Restaurants, Food Industry Adjusting
Editor’s note: This week we resume our series on alphagal syndrome with a look at how restaurants and the food industry are responding. Another installment on pending federal legislation, research and how local communities could respond is in the works for next week.
By Allie Goolrick
John Stollard, a long-time Lexington caterer and chef, got his brand new keys to the old Southern Inn on South Main Street last month. Next year, he plans to fulfill a decades-old dream to open a steak and whiskey tavern, The Legacy, in the beloved space.
The same week he got the keys, Stollard was diagnosed with alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), a tick-borne allergy to red meat.
AGS is triggered by a bite from the lone star tick, which is extremely common in the Shenandoah Valley. A bite can cause people to have an ongoing allergic reaction to a sugar molecule, alpha-galactose, found in mammal meat. The allergy can cause severe reactions to mammal products, including gastrointestinal issues, hives, rashes, and even anaphylactic shock. The allergy often lasts for years, and there is little standard treatment currently available other than avoiding all mammal- derived products.
When Stollard was diagnosed, he said the only thing he could do was laugh.
“I just said, ‘Wow, the universe has got a wonderful sense of humor.’ That’s the only way I could react, you know?” Stollard said. “It’s like, ‘Alright. Heard. Noted.’ I just have to make those adjustments.” Luckily, Stollard said he has a relatively mild reaction to alpha-gal and can still handle and cook with red meat.
But with the new restaurant, he recognized an opportunity to address what seems like a growing problem in the community.
The Legacy’s website, which launched last week, makes it clear that people with AGS will be able to eat at the restaurant, both with food free of alpha-gal and with precautions in place to avoid crosscontamination.
“We’ll have options. There might be a section called fins and feathers,” Stollard said. “We’re just going to try to make sure that we can accommodate as many people as possible. I’m still taking a deep dive into it, and obviously when it comes to the restaurant, I’m going to be uber vigilant.”
For years, restaurants all over the country have catered to dietary restrictions like gluten and lactose allergies, but several existing local restaurant owners told The News-Gazette that in the past few years, they have had to shift how they run their kitchens to accommodate an increasing number of people with AGS.
“Two years ago, no one talked about it. There was like this little thing, and now I hear about it every week,” said Bill Harden, owner of Harden’s and Legendary Eats.
Harden’s head chef, Matt Schaffner, said the kitchen now goes through a rigorous process to keep mammal meats and products apart, using separate cutting boards and pans.
Schaffner, who is originally from Texas, said he’d served customers with AGS before, but never so frequently.
“It was something you would encounter like once a month,” Schaffner said. “Here, I feel like we probably serve what at least five people a week with alpha-gal. So yeah, it’s a pretty common thing.”
There’s An App For That Even when AGS patients are not trying to dine out, finding food that doesn’t spark an allergic reaction is tough.
A lot of food at the local grocery store that can possibly trigger an allergic reaction in people with AGS – especially those who are highly sensitive – have complicated names like magnesium stearate. That makes it hard to determine what is safe to eat. Alpha-gal is not currently required to be listed as a major allergen on standard food labels, according to the Alpha-Gal Alliance, a nonprofit dedicated to advocating and helping people navigate AGS.
Bobbi Lahah, an avid pickleball player who lives just outside of Lexington, was diagnosed with AGS last November.
Lahah quickly plunged into researching ingredients at the store. She was surprised to find mammal products in places one wouldn’t expect, like medicine capsules and sugar, which is filtered through bone char. Lahah even discovered that carrageenan, a compound in a lot of vegan food, which is supposedly safe for people with AGS, also can set off an allergic reaction. Even dryer sheets can be a problem: many conventional dryer sheets contain beef tallow that can cause skin irritation in people with AGS.
“There are things that you wouldn’t think were made from mammal, but they are, or they could be, so you have to do research,” Lahah said.
“It’s really eye-opening how many ingredients are in some of the foods we eat.”
As cases of AGS seem to grow, so do resources around the syndrome. Several new phone apps now help AGS patients navigate ingredient lists on food labels in the local grocery store.
The Fig app allows allergy sufferers to filter based on their condition and scan labels on food products. It then rates what customers are buying as green, yellow or red by risk level. AlphaGal Guard and IngrediCheck apps also scan barcodes for AGS triggers.
There are also growing AGS communities on social media where people can share tips and recipes. The Alpha Gal Alliance lists a dedicated Facebook group in at least 40 of the 50 states.
Lahah said that as relieved as she is to know what is in her food, there’s a common theme in alpha-gal-free foods: it’s expensive. Lahah said a vegan chocolate cake at Wegmans ran her $32. Even vegan cheese is a few more dollars compared to regular cheese.
