What's up? My name's Morgan Pfeiffer. I'm 23 years old and live in the good old Chicago suburbs.
Some people eat to live. I live to eat. Food has been a passion of mine ever since I was little. I have journals filled with childhood vacation memories, not about what we saw or what we did but about where we went to eat and what I ordered. Instead of watching Power Rangers I was watching America’s Test Kitchen. So, believe me when I tell you my world was rocked when I found out I had an intolerance.
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Now, everyone has heard of Lactose Intolerance and everyone knows what an allergy is, but I have neither. I have CMPI IgE-mediated, and it makes me sound like a diva. It’s an abnormal reaction by the body’s immune system to protein found in cow’s milk. The immune system normally protects our bodies from harm caused by bacteria or viruses. In CMPI, the immune system reacts unusually to the protein found in cow’s milk. Basically, my body is confused. It mistakes the proteins in milk as dangerous stuff, causing pain, nausea, and the ever dreaded (and still hilarious) diarrhea.
It started in high school as stomach aches. They happened almost every Friday night. In my family, Friday night is pizza night. I thought it was just the grease and took to blotting each slice I ate with a napkin. But the pain continued, even when I ate those dry-as-cardboard oven pizzas, and they started getting worse. One night, we had spaghetti and I got a stomach ache. I thought, “Okay, so it’s the marinara sauce my body doesn’t like”. Then the next day, I had a stomach ache after eating a bowl of cereal. One thought went screaming through my mind; gluten. FOR THE LOVE OF BREAD! Please don’t let it be gluten!
After doing some Sherlock Holmes style research, I figured out it was dairy. The cheese from the pizza, the milk from the cereal, and it wasn’t the spaghetti that gave me a stomach ache, it was the glass of milk I had with dinner. And just like that, my food centered world was thrown out of whack. I grew up on milk, I was obsessed with string cheese, and don’t even get me started on ice cream. I was in denial for a bit, putting up with the pain so I could eat what I loved, but then the pain got worse.
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I gave in and decided to cut out dairy from my life, but only for a week! Just to test the waters and see if that really was the issue. And like some weird magic trick, no more pain. I thought, “Maybe it was just a bug? Some weird stomach thing I needed to get out of my system?”. So, I had a piece of cheese, and two hours later was crying on the couch.
I completely had to re-teach myself about food. What exactly was bugging me? Why was it bugging me? What can I eat? What can’t I eat? Can I make it at home? Can I ever feel comfortable ordering food at a restaurant again?
If you have these questions or are just interested in dairy free living, welcome to my blog! I’ll be posting about the research I had to do in order to live pain free, the products I now use in place of dairy, recipes I have perfected over the years, and anything else dairy free. Despite the pain, confusion, and hassle that I’ve had to go through, I still can’t kick my love of the culinary arts. Because at the end of the day, Food Is Good.