Saturday, January 21, 2012

In the Wake of the Gluten-Free vs. Dairy-Free Hostilities

Apparently, while I wasn't paying attention, there was a skirmish between the gluten-free people and the dairy-free people, which the gluten-free people won.

My youngest child, Mikalh, who is one quarter Native American, is lactose intolerant.

We recently made this discovery based on the evidence that both my husband and I are lactose-intolerant, that Mikalh farts all the time and says his stomach hurts, and that his pediatrician told us it was blindingly obvious that he was lactose-intolerant. So we took him off dairy shortly after Christmas.

I know you are wondering how to say his name. It is pronounced  MEE-koll, or as one caveman might say to another "Me call you later." It means "Bear."

Mike and I either tolerate or just go without all the things one eats with dairy. Since Mikalh is only six, I don't expect him to do this. So instead, I am spending what might have been his college savings on almond milk, coconut yogurt, soy cheese and tofu cream cheese.

The thing that surprised me, though is how few choices there were in macaroni and cheese, his favorite item of all time. Hence, I found myself in a store, angrily yelling at boxes of health food macaroni festooned with adorable rabbits, "What? I have six choices of cheese and two types of gluten-free flour but none with soy cheese? Really?"

This is when I developed my theory of gluten-free vs. dairy-free conflict. It seems like seventeen years ago, when I was vegan, there were way more dairy-free choices than there are now, but that all their aisle space has been given over to gluten-free products. This is especially annoying to me since, as someone who suffers from fibromyalgia, I have had to answer the question of my possible gluten-intolerance approximately 20,000 times at this point, since people so frequently assume gluten must likely be the cause of all suffering on this earth (apologies to those of you with actual gluten intolerance here).

Perhaps, though, this is an asshole thing for anyone to say who has a refrigerator filled with this:


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Faith in Ambiguity by Tara Adams is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License