For my entire life, I have suffered from severe food allergies. They were discovered early on, after what seemed like a perfectly ordinary morning. My father had a cup of coffee and then kissed his infant child goodbye as he left for work. Soon thereafter, my skin began to turn red and the shape of my father’s kiss became swollen on my cheek. My mother drove me to the hospital in a panic and I was diagnosed with a dairy allergy, my reaction having been triggered by the milk my father had in his coffee. From then on, everything about our relationship with food changed.
Over the years, nearly all of my family members and close friends have had a personal encounter with my allergies. Some accidentally fed me food with dairy, while others simply watched me transition from happily eating a meal to becoming violently ill. And everyone who’s eaten in a restaurant with me has witnessed my CIA like investigations with waiters about their menu.
I have countless memories from my youth where I abruptly left the dinner table in anguish. In college I wound up in the hospital for a week because I took a sip of the wrong drink at a party. And during vacations, I have spent more than a few nights in various countries curled around a toilet, writhing in pain because of translation errors. Despite my best efforts and the vigilance of my family and friends to protect me, I continued to have a few ordeals each year even into adulthood. It’s not clumsiness, but just a matter of time and statistics - of the thousands of meals I eat each year and tens of thousands of ingredients, a few of them are bound to slip through the cracks and be problematic.
Fearing that one mishap would eventually do me in, I decided to do more than build walls and wait. I began to experiment on myself in pursuit of a cure, and in doing so began to understand and face one of my greatest fears. What I discovered was that dairy had shaped considerably more than my eating habits. It had deep psychological consequences on my development, as well as my family and close friends.
As I shared my process of experimentation and discovery with others, I was met mostly with confusion and cautionary resistance. Just as I had, they struggled to understand the full physiological and psychological implications of my disease, and in doing so struggled to empathize with my pain and support my eagerness for action. My pursuit of a cure thus became a pursuit of self discover, growth, and a struggle to be understood.
