Free Do Cool Sh*t by Miki Agrawal Page A

hot water bottle leaning against my belly to soothe it, I opened up my laptop and did what any modern-day human would do: I googled it.
    It didn’t take me long to figure out what was bothering my stomach. I self-diagnosed myself as lactose intolerant. In my research, I read that one in five Americans is lactose intolerant and that 80 percent of the world is lactose intolerant to varying degrees. Most humans lack the enzyme to break down lactose, which is present in all dairy products. The symptoms include bloating, stomach pain, and gas. Aha! I figured it out! That was easy.
    I then decided I would conduct an experiment: I would not eat dairy for a month and see how I felt. Within a week, the bloating, stomach pain, and gas were gone. (See, Pops? Who needs medical school?) Very quickly though, I began to miss eating a lot of my favorite foods: ice cream, grilled cheese, and most important, pizza. It required every bit of self-restraint not to eat pizza, especially late at night. The scent of slices called to me from every corner of every block of New York City, and I had walk with my head down a lot.
    A few weeks into my dairy experiment, I traveled to a small country town in the South of France. And when you’re in France, you have to eat cheese. It’s blasphemous if you don’t. So I caved and I ate it—a lot of it (I did bring a whole container of Tums with me just in case), and then braced myself for what was to come . . .
    And nothing did. Nothing happened. No bloating, no stomachache, and no pain.
    Huh?
    Why couldn’t I eat dairy at home but could eat it in the French countryside? I asked the proprietors of the farm-style restaurants about the cheese I had eaten. They told me they made the milk right there in their backyard and made the cheese themselves. Interesting.
    The reason my stomach was so happy in France was becoming clear to me. American dairy manufacturers were injecting tons of hormones into the cows so they can produce more milk, giving them antibiotics and feeding them pesticide-filled feed, all of which was affecting the dairy we ate and all of which gave us the stomachaches, bloating, and intolerance.
    I started eating organic and humanely treated dairy to see if that would be OK for my stomach, and sure enough, it was! My stomach (also known as my petri dish) was able to stomach this good kind of dairy. I wondered if others knew this before they swore off their favorite foods, like pizza.
    I started dreaming about pizza. I loved it! I loved what pizza stood for. It stood for inclusion of rich, poor, old, and young. It welcomed all ethnicities. It reminded me of my favorite childhood memories, so many random dates and late-night study sessions. Pizza was a true mash-up of cultures, we ate with our hands, and we laughed and cried with a great pizza pie. It was truly amore.
    I then started researching to see if there were alternatives available. I didn’t really find anything good. I did find one small hole-in-the-wall place in the East Village, but it didn’t offer organic or local dairy. I discovered that pizza is a $32 billion industry, it accounts for 10 percent of American food service sales, and Americans, on average, eat one hundred acres of pizza every single day. Wow.
    OK, if I gave up on pizza because it made my stomach hurt, and one in five Americans is intolerant to American dairy, so they gave up pizza too, it meant that 20 percent of Americans were in the same boat as me. If I missed pizza, then surely some of these 20 percent of the people missed pizza too!
    There it was.
    I needed to open up my own alternative pizzeria, using fresh, local, and organic ingredients, a place where everyone with any allergy can come and eat a wonderful slice of pizza. Gluten intolerant, dairy intolerant, wheat intolerant, whatever, it didn’t matter, anyone would get to eat delicious pizza!
    I daydreamed about having a cozy place where friends could meet. I wanted to work with local farms and serve