一只蜱虫咬了他，从此他不能吃牛肉：七年后，这个营养师自己养起了四百只鸵鸟

Today's story is about an American who now farms ostriches.

First, why he farms ostriches.

His job is researching what people ought to eat.

What other people eat is what he thinks about every day.

In 2017, he was travelling for work and had a beef sandwich at lunch.

Afterwards his skin started going red, and itching.

He found it strange, because the sandwich was perfectly ordinary.

Later a doctor told him: you have become allergic to red meat.

What is red meat?

Beef, lamb, pork — those are all red meat.

But he had been eating it all his life without a problem.

Why not any more?

The reason was a small insect.

It is called a tick, it is tiny, and it hides in the grass.

When it bites you, it puts a kind of sugar from its own body into your blood.

Your body does not recognise that sugar, so it treats it as something bad.

From then on, the moment he eats red meat, his body reacts.

The condition is called red-meat allergy, and it comes from a bite.

What makes it worse is that red meat hides in a lot of places.

If other people are grilling outside and he smells the smoke, it can affect him.

A lot of pills have a coating on the outside, and that comes from animals too.

So even taking medicine, he has to check.

So what can he still eat?

Fish is fine, and chicken and eggs are fine.

That sounds workable, but as he puts it: there are only so many ways to cook a chicken.

He spent seven years on it.

What he wanted was that taste.

Then he found a way.

Ostriches.

An ostrich is the largest bird there is, taller than a person, and it cannot fly.

Here is the key point: an ostrich is not a mammal.

So eating it does not set off the allergy.

And ostrich meat is red.

Cut it open and it looks much like beef.

Cooked, it tastes very close too.

The first time he ate it he said: that taste took me straight back.

Now he does not just eat ostrich. He raises them.

He and some others started an ostrich farm.

The farm has over four hundred ostriches now.

He says he wants to reach seven hundred next year.

He sells the meat as well.

It is not cheap — over twenty dollars a pound.

Here is what I find interesting about this.

What that insect did cannot be undone.

And he did not sit there thinking about beef.

He went and found something his body could accept.

Then he turned that thing into his own work.

Think about it:

There is something you can never have again.

Do you keep thinking about it, or do you go and find a new one?