Melanie Persson: The Coeliac Cook Who Rebuilt the Food She Missed

Melanie Persson went into the endoscopy convinced the whole thing was a mistake. She felt fine, and when a routine check-up flagged coeliac disease, she did not really believe it. Then she came round from the procedure and, as she tells it, was told there was no need to wait for the biopsy. “Look, I don’t even need to see the results,” she remembers the gastroenterologist saying. “I can tell you definitely have coeliac disease.” That was in 2016, when she was in her early twenties. Ten years on, Persson is the Melbourne cook behind @theveryhungrycoeliac, a Coeliac Australia ambassador, and, in her publisher’s words, the first contestant to compete on MasterChef Australia as a gluten-free cook. On 29 September her third cookbook, The Very Hungry Coeliac’s Gluten Free Bakes, came out. She is a cook and an author, not a dietitian or a doctor.

The diagnosisA shock with no symptoms

Feeling well made the news harder to absorb, not easier. “Although I knew it was important to cut gluten out, it was hard to be strict when eating gluten wouldn’t make me feel terrible,” she says in her Coeliac Australia ambassador profile, adding that she has since developed a very strong reaction to it. Food had been the centre of her life since she was a kid. She remembers sitting in her gastroenterologist’s office as the list of things she could no longer eat, and all the places gluten hides, kept growing. “I’m just sitting there [thinking], ‘Well, wait a minute, my whole world has just been turned upside down,’” she told Refinery29 Australia in 2022. “For maybe a year or two, I felt really defeated. You know, there was no joy in food. There was no joy in cooking.”

It did not help that plenty of people then treated “gluten-free” as a fad. Her answer now is plain: “please take this seriously because a couple of crumbs can make me really, really sick.” How small a couple of crumbs can be is something researchers have actually measured; more on that below.

The kitchenFifty goes at a dumpling wrapper

What got her out of that slump was competitiveness. “I’m quite a competitive person I think and eventually I just got sick of not being able to eat all the foods I love,” she said. The foods she loved came from an unusually wide map. Born in Perth, she moved with her family to Nagano Prefecture in Japan at two, grew up in Dunsborough in Western Australia and spent a year in Milan after high school, according to her MasterChef contestant profile. Karaage, Japanese fried chicken, is “a childhood favourite of mine,” she wrote in a recipe she shared with ABC Radio, and one restaurants rarely make safely, since the chicken is usually marinated in soy sauce.

So she taught herself. “I often feel like I’m flying a bit blind, experimenting and figuring things out for myself,” she told the blog Gluten-Free Foodee in 2022. Most of what she knew, she said, came from social media. After her diagnosis, local Facebook groups and online creators taught her a lot about living with coeliac disease, and she started posting her own recipes partly to give something back, especially to people who had just been diagnosed. Today more than 260,000 people follow her on Instagram. Dumplings are still her favourite thing to eat (“I could eat dumplings for breakfast, lunch and dinner!”), and by Refinery29’s account the wrappers took her 50 goes. “Now there’s this excitement in figuring out how to do it better,” she said. “Every time I nail something, it’s exciting.”

The showA pipe dream, answered on Instagram

She had watched MasterChef Australia for years. “It was kind of like a pipe dream,” she said in 2022. “And then I was actually diagnosed with coeliac disease … so I thought it was completely off the table, but this year, the producer actually reached out to me on my Instagram … and encouraged me to do it.” That season, Fans & Favourites, put 12 new cooks up against 12 returning favourites. She competed as a gluten-free cook, and Network 10’s recipe pages from her season include her wonton soup and a gluten-free choux lemon meringue.

Watching herself on television was “really bizarre,” she said, partly because she was now representing coeliacs in front of a national audience. The part that got to her was the families. “To hear that people who have children who are as young as five, six or seven [with coeliac disease], who are watching and excited to see themselves represented on TV really hits home,” she told Refinery29. “It means a lot to me.”

