🌻The magic powder that will solve all my problems

(The onion problems)

Hi friends, what’s new? I have a bit of news: I am now in possession of a magic powder that I can sprinkle on my food that allows me to eat all the garlic and onion you want to serve to me. 

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If we haven’t shared a meal in the last few years, the short backstory is that I have an allium intolerance, meaning I can’t digest onion and garlic, which is a huge pain (pun intended) because they are in everything (and I mean everything). There has never been any prevention or treatment for it. Just a lot of trust and gambling, and a lot of getting poisoned and putting myself to bed to ride it out. 

The other day I saw an ad on Instagram for Fodzyme — an enzyme-containing powder you can sprinkle on food to help you digest certain types of molecules (the F.O.D.s of the FODMAPs for those in the know), including the fructans in garlic and onion that I personally have so much trouble with. I have never clicked on an ad so fast. 

It came in the mail last week. And last Thursday night, Andy made a very oniony chicken pan sauce for dinner, and I had my first intentional bite of onion since 2018. I was fine. The next morning, I was fine. Later that day, I went to lunch and had a salad with actual raw onions on it. I was fine. A third meal test came and went.

I guess can eat garlic and onion now. 

This is obviously life-changing. But for some reason, I don’t feel particularly elated.

Friends keep asking me what foods I’m excited to eat first. But I keep coming up relatively short — it’s become so easy to cook allium-free at home, there’s very few foods I haven’t been able to eat. I guess there’s some junk food that I haven’t had in a while (I am admittedly hype for Doritos and a Big Mac), but otherwise I have already been eating all the delicious things. Even if I had unlimited magic powder, would we start cooking every meal with garlic and onion at home? Absolutely not. Not knowing what we know now.

The main thing that’s going to change are my interactions with other people surrounding food. Never again will someone have a reason to emphatically say to me, “oh I can’t imagine cooking without garlic and onion, how do you manage.” Never again will I politely eat something that I know contains garlic or onion, after the maker assured me it did not (but I peeked at the ingredient label on the counter). Never again will I have my little dishes of separate food at a friends’ house or holiday meal. 

I have sat down to write variations of this allium story so many times, but nothing ever felt quite right. Now that it’s coming to a close, it feels like the time.

This is a story about alliums. But much more than that, it’s about how people react to my not eating them. 

Once upon an onion

Growing up, I always had a finicky stomach. It got worse and worse until my mid-20s when it was bad. I’ll skip the diagnostic saga and borderline-negligent gastroenterologist (we can talk about this all some other time if you want): The culprit was garlic, onion, shallots, leeks, and their relatives — all the alliums. Can’t digest ‘em.

(I actually wrote about how I figured this out for Discover a few years ago if you’re interested: Is Something in Your Diet Screwing With Your Stomach? Here’s How an Elimination Diet Could Help)

When I eat alliums, something goes wonky in my intestines and it hurts. I know what you’re thinking, and it actually doesn’t cause me what I’ll tastefully call “toilet issues.” Just horrible pain and some nausea, typically accompanied by what I believe is some sort of mild panic attack in response to being poisoned. This isn’t “indigestion” like I’m going to eat some Tums and be fine. When it’s bad, it can mess me up for a few days. Cutting out alliums in early 2018 was life-changing.

For the first few years, any quantity would set me off. I couldn’t dip a single French fry in ketchup (onion powder alert) without suffering consequences. “Natural flavors” in lunchmeat could ruin my day. Luckily, Andy is an amazing cook, and switching to an allium-free life at home was surprisingly easy. 

To our great surprise, the vast majority of dishes don’t suffer at all from leaving out the onion and garlic — no substitutions needed. (You don’t believe me, I know — more on that in a moment). Maybe I missed pesto and French onion dip and garlic bread a little, but mostly life went on, and I continued to eat very, very delicious food. No problem, right?

The problem, it turned out, would be everyone else’s reaction. Cook without garlic and onion?! Are you mad?!

Whenever I have the “I can’t eat allium” conversation with someone for the first time, the first thing they do, without fail, is tell me how much they cook with garlic and onion. It’s a weird flex, considering their audience. Almost everyone also seems to think they cook with more garlic and onion than everyone else (statistically impossible), and that this is commendable. I say, “actually, I’ve learned that you can just leave it out,” and they say, “preposterous!” 

