I remember, as a teenager, having a discussion with a friend out eating kiwis. She said you could eat the skin. I maintained that you couldn’t – because, well, eating kiwi fuzz burned. Even if it only touched your lips. She looked at me like I was a freak, and that’s when it hit me: perhaps I had a kiwi allergy.
But eating just the fruity insides was fine, I convinced myself. Since it didn’t cause pain.
Having just had a root canal on the left side of my mouth, I had been eating mostly on the right side. The other day at lunch, after eating a kiwi, I noticed a strange thing: the right side of my mouth was … sort of … burning. It wasn’t that bad, and it dawned on me how if my entire mouth was burning, I might not even notice. Like probably every other time in my life that I’ve eaten a kiwi.
On the allergy severity scale, my kiwi allergy is extremely minor: mild burning for 20 minutes after contact. No hives, no need for an epi-pen to open up my airways. Still, though, I think I might pass on kiwis from here on out, because now I will be distracted by the taste of burning.