Let's Remember...

 This is is a picture of my father; Lawrence Corley Davis.  I am not sure how old he was here, but he was a very handsome man, with bright blue eyes and very decided dietary ideas.  

I won't go too much into the back story, because in light of my recent alpha-gal syndrome diagnosis my focus here is going to be on food, but to set the scene; when I came into being we lived on a 5 acre farm in N. Calif.  There were two houses on the property, my dad, mom, brother and I lived in one, and my dad's mother lived in the other. They were very much farmers; had a milk cow, raised a large garden every year, preserved by canning or freezing...etc.  My Grandmother Davis passed when I was about a year old, but my dad continued with the farming; with cow and garden and even a pony.  When the cow had a bull calf it would be butchered at a certain age and put in the freezer.  

When I got about 5 years old my dad was in his 50s (he was 46 when I was born) and decided that keeping up with a cow was a bit much, and the pony was sold as well.  

It was about that time that he decided that beef, red meat of any type, was of the devil, as it were.  Haha.  On top of this he refused to have anything to do with consuming pork, due to the parasites the meat can carry.  So my mother was forced to fix meals with proteins of either fins or feathers (which I am now confined to due to alpha-gal syndrome-can you see where this is leading).  On occasion she would sneak ground sausage or ground beef into spaghetti or burgers, but it was a rare thing.  I remember the first time I ever had a beef steak was when I stayed overnight with a friend when I was about 11 or 12 maybe. I wasn't sure what to think of it. 

In my younger years my dad's brothers would come up in the summer and they would all go surf-fishing and catch buckets of small fish that we would clean and freeze.  So for a few months afterwards we would have fried fish.  My dad would never fish in any other manner, but occasionally a friend or family member would bring us a salmon from one of the rivers.  My mom was not a fan of fish though.  In her younger, single years she had worked in a fish canning factory in southern California, and that kind of killed her enthusiasm for fish.  Though I remember as a kid I had more tuna sandwiches than PBJ, but that's neither here nor there.  

At some point, likely around the time he got rid of the cow, he also decided that milk was bad for you.  He always said it caused kidney stones.  He may have had a point, but mom always had milk in the fridge, perhaps in the belief that kids needed milk.  I grew up drinking the occasional glass of milk for supper, and eating cold cereal with milk in the mornings.  I don't have kidney stones as of yet, but the past 10 or more years I have not consumed much liquid milk at all.  So...there's that.   

So what I am driving at here is that I was raised not eating beef or pork, so this alpha-gal syndrome diet isn't that far off from what I grew up eating, and there are enough milk alternatives that I won't miss it all that much.  I do miss real cheese though. And that is mostly for cooking; lasagnas and pizzas and the like. Alternative cheeses get close, but can never replace the real stuff in taste or consistency.  I miss baked goods that have dairy products in them.  

Life will go on, I will adjust, but in the meantime I can thank my dad for having inadvertently prepared me for an alpha-gal syndrome diet.