Unfortunately, ticks don’t discriminate based on income, and higher prices could present a challenge for people with AGS in lower socioeconomic brackets. According to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) does not provide increased benefits for people managing food allergies, despite the fact that allergy-free foods often cost more.
But one Virginia-developed solution proves that despite the higher expense, people with AGS who can afford it will travel far and wide to get allergy-free meat: enter alphagal- free pork.
Made In Virginia: GalSafe Pigs
This past February, Lahah learned through one of her Facebook groups that alphagal- free pork, trademarked as GalSafe pork, was on sale at a pop-up market at the Bedford County Cooperative. The area is one of the leading hotspots for AGS in the country, according to the CDC.
She was stunned to find a line around the block of people who wanted the genetically- modified meat. Some had come from hundreds of miles away.
“We were probably 30, 40 people deep, and there were people behind us,” Lahah said. She got there early and still found that some things had sold out.
But Lahah said it was worth the trip.
“It is nice to have an option other than chicken and fish,” she said. “I’m rationing it now.”
The development of Gal-Safe pork has a fascinating Virginia origin story that has nothing to do with the dinner table.
In 2003, a regenerative medicine and biotechnology company called Revivicor Inc., which is based in Blacksburg, developed genetically modified pigs with the goal of using them for human organ transplants.
Revivicor, best known for cloning Dolly the Sheep in 1996, was acquired in 2011 by United Therapeutics, a U.S. biotech focused on organ manufacturing.
In the process of trying to develop pig-to-human organ transplants (which is called, in true sci-fi form, xenotransplantation), scientists discovered that alpha-gal sugar found in pigs can trigger immediate organ rejection in people. So, they bred the molecule out of pigs with the hopes of being able to transplant entire organs like kidneys.
In 2009, just 150 miles away at the University of Virginia, allergist Dr. Thomas Platts-Mills documented the first known cases of AGS.
David Ayares, senior vice president of xeno research and development at United Therapeutics, said in an interview with The News-Gazette that his team connected with Platts-Mills in 2013, partly because people who worked for the company had their own friends and family who had developed the allergy.
“It’s just it’s kind of an amazing story,” Ayares said. “You know, here we are developing these pigs for xenotransplantation and organ replacement, and (we discover) they had another application.”
That application was pork that was safe for people with AGS to eat.
The Food and Drug Administration and the U.S. Department of Agriculture approved Revivicor’s “GalSafe” pork in December of that year. At first, Revivicor gave the meat away on a compassionateuse basis for more than 2,700 AGS patients who signed up for it.
At that time, the company only had a few hundred pigs. But Ayares said that before the end of next year, they’ll have more than 10,000 alpha- gal free pigs going into the food chain. Last year, the FDA approved unlimited production of the pigs, and the USDA also approved Revivicor for agricultural production, so now the company can raise the pigs on a normal farm instead of in a biomedical facility.
As of 2025, there are only a handful of distributors of Gal-Safe pork, including Amaroo Hills Farms in North Carolina and Washington County Meat Packing and Livestock in Bristol, Va., which is where the GalSafe pork in Bedford County came from.
Ayares said the meat goes so fast the companies don’t even have to advertise it. “It’s all just word of mouth,” he said. “You don’t need to market it. I mean, this allergy is so much bigger than it’s currently recognized for. Probably everyone in Lexington knows someone who has the disease in their family, part of their friends and family. It’s incredible how prevalent it is.”
Keith Fleenor, the manager, owner and operator of the Washington County Meat Packing plant, said he sold out of 700 pounds of pork in about three hours at the popup this past February. The line was so long that some people had to leave before they got their chance to even make a purchase. He said he’s had people travel from as far away as New Jersey. The company is planning another pop-up in Bedford County next month.
“A lot of people are really satisfied to get [GalSafe pork],” he said. “It’s one of those things that helps people, so that’s how we got involved.”
Speaking for Revivicor, Ayares is very clear that they are in the businesses of developing alpha-gal free pigs for transplants, not food production. But they also see the benefits of providing safe food and other alpha-gal free products like medicine capsules, which are sometimes made with pork gelati, for AGS patients.
“I think it’s there’s something like 250,000 FDA-approved drugs and more than 60% of those contain mammalian protein,” Ayares said. “So now that we have pigs in an agricultural environment and we can produce thousands of them, the medical products are something that can start coming from these pigs, whether it’s heart valves or heparin or collagen. The door is open for those types of biomedical products and pharmaceutical products being developed.”
