A friend and I were talking about the fact that the Chinese don’t eat a lot of dairy products. “Except ice cream,” said he. “They only serve ice cream in American Chinese restaurants – not in China” said I.
Am I right?
Don’t know about China, but they have ice cream in Japan. The Japanese seem to like green tea ice cream, which did nothing for me.
It would seem that they do.
I’d pop into ice-cream bars in Shanghai and Beijing for my dairy fix. Most other dairy in China is rubbish. Excepting Hong Kong, which has everything.
In his book Good to Eat, anthropologist Marvin Harris claims that ice cream in Chinese Restaurants is a concession to Western tastes. Most Chinese are apparently lactose-intolerant, and dairy products in general upset their digestive system, often giving them the runs and gas, since their bodies can’t break down lactose. The bacteria in their gut then gets to gorge on it, with catastrophic results.
I once made a dinner for a Chinese grad student (when I was in grad school), and he insisted on a total lack of dairy. I thought at first that it was a personal affliction – I didn’t realize at the time how widespread this was not only in China, but around the world. Only people who raised cows or goats and ate their milk have a broad ability to digest lactose as adults (and not even then. Pepper Mill id lactose-intolerant, despite a broad European ancestry).
Harris gives the impression that there is little ice cream even in China (although it’s not unknown), and that dairy remains a very minor part of the diet. As he points out, there are no cheeses in China, and no traditionary cream sauces and the like. Nothing is broiled in butter.
It seems a little surprising, considering thayt, across the Himalayas in India, ghee or buffalo butter is a mainstay. I think it’s big in Tibet, too. You can read all about the reason for milk’s success in some places, its lck in others, and the whys of lactose intolerance in Harris’ book. He devotes a whole chapter to it.
The McDonald’s ice cream cone is very very popular in China. Never saw a drive-thru in China, but half the McDonald’s would have some kind of “walk-by” window where the main thing being sold was the ice cream cone. Pizza-Hut pizzas are kind of popular in the larger cities, too.
Harris’ books are wonderful as history, but they’re based on observations that are at least 30 years old.
In the modern world, diary products are making huge inroads into the Asian market. Many are low-lactose products, like yogurt or cheese, and some lactose-free milks have been introduced, but dairy in general is far more available today than it used to be.
It may be the western influence, which wouldn’t be surprising, but the notion that dairy is not found in Asia is essentially obsolete.
I was just reading in Lonely Planet Cambodia about how ice cream is sold in that country. It sounds like there are several ice cream confections that are popular with Cambodian kids. IIRC, the rate of lactose intolerance is high for Asians (Southeast Asians, 98% according to http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/001681.html), but apparently they eat ice cream anyway.
My wife eats ice cream, even though she’s lactose intolerant. But she doesn’t eat a lot.
Harris died less than a decade ago, and his references were up to-date. Good to Eat came out in the 80s. 30 years old they ain’t. As long as 98% of Southeast Asians are lactose intolerant (if the link is correct), dairy isn’t going to be a major part of their diet,
Yes the Chinese eat ice cream. Hell, there is even a Dairy Queen in Shanghai.
Butter has very little lactose, and ghee (clarified butter) has none.
Both of my South Korean children are lactose intolerant. Then again, I’m 1/2 German, 1/4 Polish and 1/4 Russian and I’m lactose intolerant.
What can one buy for 12 cents ? Even those delectable small paper cups of ice cream that we all were handed at birthday parties as children probably come in at around.50 cents per.
Cartooniverse
OP would lose.
Haagen Daz is quite popular - especially their ice cream moon cakes for the mid autumn festival. It just happened last week and my company gave out free coupons. we’ve had ice cream days at work. there are dairy queen outlets. wall’s (unilever) ice cream can be found through much of china. gelatto is quite popular in shanghai. ice cream cake is popular too bor birthdays
even 25 years ago there was locally produced ice cream for local consumption…it wasn’t even that bad.
My daughters first grade buddies all love ice cream.
Thanks for the info, everyone – always glad to have my ignorance successfully fought.
