Alpha-Gal* Should Come With An Asterisk
Dining out and the Great Meat Slicer Debate of '26.
Laura Finney
5/11/2026
Some days it feels like this should be called Alpha-Gal* (with a little asterisk at the end), because everything starts to feel as if there’s a side note, a pivot required, or an endless series of forks in the road.
What’s for lunch? Turkey sandwich. Great. You’ve found the vegan bread, the AG-safe mayo, and the lettuce and tomato are fine, but what about the turkey?
You’re probably thinking, “I thought she could eat poultry.”
And you’d be right.
Asterisk.
For reasons I cannot fathom, here in the US we apparently like to marinate perfectly innocent foods in mammal. I wish I were kidding. Someone, somewhere in a turkey processing plant looked up one day and thought, You know what would really liven up this turkey? Cow.
And thus, processed turkey may be injected, treated, or sprayed with things like gelatin (derived from pigs, cows, or horses) or broth containing mammalian by-products. Which is both horrifying and, frankly, deeply insulting to the turkey.
So there I am, wanting a simple lunch, and instead I’m spiraling into a full-scale poultry investigation. I no longer make sandwiches. I conduct meat audits.
Even when you overcome the initial turkey/beef debacle, you still have to cross the treacherous Bridge of the Meat Slicer. Yes, I realize that metaphor is unstable at best. Just stay with me.
Because now the issue is cross contamination. Meaning that unless the deli slicer is thoroughly cleaned, my turkey could pick up enough residue from the ham, roast beef, salami, or whatever other mammalian horrors came before it to cause a reaction.
Which means I must become the person I was never meant to be: the woman making complicated requests at a busy deli counter during the lunch rush.
I do not enjoy this. I would rather have a root canal than be that person.
There is simply no comfortable way to say, “Hi, yes, could you please completely dismantle and sanitize your industrial meat equipment because otherwise my sandwich may try to kill me?”
And once they do clean it — sighing internally while hosing it down like a hot zone, and everyone else in line is glaring at me, the turkey princess — I suddenly feel morally obligated to purchase approximately forty-seven pounds of deli meat in gratitude for their service.
At that point I don’t even want turkey anymore. I just want to apologize to everyone and leave.
And this, unfortunately, is how one eventually arrives at the Restaurant Problem.
Because if obtaining a safe turkey sandwich requires a detailed understanding of industrial meat practices, a sanitized slicer, and the emotional resilience to inconvenience a deli worker named Chad during peak lunchtime hours, then dining out starts to feel less like a fun social activity and more like a medically supervised trust exercise.
Restaurants love hidden ingredients. Butter appears where no butter should be - and trust me, old me would have never uttered those words. Bacon materializes without warning. Things are “finished” with mysterious sauces, brushed with animal fats, or cooked on grills that have spent the afternoon hosting a meat parade. And every menu item comes with its own invisible little asterisk.
At some point you stop looking at restaurants and seeing food. You start seeing risk management with ambient lighting.
Some people with AGS carry little restaurant cards to hand to servers — neatly printed explanations listing all the things they can’t eat, including the hidden ingredients most people would never think about. Gelatin. Beef broth. Lard. Whey. Certain flavorings. Certain shortenings. Ingredients hiding inside other ingredients like some sort of culinary Russian nesting doll of doom.
And honestly, I respect these people tremendously because they are organized, proactive, and clearly not the low functioning people pleaser I am.
But if I worked in a restaurant kitchen and someone handed me that card, I would simply stare at it for a long moment before quietly walking into the sea.
Not because it’s unreasonable — it’s completely reasonable, it's beyond reasonable when your health is on the line — but because the list of possible mammalian landmines is so bizarre and extensive that it starts to sound less like a food allergy and more like an ancient curse.
At some point I realized that dining out no longer felt relaxing. It felt like assigning homework to strangers and then hoping they cared enough to do it correctly. So I opted out.
Which is how I ended up leveling up my cooking skills by approximately one thousand percent. Because when you can’t safely eat at restaurants anymore and you suddenly lose at least half your ingredients, it becomes clear rather quickly that you either learn to cook creatively or perish dramatically beside a package of plain chicken thighs.
And I do want to state for the record — because I have a tendency to tell these stories in a sort of “what a quirky adventure!” tone — that this was an enormous life pivot. This was the motherforker of all forks in the road!
Before alpha-gal, I ate out constantly. And at home? I would estimate that roughly 85% of my meals involved mammal in some form. Cheeseburgers. BLTs. Steaks on the grill. Little bits of bacon wandering into recipes. My kitchen was basically a shrine to cow and pig.
Then suddenly I found myself trapped in a bizarre survival game show where the challenge was: Create a satisfying meal using only poultry, oat milk, and mounting psychological fatigue.
And not even my old cookware survived the transition. Because asterisk: if you previously cooked mammal in your pans, that pan is now haunted and while there’s debate over whether lingering residue can cause reactions I was not willing to be the guinea pig. Which means I got to experience the deeply frustrating process of replacing perfectly good kitchen equipment.
So there I was. Standing in my kitchen with a brand-new pan, one boring chicken breast, and absolutely no idea what to make for dinner.
I will say that I am deeply grateful I did not contract this in the dark ages. Though, to be fair, I am generally grateful not to live in the dark ages. The whole experience seems cold, muddy, and riddled with lepers.
But I digress.
What I mean is: thank God for the internet. Because now, whenever I stare hopelessly into my refrigerator like a pioneer woman who has lost the will to churn, I am only one desperate search away from culinary inspiration.
And my friends have been absolute heroes. Every so often I send out what can only be described as a seafood-and-poultry bat signal asking for everyone’s current favorite “fins and feathers” recipes, and they always come through. Suddenly people are texting me things like coconut shrimp bowls and lemon garlic cod and thai chicken meatball soup as though we are contestants on a very supportive episode of Chopped.
Which is how I learned that necessity may be the mother of invention, but dietary restriction is apparently the mother of surprisingly decent weeknight dinners.