“That’s awesome,” Lovell replied. “I’m so excited.”

Alcocer was excited, too, as usual. The Cornell University graduate was once a captain in the Air Force, where he worked on decoys to confuse enemy missiles and became a Global Positioning System expert who negotiated international treaties on behalf of American interests — heady, scientific stuff. But this job, he said, is just as important as his former military duties. He’s in charge of selling products to a large and once-unknown consumer population: gluten-free America.

“We’ve got food everywhere,” Alcocer said from atop his chair at the expo. “It’s coming out of everywhere. You can’t slow it down. We won’t slow it down.” He paused and smiled. “It’s like I’m selling cars up here,” he chuckled. “How do I get you into a Nature Valley bar today?”

Food companies are always trying to take advantage of the latest dietary trend or health craze. (Low carb, anyone?) But the story of how we got to a place where celiac disease is suddenly mainstream, prevalence rates are rising, perfectly healthy people are opting to eat gluten-free and General Mills is coveting these customers is an especially unlikely business narrative.

I should know. It’s a story I’ve been following for years, ever since I was told I had celiac disease in 1999. I was 26 and until that point healthy. But then I started shedding weight like a sailor lost at sea, and became increasingly gaunt and anemic. So pale, so tired. My doctors told me to prepare for the worst. Cancer, probably. But a biopsy of my small intestine found no tumors in my gut, just withered and destroyed villi. I had celiac disease, a genetic autoimmune disorder. And though it was serious — the disease, when undiagnosed, has been associated with an increased risk of death — I would live. My villi, the tiny, fingerlike protrusions in the small intestine that help the body absorb nutrients, would recover as long as I stayed off gluten, found in wheat, and similar proteins in barley, rye and malt.

But I wouldn’t eat — not really. Gluten-free packaged foods — in which wheat has been replaced by alternative ingredients like rice, sorghum and tapioca flours, among others — were almost impossible to find in the 1990s. Most of what did exist was dreadful: think cardboard. It was also hard to find people who understood the disease itself. Doctors believed it wasn’t much of a problem in this country.

“Nobody really was ready to accept the 1 percent prevalence of celiac disease,” says Dr. Stefano Guandalini, founder and medical director of the University of Chicago Celiac Disease Center, who came to the U.S. from Italy in 1996 and found very little awareness of celiac disease. Even experts ignored it, Guandalini says, noting that a prominent medical textbook published as recently as 1999 questioned how widespread it was. “The chapter on celiac disease,” Guandalini says, “quotes a prevalence of 1 in 10,000 in the U.S. and adds that this is mostly a European condition — and the prevalence is decreasing. This is the formal, official teaching in ’99.”

But Guandalini didn’t buy it. And neither did Dr. Alessio Fasano, another Italian who was practicing at the University of Maryland. The genes were here, Fasano recalls thinking, courtesy of our European ancestors, and so was the gluten, a natural component of wheat that provides the elastic qualities that make for delicious baked goods. But the protein is also difficult to digest. And even a healthy intestine does not completely break gluten down. For those with celiac disease, the undigested gluten essentially causes the body’s immune system to lash out at itself, leading to malabsorption, bloating and diarrhea — the classic gastrointestinal symptoms — but also, at times, joint pain, skin rashes and other problems. In Italy, Fasano routinely saw celiac disease. Surely it was in the U.S. too. Hence, in 1996 Fasano published a paper, asking, in the title, a simple question: “Where Have All the American Celiacs Gone?”