I’ll forward the thread to my pal.
I do the same, excecpt I eat a lot 
Lactose intolerance, from what I can tell, comes in degrees.
For some of us LI folks, the consequences of eating dairy are fairly mild and don’t especially preclude eating dairy. I presume for others with LI, the aftereffects are more severe.
The question is: how many East Asian LI sufferers have severe symptoms versus mild symptoms?
bordelond has it correct.
Being lactose intolerant does not mean being completely incapable of eating dairy without suffering symptoms nor does it mean that one is completely incapable of producing lactase.
Why can’t you find lactose-free ice cream in American stores? (OK, there are two brands but they’re almost impossible to find.) Because they don’t sell. Lactose-free milk sells but not lactose-free ice cream. People like real ice cream, and that includes lactose intolerant people.
All studies show that even people who are lactose intolerant and who self-report as being sensitive to dairy can have some lactose-containing foods, including straight milk. They can have more if the food is eaten as part of a meal. They can have still more if the food is low-lactose to begin with. They can have more if they have the beneficial bacteria in their colons that digests the lactose.
Reread the lactophobes chapter in Good to Eat, Cal. Harris’ actual medical references don’t date any later than 1975 and his comments on Asian behaviors are from the 1960s.
Harris is dead. The world has changed. Asians are drinking milk in large quantities, overall that is. The market for milk products is exploding over there. It may never equal that of a milk-drenched culture like ours, but the notion that Asians loathe milk, as Harris wrote, is obsolete at best and possibly was wrong the whole time.
I am not sure how much just the ice cream cups are, but the cones with chocolate bits on top and marshmellow swirls in the icecream are 3 yuan (37.5 cents). If I had to guess I’d say the ice cream cups are 2 yuan (25 cents).
Not to hijack but I’ve read somewhere that if you switch from your mother’s milk to cow milk and don’t stop drinking cow’s milk regularly you cannot develop lactose intolerance regardless of your genetics. Right now I can’t find anything like that, so does anybody know what I’m talking about? It seems to make sense since babies do not seem to be negatively affected by the amount of lactose found in breast milk - is anybody actually born lactose intolerant?
Anecdotally, this was not true in my case.
Regular milk drinkers can and do start showing the symptoms of lactose intolerance as they age. However, you have to remember that the symptoms are formed from two different mechanisms. One is that the undigested lactose in the intestines actually draws water into the intestines, the opposite of what normally occurs. This leads to diarrhea.
The other is that the undigested lactose becomes fermented in a series of reactions by certain types of bacteria that can live in the colon, causing gas, bloating, and flatulence.
There are “good” bacteria that compete with these other types and the regular presence of milk in the diet, therefore undigested lactose, can stimulate their presence, thereby lowering or eliminating the major symptoms in some people, who technically have lost some of their ability to manufacture lactase. Milk itself is not a terribly good stimulus though: yogurt with live cultures is much better since it contains the very bacteria that you want.
Only a tiny number of babies - estimates place it at maybe 100 over the last 50 years - have been born with no ability to manufacture lactase. These days, soy or other formula is substituted almost immediately and the child can grow up perfectly well if milkless, much as if a dairy allergy were the problem. Before soy formulas they died from starvation, so the fact they continue to appear is obviously a rare mutation in the gene that controls lactase production.
But this has nothing whatsoever to do with babies being able to drink mother’s milk. That stems from the fact that humans, like every other mammal, are programmed to make appropriate amounts of lactase until the normal age of weaning. Babies in every culture and location on earth can nurse on lactose-laden milk - human breast milk has the highest known lactose content - perfectly well. It is only starting at about the age of three that children in some cultures start showing a decline in lactase. That has nothing to do with what they drink. No known food or activity changes lactase loss or lengthens lactase activity. (Studies on this are actually pretty awful, so take this absolute with a great deal of salt. Still, there has never been a convincing case for the negative.)
Symptoms from milk drinking and lowered lactase activity are both commonly called lactose intolerance, but are really two separate, although correlated and overlapping, phenomena.