He never met a garlic dish he didn’t like. : Lovers of the Stinking Rose Have No Use for Mouthwash

The Lovers of the Stinking Rose are different from you and me.

They eat more garlic.

As Charles Perry, an unabashed fan of the redolent plant, explains, he never met a garlic dish he didn’t like.

Perry, a free-lance food writer who lives in San Fernando, prefers his pasta pungent and his salad laced with chopped garlic greens. He is the kind of guy who starts a meal with garlic-perfumed hummus and finishes it off with a nice slice of garlic cheesecake, with perhaps a glass or two of garlic wine to wash it all down.

Indeed, Perry has even been known to indulge in the occasional vodka gartini, made by squeezing the juice of two cloves of garlic into iced vodka. As he explains, a proper gartini is served with a pickled garlic clove on a toothpick, instead of a twist. After your second gartini, you don’t care whether it was shaken or stirred.

Perry, 44, who is the restaurant columnist for the Orange County Edition of The Times, is also the head of the Southern California chapter of the Lovers of the Stinking Rose, an international society of thousands of people who love garlic and don’t care who knows it.

Of course, no one who eats garlic evidently cares who knows it.

But the lovers take their passion for the pungent plant a step further. Culinary activists, they once held a press conference to protest a Signal mouthwash commercial that implied that the heartbreak of garlic breath could be cured by a swish or two of Signal. “You got something against garlic breath?” the lovers demanded to know.

According to Perry, the society has about 200 members in the Los Angeles area. A couple of dozen are active members who attend monthly garlic dinners in local restaurants and get together for informal “gar-lucks,” as the group calls its potluck suppers.

A few members, including Perry, are so committed to the cause that they are willing to risk the scorn of the uninitiated by dressing up as heads of garlic on ceremonial occasions, such as the annual Doo Dah Parade. The society enters a float in the Pasadena parade each year, graced by a Garlic Princess, who tosses whole garlic heads to the breathless crowd.

Perry says that he learned to love garlic at his mother’s knee.

“She put it in everything but dessert,” he recalls. You probably think that means Mom was Italian or Jewish. Wrong. Mrs. Perry is Mayflower WASP, her boy reports.

“But her next-door neighbors were Italian and grew their own garlic,” he says. “She and her sisters used to sneak over there for garlic sandwiches. Yum-yum.”

Like his mother before him, Perry is shameless about running next door to borrow a cup of garlic (his Valley neighbors grow their own year-round).

Not that he’s a fanatic. If the truth be known, he’s not crazy about mocha ice cream cake with garlic sauce and some of the other desserts served at the society’s dinners. As he praises most faintly, “They don’t taste awful, especially if you’ve been eating a lot of garlic.”

Garlic isn’t really a member of the rose family, Perry points out. It is related to the lily.

And it was highly regarded as a folk medicine long before it was valued as a foodstuff. Unlike most things that go nicely with red wine, garlic has marked germicidal properties. Before World War II, when the United States feared it might be dangerously dependent on German-made drugs, American scientists studied the feasibility of using garlic as an antibiotic, says Perry, who is an avid historian of food.

“You can even use garlic to treat athlete’s foot,” he claims, a contention best not dwelled upon.

Perry and his fellow lovers are now gearing up for the Fourth Annual Los Angeles Garlic Festival, a weeklong celebration of the controversial joys of garlic to begin July 13.

In his view, L.A.’s festival, which he describes as “restaurant-based,” is superior to the better known Gilroy fete. “It’s not garlicky enough,” Perry says of Gilroy’s annual fair, which combines homage to the stinking rose with a large dose of local boosterism.

Perry likes the fact that the local festival concentrates on food, specifically, garlic-dense dishes devised by chefs from 30 Southern California restaurants. As he puts it, “There are no rides.”

Perry concedes that Gilroy, where most of the nation’s garlic is grown and processed, is unique, however. As he says, “Gilroy’s a town you can recognize when you’re driving through it in the middle of the night.”

Playfully paranoid on the subject, Perry suggests that “vampire interests” are behind the societal bias against garlic, or at least those who eat it without forewarning their companions. “It’s like any other political issue,” he says. “You have to ask yourself, ‘If garlic is so good and so good for you, who is benefiting from the prejudice against it?’ ”

A believer in what he calls garlic diplomacy, Perry refuses to comment on the wisdom of the folk adage, “Garlic is better than 10 mothers,” which is also the title of garlic’s “Gone With the Wind,” a film on garlic’s glories by Les Blank.

“Too controversial,” he says.

But he is most frank when asked if he’s ever been involved with someone who likes garlic less than he does.

“No one I’d see again.”