Vegan blogs are heralding new research showing that more people may be allergic to mammalian meat than was previously thought. Vegan.com linked to this Reuters article and ActiVeg linked to Medical News Today.

However, a Washington Post article that ran last October was more informative than either of these recent ones.

The new articles say that people with sudden and unexplained anaphylaxis might be allergic to meat, but might not realize it because it takes hours for their anaphylaxis symptoms to show up, unlike with allergies to nuts or shellfish, which strike minutes or seconds after consumption. Scientists did a study of 60 people with unexplained anaphylaxis and found that almost half of them were allergic to alpha-galactosidase, an enzyme found in meat.

These studies didn’t investigate the cause, but The Washington Post article from last year links the sudden development of a meat allergy to tick bites, which cause some people to develop anti-bodies that react to alpha-galactosidase.

Alpha-galactosidase also happens to be the active ingredient in Beano and Bean-Zyme, supplements that help the body digest the oligosaccharides in beans and cruciferous vegetables. So if you find yourself suddenly allergic to meat after a barefoot walk through the forest, you’ll have to eat more beans and vegetables from now on and you won’t even be able to digest them.

This is bad news for meat-loving forest dwellers, but great news for vegans. Now there’s a new possibility for animal activism: releasing hoards of ticks into steak houses and fast food restaurants. Heartless omnivores will develop meat allergies and be forced to eat humanely whether they give a damn about animal lives or not.

No longer will carrots or broccoli be the cliched symbols of veggie life. The image most commonly associated with veganism will be the tick.