Amy Pearl used to love meat. Steaks. Hot dogs. You name it. One day, she ate a very nice steak and was rushed to the hospital. She nearly died.

Turns out, Amy had been bitten by a tick and developed a meat allergy called alpha-gal. She can’t eat mammalian meat, or as Amy calls it, the meat of “anything with boobs.” 

We shared Amy's story in part one of our two-part series on living with food allergies, which we called May Contain Nuts. That series is now in our Stitcher Premium archive.

If you heard that episode, you already know that Amy is one of the funniest people on the planet.

This week, Amy draws on her food allergy expertise to answer Sporkful listener questions. How do you navigate an allergy to onions and garlic when one member of a couple has it and the other doesn't? What do you do when your husband won’t stop slopping hummus onto everything you cook? And why won’t Amy accept Dan’s instagram request? 

Dan and Amy are old friends from The Sporkful's WNYC Studios days. Today, Amy hosts the podcast 10 Things That Scare Me, a tiny podcast about our biggest fears. On the show, callers leave anonymous voicemails listing the 10 things that scare them most. Each episode is short – it runs about eight minutes long – but it gets deep quick.