The booksFrom feasts to bakes

Her contestant profile said she dreamed of publishing cookbooks. There are now three. The Very Hungry Coeliac (Affirm Press, 2023; published in the US by Hardie Grant as The Very Hungry Celiac) collected 75 recipes for the dishes she had missed, from fresh pasta and udon to baklava. Gluten Free Feasts (Hardie Grant, 2025) arranged more than 80 recipes around occasions: dim sum, taco night, a fish-shop feast. The handle nods to Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which fits her other life. When Deakin University’s writing and literature blog profiled her as a PhD candidate in 2022, her thesis was about picture books that bring non-living things to life, and her publisher says she completed her PhD in children’s literature in 2025. It is a doctorate in literature, not medicine.

In July 2024 she cut into a test croissant and found the honeycomb of layers she had assumed gluten-free dough could never make. “I haven’t cried over something I’ve made since I nailed gluten-free dumplings for the first time,” she wrote. “I was convinced it was impossible, beyond what is achievable for gluten-free cooking. And I’ve never been so pleased to be wrong.”

The Very Hungry Coeliac’s Gluten Free Bakes takes that further. Hardie Grant published it on 29 September: more than 80 cakes, breads and treats, from pistachio biscotti and a Japanese roll cake to almond croissants, pasteis de nata and a chilli olive fougasse. “It’s publication day!” she posted. “My third book, Gluten Free Bakes, is officially out in the world. I hope you guys love it!” When she announced it in August, she said the book takes the skills from her first two and “channels them into cooking for pleasure, fun and nostalgia rather than necessity.” If someone had told her in 2023 that two more books were coming, she added, “I would’ve laughed in their face.”

Rebuilding the food a diagnosis takes away has a proud tradition. Heather Van Vorous did it for IBS, the pastry veteran Dédé Wilson did it for the low-FODMAP diet, and in Melbourne the food photographer Georgia McDermott has done it for a gut that gets along with neither gluten nor onion and garlic. Persson is clear about why it matters. “As the GF community is so often overlooked, we need to be loud about it and our need for good food!” she wrote last year.

What the research actually measuredHow small a crumb can be

Coeliac disease (celiac, in the US) is an immune reaction to gluten that damages the lining of the small intestine. Coeliac Australia estimates that about 1 in 70 Australians have coeliac disease but only about 20% of them are diagnosed. Worldwide, a 2018 meta-analysis of 96 studies found coeliac antibodies in 1.4% of people tested and biopsy-confirmed disease in 0.7%. The only treatment is a strict, lifelong gluten-free diet, according to Coeliac Australia, which also advises starting that diet only after a specialist has confirmed the diagnosis, because avoiding gluten beforehand can make the tests unreliable.

So how small is a crumb? In a 2007 double-blind trial, 49 adults with biopsy-proven coeliac disease who had been gluten-free for at least two years took a daily capsule containing 0, 10 or 50 milligrams of gluten for 90 days. In the 50 mg group, the ratio of villus height to crypt depth, a standard measure of damage to that lining, fell by about 20%. In the 10 mg group it barely moved on average, although one person taking 10 mg had a clinical relapse. The researchers concluded that contaminating gluten should be kept below 50 mg a day. That is why labels matter: in Australia, any food carrying a gluten-free claim must contain “no detectable gluten,” Coeliac Australia notes. These findings are about the disease, not any recipe or book; anyone who suspects coeliac disease should talk to their own doctor about testing.

The disclosure mapWhere her interests sit

Persson earns part of her living from gluten-free food, and it is worth naming plainly. She is the author of three cookbooks, the second and third published by Hardie Grant, and her Instagram bio and link-in-bio point readers to buy them. She has a Buy Me a Coffee page where followers can “donate to support this work,” her link-in-bio has carried Amazon affiliate links for kitchen tools such as a pasta maker and a dumpling folder, and it takes brand collaboration enquiries. She is also an ambassador for Coeliac Australia, the national coeliac charity. She is not a dietitian, a doctor or any kind of clinician, and her recipes are recipes, not medical advice. Gut Health Times has no commercial relationship with her or her publishers. This profile is educational, is not medical advice, and was prepared without input from her.