Okay. I was just highlighting some of the circumstances. But I don’t think that lactose intolerance which is genetic, has much to with diets of neigboring countries. And I don’t see that dependence on high lactose food, which is basically cow’s milk, exists that widely outside of Europe. Europeans and Eastern Asians are the extremes.
A simple explanation is that Europeans were dependent on milk for survival in long winters, and the Asians had no source of milk. I don’t contend that is the case, but the distribution of lactose intolerance based on your link doesn’t look surprising. Europeans consume a lot of milk, Chinese don’t consume any, and everybody inbetween uses limited amounts in forms that are not high in lactose.
It’s true that cheese is growing in popularity, but it is actually kind of expensive in China. Basically, cheese is not popular and it costs more than here. Meanwhile, most other food items are cheaper, which makes cheese seem kind of like a luxury purchase.
I bought some there, but none of my Chinese friends thought much of it.
Nowadays you can find incorporation of cheese in food throughout east Asia (ie cheese in oden - for reals - or okonomiyaki, Asianized gratin, etc) but traditionally, probably not so. My mom said that when she first came to America for grad school, she thought mac and cheese was so effing nasty, she wanted to vomit. And whenever my grandparents visit the US, they flat out refuse to eat pizza or anything with a large concentration of cheese.
One well-known restaurant in Taipei serves bamboo drizzled with cheese to taste. It is actually pretty good.
A Chinese friend explained to me that for 8,000 years the Chinese have not had dairy in their diet. Eight thousand years I asked :dubious: and she said yes, eight thousand. Maybe her numbers are off but she is a Chinese woman and she won’t touch anything with any dairy. The Chinese simply do not have the ability to process dairy. (Which I am very glad not to be afflicted with that syndrome.)
traditionally in some of the minority (non Han Chinese areas). The Bai Nationality around Dali make and eat cheese.
The Tibetans, if you consider them part of China, eat cheese from Yak and goat milk. Not sure about the Mongolians but I assume they also have cheese. There may be more but at least the Bai and the Tibetans have eaten cheese since time immemorial.
Cheese has very little lactose, though. Lactose concentrates in the whey, not the curds. Romans were lactose intolerant, they drank milk to induce vomiting and even ranked the effectiveness based on livestock with horse milk the best, followed by cows. Yet cheese was a staple of their diet.
Someone who cannot tolerate both cheese and milk is allergic to dairy.
