That was funny. Something similar happened with Tea when it was introduced to Americans :
“ Many colonists put the tea into water, boiled it for a time, threw the liquid away, and ate the tea- leaves. In Salem they did not find the leaves very attractive, so they put butter and salt on them”
Home Life in Colonial Days - By Alice Morse Earle
A nutrient that’s new to you, or unusual (like lactose for an adult) sure. But most new-to-you vegetables are made of pretty much the same stuff as other vegetables.
I’m a picky eater, but I like to try new foods. I actively seek out new meats, fruits, and vegetables to try. I can’t recall ever having any intestinal issues after trying any new food.
Well, when I decided I liked Jerusalem artichokes and ate a whole lot of them, I got gas. But that’s a common problem with Jerusalem artichokes, and independent of whether you’ve eaten them before.
Post-infancy lactose intolerance is most common in east Asia. It is somewhat common in west Africa, the Middle East, Greece, and Italy. It is rare in northern Europe. This is according to the link below. This sort of kind of vaguely correlates with what some people think of as whiteness:
Vaguely. But India is full of very dark-skinned people who are lactose tolerant as adults.
One New World crop that often needs special preparation is cassava, aka manioc or tapioca. The root comes in “sweet” and bitter varieties, with the latter containing potentially toxic levels of cyanide-producing compounds and requiring special preparation in order to be safe to eat. However, the roots are equally toxic to anyone, and Old World peoples were not especially susceptible to them. Spanish colonists sometimes complained that cassava bread gave them digestive problems, but this could have been due to poor preparation or other issues. Today the crop is used widely throughout the tropics, including Latin America, Africa, and Asia.
The French philosopher Voltaire was an early proponent for cultivating potatoes in Europe (and influenced his friend/sometimes enemy Frederic the Great, who propagated the potato in Prussia and thus changed German cuisine forever), but at least there seems to have been a reputation of the potato for being hard to digest. I remember a documentary citing Voltaire in that context (from memory) “The potato might be hard to digest, but what are some winds in the guts of some peasants compared to a safe nutrition?” Sorry, no cite, I didn’t find it online.
They are related closely enough to Europeans that in classifications (obsolete, as they all are) that pigeonhole everyone into a limited number of “races”, they were often classified as Caucasian. Of course, since race is a construct, how much you are genetically related to someone is not a perfect correlation with what race people classify you as.
Anything green, other than the green tomato fruit. So… stems and leaves.
Anything green, other than the green tomato fruit. So… stems and leaves.
The same applies to potatoes. Anything green has toxin in it.
Cite please. So you are saying Indian food is not considered Ethnic aka non-white food ?
Cite please.
After US, India is the largest producer of milk. Milk - Wikipedia
You do understand that “have tended to be” /= are always, don’t you? A lot of people can’t seem to grasp this simple fact.
That said, it’s true that milking and the domestication of cows is traced back to the Middle East. But the use of fresh milk was minimized there by the high temperatures. To make milk last they either fermented it into yogurt or kefir or cheeses, among others, all of which are low in lactose so high percentages of tolerance in the population wasn’t necessary.
Dairying moved north and east and anthropologists have shown it has a high (high is not perfect, remember) correlation with the spread of Indo-European languages. (see this map.) That’s why there is a dairying culture in India but not in Africa. The use of fresh milk products increased as temperatures dropped, so that gradients of tolerance can be seen across Europe with the highest percentages of tolerance in Scandinavia and England, who brought their dairy culture to America. The usual explanation involves the need for white skinned peoples to have difficulty getting enough vitamin D in areas of short summers, while the calcium in milk helps with that. (Some dark skinned peoples have high percentages of tolerance, but from specialized situations in local environments.)
If you would like to know more about lactose intolerance, I highly recommend my book,Milk Is Not for Every Body: Living with Lactose Intolerance, a work that a reviewer on Amazon called “too thorough.”
Thank you Exapno Mapcase for the good explanation - makes sense to me. Also want to say that as a person of Indian origin, I’m not sure most Americans (I live in the south) understand that India and Europe has a common history. Forget IE languages, most people (I come across) don’t know that anthropologically many Indians are Caucasian too and Caucasian is not about skin color.
Thanks again
am77494, do you not understand the idea of something being approximately correlated with something and yet not precisely correlated with it? This is true of most cases of correlation that you will discover. Look up how correlations are calculated:
Well, your cite supports my claim. Seriously, Indian cuisine is full of milk. That would be weird if most Indians couldn’t digest lactose.
Here’s a cite: “Madhur Jaffrey’s An Invitation to Indian Cooking”. Quite a lot of the recipes include butter or yogurt.
You should be aware that while Indian populations have been classed as “Caucasian” in the past, this is not a classification that is currently much used by anthropologists. The population of Indian is a very complex mixture. Some populations, especially in the north, are more closed related to Europeans, while others, especially in the south, show links to Austronesians.
Butter is virtually lactose-free. Old-fashioned yogurt (not the modern fortified and sweetened American stuff) is quite low in lactose. Used in moderate quantities, neither would bother someone unless they are exceptionally lactose intolerant.
Puzzlegal - I misread your post. Specifically read tolerant as intolerant. My apologies.
I am aware and hence I specifically said in my post “many Indians” not all Indians. Not all Europeans are Caucasian and agree that the term is outdated. But if you use the term, be sure to understand that it doesn’t mean white.
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I am not sure there is a study on “some” or “majority” and I think that’s a matter of opinion . North India is pretty big and holds significant population percentage of India.
Here is a study that cites the different states with Indo-European ancestry and it has almost all of the big population states: Reconstructing Indian Population History - PMC
My daughter has trouble with yogurt. Maybe it’s not old-fashioned enough? And I’d been claiming butter was low in lactose until a lactose intolerant friend said she couldn’t eat it. I looked up the numbers and they were higher than I would have expected.
From here:
