The steaming plate of ravioli arrived with the pungent sting of parmesan, its vapor hanging in the air like invisible grit. If I dragged my finger down the wall behind me, I was certain it would come away slick with grease, as if the room itself was sweating cheese. The ravioli wasn’t intended for me, but for the child beside her mother across the table, a child who, at just eight years of age, was already learning to distrust her own body’s alarms.
Her mother reached into her purse and produced a small bottle of lactase supplements: a rescue kit for meals her daughter’s body clearly rejected. “She’s lactose intolerant,” she said matter-of-factly. “Do you know how I found out?”
I shook my head.
“She started losing weight. I didn’t understand why at first. Then I discovered she was skipping lunch at school, starving herself, because every time she ate, her stomach hurt. The menu is always so dairy-heavy: quesadillas, grilled cheese sandwiches, pizza, mac & cheese. So now, I give her lactase supplements so she can eat normally.”
Normally, I thought, the word hanging in the air.
What is normal, really?
We often define it as whatever we’re conditioned to accept, and conditioning can make almost anything seem normal, and benign, even when it runs counter to our instincts, our biology, and our health. Normal doesn’t happen overnight; it’s built, reinforced, repeated.
The dairy industry cemented milk as “normal” by infiltrating America’s schools in 1946. During World War II, farmers had churned out a massive surplus to supply soldiers with powdered milk. When the war ended, adults didn’t want it, so the industry and its allies in Washington found another target: children. With Truman’s signature on the National School Lunch Act, every school meal was made to include dairy. Our kids became the convenient dumping ground for surplus milk, and an entire generation was taught to mistake industrial waste management for nutrition.
It’s counterintuitive, even perverse, how dairy has been woven into our food systems, warping children’s perceptions and training them to distrust their instincts. One of the most important lessons a parent can give a child is to listen to the messages their body sends, the signals that keep them safe and teach them to trust their gut as they grow. The technical term is interoception: the ability to recognize and respond to internal cues like hunger, pain, or discomfort. So what happens when we tell children to ignore those cues, and what are the long-term consequences? What are we really teaching when we say, take this pill to stop your body from rejecting something it was designed to reject, and keep consuming the very foods making them sick? Does it erode trust in bodily awareness? Does it condition self-suppression for the sake of fitting in? Does it set the stage for a disordered relationship with food?
The global market for lactase, an enzyme children naturally produce to digest their mother’s milk, is projected to reach over $300 million by 2032. Rising awareness of lactose intolerance is cited as the cause, but consider this: 65 percent of the global population experiences it. Lactose intolerance is not a condition, disorder, or syndrome; it’s the body’s normal, healthy response to lactose after childhood. Once we are weaned and eating a balanced diet, we no longer need milk, especially from another species. To be clear, cow’s milk and its byproducts are not essential for children’s growth or development, and, in fact, can lay the foundation for diabetes, heart disease and cancer later in life.
What was once a message from a child’s body — don’t eat this, it hurts me — has been converted into a product, a market opportunity. Natural wisdom is now a thing to be overridden, medicated, and monetized.
The steaming plate of ravioli sat between us like a golden calf, the molten cheese bearing the stench of a rotten system drenched in greed and blind tradition. And in front of the false idol was an eight-year-old girl who had no idea why it was tearing her gut apart, a victim caught in the middle of a war between her body, an indoctrinated society, and the corrupt powers that keep our children tethered to the teat.
