Eating Chocolate

            Last week, I took a deep breath, crossed my fingers, and ate a piece of chocolate. For the first time in decades my tongue experienced the taste of chocolate. It was like a glimpse of heaven.

            For more than twenty years the slightest intake of chocolate, alcohol, caffeine, cultured milk products, nuts, sourdough bread, or aged cheese would inevitably result in a migraine headache – the pain, the vomiting, the ache behind the eyes, the whole schmiel. Even alcohol cooked in a sauce would result in a migraine. Even wine tasted and spit out would result in a migraine. Even decaffeinated coffee, which has a trace of caffeine in it, and non-alcoholic wine, which still has 0.01 percent of alcohol, would result in a migraine. No matter how minute the amount, any of those substances would send me to bed the next day. No medication could touch the pain.

            I don't remember the last time I ate chocolate, but I do remember my last cup of coffee. I was at a café in Greece, sitting at a table under an enormous tree so old its limbs were propped up with boards. Although I knew that drinking even the tiny demi-tasse cup of coffee set before me would, with a 99% probability, keep me in bed the next day, I wanted to taste that deliciously strong Greek coffee, and so I did. I didn’t regret it, though I paid for it the next day.

            Chocolate, alcohol, caffeine, nuts (almonds in particular), yogurt, buttermilk, kefir, sour cream, cheddar cheese, Swiss cheese, Parmesan, Gouda, Gruyere – those were the migraine kickers. If I avoided them, I wasn’t headache-free – I still got freebies, migraines I didn’t pay for by eating the wrong things but that happened anyway – but at least I was preventing the migraines that were deliberately triggered.

            A couple of decades ago I also suddenly developed an allergy to peppers, which gave me not a headache but gastrointestinal uproar. Then one day two years ago I inadvertently ate peppers, hidden in a sandwich. To my amazement, I didn't spend the night going back and forth to the toilet. So I started, slowly, to experiment – a little cayenne here, bell peppers in a salad there. I never again got sick from peppers. The allergy that had suddenly come on had now suddenly gone away. And if my body chemistry had changed in that way, maybe – maybe! – the sensitivity to migraine kickers had changed, too.

            I decided to test the theory. I started with yogurt because I used to love yogurt and because eating yogurt didn’t result in as bad a migraine as drinking wine or coffee or eating chocolate. So one day, when the next day was expendable, I ate yogurt. The next morning I woke up without pain. It was a miracle! I started eating yogurt like mad, as though to make up for two decades without it. Before I went to Sweden last summer, I tested aged cheeses – no migraine. I was free to eat whatever Swedish cheeses I liked. I can eat nuts again, too, and sourdough bread.

            The real test would be with chocolate, alcohol, and caffeine, the three substances that resulted in the worst migraines. It would take courage to test them. When my friend who owns the English Lavender Farm down the road gave me a box of chocolate-covered lavender salted caramels for Christmas, I recognized the opportunity. 

I chose a day when I had nothing pressing to do the next day, and, that evening, I ate a chocolate. The taste was both strange and strangely familiar, as though I were reaching through the mists back to something vague and beautiful that had been lost and now was recovered, a memory, a photograph in sepia tints, the whiff of perfume from rose petals kept in a pewter vase. As with the coffee in Greece, for a moment I thought the migraine might be worth it.

            But when I woke up the next morning – no migraine!

          I am ecstatic. Is it possible that the long, long years of migraine headaches are over? I read somewhere that for most women who suffer migraines, menopause ends that suffering but that for a small percentage of women, the migraines get worse at menopause. Unfortunately, I was one of the latter, but I haven’t had a migraine, freebie or paid for, for many months now. I can eat chocolate, yogurt, nuts, and cheese. Wine and coffee, here I come! I am beginning to feel like a normal person, one who can indulge in the dietary vices as I like or, to put it another way, one who can experience, pain-free, some of the best tastes food has to offer.