It's going to be legend - wait for it - dairy!

With an exception for those who are lactose intolerant, like how I am (to my despair). I think I developed lactose intolerance during my sophomore year of high school. I say that with a glint of doubt, because 1) I didn’t really know what lactose intolerance did to you, 2) knowing me, I would have probably continued eating dairy products since the side effects weren’t so conspicuous back then and 3) I really love milk, cheese, and all dairy products. Yet apparently, it seems that I’ve been destined to walk this cheese-less path ever since infancy: when I was a baby, one of my doctors told her to feed me soymilk/soy-based formula because I was lactose intolerant. My mother did so obligingly, but realized that as I got older, I was able to consume regular cow milk. And so I did for my life until high school, when I realized that gurgling stomachs and trips to the bathroom after eating milk products weren’t due to my hypothesis that milk was just a good cleanser for me (silly, I know), but that I actually can’t digest it anymore.

In the beginning, it was actually difficult to remember what foods had milk and what foods didn’t. For example, pesto in pasta looks nice and green, but sometimes cream has been used to cook the dish, so then that becomes a no-no. I had to give up ice cream as well, which was an everyday struggle. In fact, I didn’t realize how integral this milk thing was to our society’s dietary desires until that privilege was taken away from me! While it is true that there are alternatives - like Lactaid pills to counter the intolerance, the pills don’t seem to work 100 percent and I’m still left feeling queasy and uncomfortable. Even during my stay in Japan, milk products were more difficult to avoid than I had previously thought. This culture of consuming milk-related products has seeped into the many corners of the world, and I’ve learned to not only face it, but also be pretty vocal about it (ref: my friends) because it does suck, but simultaneously has become a pretty funny running joke. Just to illustrate how often I encounter foods I can’t eat without having less-than-positive effects, here’s a week of food:

Monday:

I was not only invited out for hot chocolate but also for ice cream. Princeton happens to have a well-known ice cream parlor and its signature hot chocolate is also incredibly decadent. Nope and nope. I ran out to another parlor that had hot apple cider and spared my stomach a night.

Tuesday:

An odd day in the week, in which the M-W-F rush isn’t there to bombard and overcrowd the dining halls. Not much for lunch besides the usual salads, but of course, the main entree was chicken parm.

Wednesday:

Decided to try two different places and see if there was more variety. The first place had penne a la vodka (made with milk, mind you). Next place had chicken pot pies as their special dish! DEfeated, I ate a salad and fries.

Thursday

A few words:

Mashed potatoes
Creamed Spinach
Buttermilk fried chicken

Which all sound pretty damn good, but nope, no can do.

Friday

This is totally what I mean when sometimes detecting milk products in certain foods can be more difficult because things don’t obviously look like they have milk in them. There was beef stroganoff and apparently that has milk/cream in it, too! It was too late, the food was on my plate, so it had to be eaten. That aside, even for dinner, parmesan crusted cod fish? Yay, count me out.

The conclusion? Maybe it’s because I’m having a huge deficit of dairy in my life, that I’m so freaking cheesy.

(too real...):