(I bet you’re doing it right now. You’re thinking: Leave out garlic and onion? Preposterous!)

One more time: Preposterous!

One of my favorite allium moments was at the tasting for our wedding dinner. We had communicated my dietary restrictions to the venue in advance, and they had assured us they could modify anything we wanted. But when we arrived at the tasting, we learned they hadn’t modified anything. “We can leave the garlic and onion out on your wedding day, of course,” they said. But I couldn’t taste any of the samples, and the samples weren’t actually the recipes they’d be using at the event. Um??!? 

Then the chef came out and actually asked me what I would use to substitute for garlic and onion. The chef!!! I said, uhh, paprika or sage or fennel or turmeric or thyme or dill or do you want me to keep going? Can’t you just leave it out? Like, you’re the chef?

(I don’t remember what I actually said or what the reply was. I’ve blocked it out. And we were very happy with our venue. They gave us another tasting, and the food was absolutely incredible and 100% allium-free. Everyone said it was the best wedding food they’d ever had.) 

The truth about alliums

So even though food without alliums is delicious, navigating a life without alliums is a challenge, to say the least. Here’s four things I learned when we went allium-free:

1. Alliums are in even more packaged food than you think. Onion powder and/or garlic powder are in every condiment and seasoning mix (chili powder!), it’s in goldfish crackers and “original” Sunchips, it’s in plain Kraft mayo, it’s in cans of refried beans and diced tomatoes. It can be in cottage cheese, or in roasted, salted peanuts. If it’s savory, even if it’s “plain,” you gotta read the label.

2. Some things you’d assume have alliums do not. Pizza sauce was the biggest surprise here: A lot of restaurants don’t put garlic or onion in their pizza sauce! Curry is another — it probably will have onion as a veggie but there’s no onion or garlic in the spice mix. Most foods I expected would be ruined or impossible to get without alliums have always remained available to me.

3. You don’t need alliums to cook delicious food. Cooking at home, we haven’t found a single dish that doesn’t work without the onion or garlic. That’s not an exaggeration: Not a single dish. You can just… not use it.

4. It is truly impossible to convince anyone that #3 is true. Even you, dear reader. Even you.

Andy does the cooking at our house, and since he’s not a recipe guy, we never eat the same thing twice. We’ve made Italian, Indian, Chinese, and Thai; we’ve made variations on all our favorite family recipes; we’ve made anything and everything that it’s even occurred to us to make. Unless it’s literally French onion soup or something like that, the other gazillion delicious flavors that exist more than carry any dish you can dream of.

I kid you not, when people eat at our house, they will often say “that’s the best ____ I’ve ever had.” They don’t say “thanks for the food, have any garlic I can add?” 

Yet if I suggest to someone else that they leave out alliums, the reaction is borderline aggressive. Honestly fam, I don’t know what you think is going to happen when you leave it out. People just can’t wrap their brain around cooking without garlic and onion — even professional chefs. 

On the off chance that you are legitimately wondering, here’s how we cook at home without alliums (or I guess, how we would if we were using recipes):

• If the recipe calls for garlic powder or onion powder, leave it out and carry on as usual

• If the recipe calls for a spice blend that includes garlic powder or onion powder, leave it out and add the other spices instead (e.g. instead of your taco seasoning packet, use cumin, oregano, etc.)

• If the recipe calls for a couple cloves of garlic or some diced onion, leave it out and carry on as usual

• If the recipe calls for a LOT of garlic or onion, leave it out and increase the quantity of other items (e.g. to make veggie stock with no onions, you’ll need more carrots. To make a creamy herb garlic sauce without garlic, you’ll want to add more herbs, etc.)

And like, don’t knock it till you try it. Maybe you’ll discover that you love rosemary mashed potatoes even more than you love garlic mashed potatoes, if only you had given them a try! 

How other people cook for me

Despite my above-average food enjoyment at home (thanks Andy), eating out — either at restaurants or friend’s houses — is always a challenge. Everyone means well, but there’s just something about garlic and onion (or is it dietary restrictions in general?) that makes people act weird. 

