In Humans We Trust?
Laura Finney
9/3/2026
If I were to make a laundry list of places I would not care to find myself suffering an anaphylactic reaction, perhaps close to the top, literally and figuratively, would be 35,000 feet. It just seems like a wildly inconvenient spot to say, “could you pull the plane over, I might die.” And yet, I had a friend who nearly found herself in that exact spot.
Traveling with Alpha-Gal is tricky at best. Most of us travel with our own food just to be safe. But there are always those situations where that is just not possible. And this is where trust comes into play.
Every day I trust without consideration. I trust the bridge I’m driving over will continue to be a bridge with all of the structural integrity required of it. I trust that the pilot remembers how to fly the plane and won’t be popping out halfway through. I trust that the pharmacist is putting the correct pills in the bottle and not just tossing in whatever’s on hand.
But when it comes to a food allergy that has the ability to turn “dining out” into “a celebration of life”, I need to be a bit more careful. This is a level of trust I’ve never experienced, and I can’t say that I have actually fully embraced it. Because here’s the really hard part: at a restaurant, I am trusting a nameless, faceless stranger in the kitchen to care enough about another nameless, faceless stranger, me, to be on high alert.
It’s a hard thing to wrap my head around. Somewhere beyond those swinging doors is a human I will probably never meet, making dozens of meals for dozens of strangers, and I need my order to matter just a little bit more. Again, I’d rather have my gallbladder removed with an ice cream scoop than demand a stranger go above and beyond for me. (Yes, clearly, I should try therapy at some point.) But this is where I find myself now.
It would probably be so much easier – no less nerve wracking, but still easier – if it were a straightforward allergy. If it was an asparagus allergy it seems rather simple. Don’t add asparagus. No one is sneaking the essence of asparagus into the potatoes. But mammal? I mean, where does one begin? Yes, avoiding red meat and dairy is obvious. But what about “natural flavors” and “magnesium stearate” and even “breadcrumbs”? Do I really have to put my faith in a twentysomething line cook to do a deep dive into every last ingredient in a dish?
Which brings me back to traveling.
A fellow alpha-galleon was traveling overseas recently. The first leg of the journey was roughly five hours, and she was already feeling a bit off when she hopped onto the next eleven hour flight. At this point, I’d already be tapping out as there is no universe where I want to fly for sixteen hours unless it involves a new identity and a large sum of money.
Anyway.
She had the wherewithal to pre-order a specialty meal with the airline and to be extra safe, she chose to go with the vegan meal. Again, if I had to travel for sixteen hours, I’d need to be powered by more than lentils and kale but safety before flavor. Unfortunately, in this situation, she received neither.
When her specially ordered vegan meal arrived, it clearly contained butter, cream and a side of cheez-its. Now I am no nutritionist, but I’m pretty sure that none of these items should be found in a vegan meal unless cows have suddenly been reclassified as plants.
But then it got even crazier. When she asked the flight attendant if she could see the ingredient list for her specialty meal, she was told that they only had ingredient lists for the standard meals. Let’s just sit with that for a moment.
The standard meals doled out to those who really could not care less what they ate, came with a breakdown of ingredients. But the meals for those with considerable dietary restrictions … nothing. I understand that ingredient lists and liability have a complicated relationship but surely there’s a better answer than “we don’t want to tell you what’s in your meal.”
The airlines have all sorts of “reasons” for why they will not provide this information. Secretly, I just don’t think they know what they put in it.
At the end of the day, she went hungry and survived – which just seems wrong and unnecessary but kind of par for the course for this allergy. Which brings me back to my blind faith.
I’ve spent 57 years getting very good at trusting. Spectacularly good, actually. It used to be that I could order a meal without requiring additional documentation. I used to assume that the person behind the counter knew what was in the thing they were handing me. I used to hear “there’s no dairy in that” and I’d think “ok” rather than “define dairy.”
Which was all well and good back in my carefree days of last year. But all of that blind faith has left me woefully unprepared for life with Alpha-Gal.
AGS requires an entirely different skill set: part food interrogator, part deep label reader, part “natural flavor” auditor. I’ve learned approximately six trillion ways mammal can appear on the ingredient list and where those might be hiding in my dinner.
But perhaps the strangest skill is learning to overcome a lifetime of good manners.
It turns out that when the stakes are considerably higher, it’s okay to be the slightly unhinged woman on the plane demanding the ingredient list for the specialty meal. It’s okay to question whether the seventeen year old waiter who just assured you there’s no mammal in your meal fully understands the breadth of the mammalian kingdom. It’s okay to ask again…and then get a second opinion.
That does not come naturally to me.
But I’m learning.
Ronald Reagan used to say, “Trust, But Verify.” Apparently, I wandered off before he finished the sentence. So now it’s time for me to master the art of verifying.
I’m going to go ahead and apologize now for just how deeply frustrating this is about to get for everyone involved. Trust me.