Made the decision last night to go totally dairy-free. No milk, no cheese, no sour cream, no butter, no nothing. This is incredibly difficult and ironic, as I grew up surrounded by dairy farms, my grandfather worked for a dairy, and I absolutely love dairy products.
But one, I'm lactose-intolerant and although I've been trying to get along with popping a bunch of lactose pills when I eat dairy, it's just not working. And two, my son appears to be much more seriously allergic to milk. Not like anaphylactic shock allergic, but it seems to cause massive overproduction of mucus. I gave him a small dish of mac'n'cheese on Thursday and by Friday morning he sounded like Darth Vader with a chest cold. And it's not the first time it's happened. We had already cut out liquid milk from his diet, but I was testing to see how he was with milk byproducts.
The thing is....as someone for whom cheese is a delicious gastrointestinal landmine, it's a f**king nightmare to avoid cheese if you eat out or buy processed food in America. It's in EVERYTHING. There's an actual dairy lobbying firm (funded in part by the US government) that works with restaurants to find new ways to put more cheese in our food. They're the people behind the idea of "hey, a pizza with triple cheese isn't good enough. How about we put cheese
inside the crust too?" NY Times did a
good piece on this last year.