndrome, AGS, and is anaphylactically allergic to red meat.

She feels loss of taste and tradition and lives in fear, never far from her EpiPen. I feel a little bad for her, but I start really liking her when she transforms into Alpha Gal! She becomes a better woman because of her bite.

Amy jokes that she gained “moral superiority” by not eating meat now, that she achieved something she couldn’t by willpower. That she was concerned about factory farming and environmental tolls. That maybe the tick was helping her evolve into a better human being.

And then whammo, a twisted update to the story.

Biotech company Revivicor was working on transplanting pig organs into humans. The problem (aside from using animals to harvest organs) had been that human bodies rejected the alpha-gal in pig tissue. Solution: the genetically modified GalSafe pig. With its alpha-gal gene edited out, the transplants took.

Revivicor executive John Bianchi was listening to that first Radiolab episode with poor Amy, and he decided to solve a problem for her, too. Oh, the irony. The first GalSafe pig slaughtered for human consumption – so AGS sufferers could eat bacon – was named “Amy,” after Amy Pearl.

After being bitten, Amy no longer wanted to eat animals. She didn’t think science was solving a problem, only doubling down on an old one. Why modify a sentient being to harvest her organs when we can put scientific effort into creating a non-animal replacement organ? I love Amy!

When a tick bite renders you deathly unable to eat red meat (and in some cases dairy and other animal products), why fight it? Embrace the evolution.

Yeah, that’s not what I found when I went looking for others like Amy.

Spoiler alert: My brief foray as a vegan advocate on alpha-gal support groups on Facebook did not go well.

I said I was looking to interview people who’ve had to stop eating meat because of AGS but now embrace it. Perhaps “embrace” was the wrong word.

I deleted my post after just two hours and a pile of hate. To be fair, there is real fear, confusion, anger and grief. I just gave it a brief target. I felt awful for a mom with a newly diagnosed kid, a guy that can’t afford but requires epinephrine, and a myriad of stories that may or may not be scientifically factual.

Did I know how insidiously animal products are hidden in everyday items with no labeling, they asked me. Yes. Yes, as an ethical vegan I am aware. Gelatin in your pill capsule? Lanolin in your face cream? You get a migraine from airborne alpha-gal fat droplets in the barbecue smoke ignoring your neighbor’s fence; I get a heartbreak. It should be illegal. Eating animals should be illegal. I didn’t write that; I just left.

They thought I was conflating medical necessity with ethical choice, imposition with intention. I was not.

The moral claim of the animal rights movement is that eating animals is wrong regardless of consequences to the eater. Is it also true that, regardless of intent, the outcome is good? It took an allergy to do what advocacy couldn't. Fewer animals eaten, for example. Yep.

Was my schadenfreude showing? I admit the irony is delicious, for a moment.

Maybe Amy is a unicorn, and there is no magic in the tick spit that changes the heart of an omnivore.

Maybe Amy had a latent belief, some unease about eating animals pre-bite, that became realized. Maybe she has a personality-level disposition, a coping style that sees loss as transformation and full of meaning. Maybe it’s because she’d had a decade to integrate her diagnosis into her identity before I heard her story. Maybe I hit selection bias in my Facebook search because the loudest, most visible AGS voices skew toward people still actively grieving.

But despite a real, organized AGS advocacy ecosystem (FARE, Alpha-gal Alliance, Two Alpha Gals), none of it surfaces anyone with Amy's specific ethical-conversion framing. The community's public voice is overwhelmingly about managing the condition, not changing their conviction.

Note: I just reached out to Amy Pearl for my own interview. I hope she responds.