There are really only six types of people when it comes to cooking allium-free. But before I tell you what they are, I need you to know that I don’t want a single one of you to be offended when you see yourself on this list. This is just my honest lived experience, and I assign no motive behind any of these. Each one just is what it is. 

Here are the six types of people cooking allium-free:

1. The “only a little bit.” This person might leave out the diced white onion, but then confess they went ahead and used various other ingredients that contained garlic or onion. They will be honest about what ingredients they used, and then say that overall, the garlic and onion add up to “only a little bit.” That’s okay, right?

2. The “garlic or bust.” Can’t eat garlic? You get nothing. The allium-free option this person serves is totally plain — devoid of all herbs, spices, sauces, or flavors. Typically, this person is committed to a specific seasoning blend and/or sauce as-is, which everyone else will be eating, but don’t worry, they can leave it off mine.

3. The scaredy cat. The other person serving up flavor-free food is the overly cautious, and they are typically open about their motives. This person doesn’t trust themselves to read ingredient labels, doesn’t trust any ingredient that they don’t know what it is, sees a couple of labels that say “spices,” and decides to serve up a naked chicken breast rather than risk making me sick.

4. The burden-bearer. This person is fully committed to making something delicious and allium-free, but oh, the wringer this task has put them through! This person scoured the internet looking for special certified-allium-free recipes and then went to five different stores to buy specialty ingredients. It took them all day and cost their left arm, but they pulled off this challenging meal, all to accommodate my burdensome dietary restriction.

5. The ostracizer. Although this person is on board with making something allium-free, they will not eat it nor serve it to other guests. This person typically knows how to cook, but for whatever reason prefers to make two separate dishes, sometimes separate elaborate meals, rather than just leave the allium out of whatever they made for the group. They’ll probably send me home with my leftovers.

6. The oblivious. This person won’t serve onion soup with garlic bread, but otherwise assumes everything else is safe. They read zero labels and are dying for me to try their new sriracha aioli.

What a weird allium enneagram. Tag yourself!

My theory for some of these is that garlic and onion are just so, so deeply ingrained in people’s minds as the baseline of all cooking that the option to skip it doesn’t even register. “You can actually just leave out the garlic and onion” lands about the same as me saying “you can actually cook while standing on your head.” So when I’m coming to dinner, people think “how do I get around this for just this one person” rather than “let’s skip the alliums tonight.”

It has nothing to do with me. The grasp of allium on society is a tight one. 

OK feelings time then we can go home

Again, I know that people mean well, I really do. And I am so extremely grateful for every dinner invitation and every meal served to me. But that’s because if you’re inviting me to dinner, I’m coming to spend time with you, not to eat your food.

Am I excited to eat garlic and onion again? Yes, but it’s not at all because I miss garlic and onion (I don’t), or that I’m sick of worrying that I might become physically ill (I’m used to it). It’s 100% the weird social aspects. 

In fact, I’ve been so sick of these interactions that I’d already started to occasionally keep my allium intolerance to myself. Sometimes I’d just rather eat the dang onion than have to sit in a corner with my stupid special food that no one else will touch, that the cook went to great lengths to make special for me, that’s going to make me sick anyway because they forgot to read one of the labels. I’m a burden and I still get poisoned very regularly, so what’s the point. (FYI, I don’t tell you when it happens.)  

Anyway. Here we are. I can eat garlic and onion now! Yay!

It feels almost bittersweet. It’s like I’ve always been the kid with the ugly nose, and you’ve been making fun of me, but now I’ve finally gotten plastic surgery. The problem is certainly solved, but maybe “happy” isn’t quite my feeling.

I do think this allium experience has made me better at responding to other people’s issues. It’s made me realize that “I’d never survive if I had [your thing]” is not as funny (or original) as you think. It’s made me realize how important it is, when sharing a meal, to actually share the meal. And how good accommodating someone, without making a big fuss, can make a person feel. 

Whatever your thing is, I hope you find your magic powder, too. But until that happens, I hope I can at least not make you feel any worse about it than is completely necessary. Probably it’s not even that big of a deal, it’s not like you’re asking me to cook without alliums or something preposterous like that.

✌️

Special thanks to JGW for helpful feedback on this post.