Why don't Asians do dairy foods?

"East Asian cuisine not containing much cheese is just as odd as European cuisine not containing much soy. It's simply a product of tradition and accessibility." Wil Fulton

We had the family over for dinner last night, including my niece's Chinese/Vietnamese - actually Australian, boyfriend. We always have a cheese course - it's a family favourite and our Asian guest tucked in with the rest of us. But it did make me think about the lack of anything dairy related in Asian food, so I asked why - with particular reference to cheese.

For it seemed to me that milk is such a basic food. People all over the world keep animals of some kind (well not quite everyone, but most of the world's population) and to my ignorant self, it also seemed to me that most of them drank milk from their animals, be it cows, sheep, goats, yaks, camels - whatever, and many of them made cheese or yoghurt or some such from the milk. But not the Asians - although when I thought more about it I realised that I really meant East Asians, because the Indians do have yoghurt and paneer - and probably other cheese things too.

My son proposed the notion that Asia was in the tropics and that it was too hot to store the cheese to ripen it. I suggested caves (and I still think I am right about this, although he dismissed the idea saying they were still too hot). So as usual I 'caved' in (excuse the pun) - but as I thought about it I thought that not all of Asia is tropical anyway. Some of it - Japan, Korea, northern China is actually quite cold. So I don't think that theory is right - although now that I have read about it a bit, I see that he is not entirely wrong. And you don't need cool to produce yoghurt or cottage cheese types of cheese.

There seem to be several theories.

The main one is the lactose intolerance theory - though this one seems to me to be a chicken and egg kind of thing. The science says that humans are 'normally' lactose intolerant - except for when we are drinking breast milk. Breast-feeding done, we become lactose intolerant because we don't need milk anymore. And:

"Milk combines horribly with just about everything, while supplying vastly too much calcium and not enough magnesium." Huffington Post

So if we are all naturally lactose intolerant - why are we in the west not? The scientists propose that the basic need for calcium and Vitamin D + let's not forget, protein, can be derived from leafy greens, fish, sunlight and meat. In Europe, back in pre-history it was too cold for the leafy greens, the sunlight and the fishing. So they turned to milk for these things and for the protein, because there were also not as many animals to hunt. I'm not totally convinced by this, because surely lots of Asia had an ice age too, and I do not find it convincing that we didn't fish, or that there weren't animals to hunt. There would surely have been sufficient for the much smaller population back then. And even if it's cold you can have sunlight. Witness today here for example. And I don't think of China being particularly sunny - maybe the tropical countries of south-east Asia and the southern part of China, but not the bulk of China - or Japan. I think of them as being much like most of Europe really. But of course I could be wrong. I have never been there. It is true though that some 90% of East Asians are lactose intolerant - which is a huge percentage.

The other reasoning behind the lactose intolerant theory is evolution. As agriculture progressed in the west and we began to use dairy products because they made people stronger and fitter, those people that were lactose tolerant survived better than those that were not, and so over time the lactose tolerant became the norm. Survival of the fittest and all that. This I find logical. So if the Chinese were not drinking milk, then they wouldn't have gone through that particular evolutionary process. It's sort of a chicken and egg thing though. Which came first, the lactose intolerance, or the lack of dairy in the diet producing lactose intolerance? If the East Asians did not eat dairy, then their evolutionary direction would have taken them away from tolerating dairy.

Theory no. 2:

"Chinese geography, with its hilly terrain and dense populations, doesn’t cater well to grass-grazing mammals, such as cattle or goats." Corinne Trang

Now that I really don't believe. Europe is just as hilly as China (look at Switzerland - a huge dairy producer - or the Netherlands - very densely populated) and besides goats don't need flat land. The cows were used for work and for meat apparently, and so therefore could not be wasted on milk. I also find this a bit hard to believe. The peasants of Europe often had little more than one cow that provided milk and butter and cheese for the family. And that cow would not necessarily have been roaming the fields either. I know for a fact that the cows producing milk for Parmigiano Reggiano in Emilia Romagna are kept in barns - not in the fields.

The third theory is that in East Asia they had soy and they developed soy rather than milk although a quick check shows that soy milk, for example, does not have as much calcium or vitamin D as milk. The soy milk they push here as super healthy is often vitamin D boosted. It is true though that soy in all its myriad of forms is very extensively consumed and I have no doubt that it has lots of benefits. I wonder why soy didn't catch on in Europe? It is native to China and I don't think was introduced into the west until the eighteenth century - but then we didn't get all those South American goodies until the fifteenth century and we can't do without them these days, so why didn't soy catch on? Is it because it doesn't taste all that nice? Well I think so anyway. Nowadays of course, in the health food industry it's big. But that's a whole other topic.

A lesser touted theory about dairy and the Asians is that the only people who consumed dairy products were the nomads on the outer fringes of society - the barbarians and so it was considered socially unacceptable to follow their lead. But again - this would have included the Mongols, who, in fact invaded large chunks of Asia and ruled for centuries - they became the upper class.

So I don't know that I have really found the answer. And what about all the Asians who have settled in Western countries. Have they gradually become lactose tolerant? Our guest certainly didn't have any problem with cheese - and he is only a first generation Australian. I gather that, of course, western food culture, in the form of pizza and cheeseburgers is gathering momentum in Asia. Do they need to modify it? I see another topic coming up there.