Once again, as is often the cause of me coming to Unca Cecil and the Teeming Millions, my wife will simply NOT believe anything I tell her.
We’re eating dinner, and she pipes up with “Does any Chinese food have cheese?”
“Well,” say I, “At the Pizza Hut in China you have to ASK for cheese.”
"Oh, Come on now! You made that up,” she says.
“DEFY ME, WILL YOU WOMAN! I WILL SMITE THEE JUSTLY AND DRINK THE BLOOD FROM YOUR INFINITESIMALLY SMALL BRAIN!” I screamed . . .
In my mind.
To HER, mind you, I said “Well, lemme go find you the PROOF!” (I’m not a fool and value my life). But, alas my fine folk, the Internet – though rife with the penis enlargement and the very beautiful girls who look lovingly at Zucchini as they talk with you – Left me high and dry on the Pizza Hut/China connection.
So I come to you, my dearest and closest Big-brained and hopefully well-traveled folk to help me once again prove to my wife who is right, and who is just silly to BETRAY BELIEF IN MY WORDS!
This doesn’t address your question expressly, but one would think that if cheese didn’t come standard, it might be mentioned with the “one notable diffrerence.”
Well, it’s not like I eat there all the time or anything, but Pizza Hut in Shanghai China comes with cheese. Actually, I don’t think you can get a cheese free pizza.
In Hong Kong it’s been at least a decade since I had Pizza Hut, but they had cheese as well.
Corn is a big pizza topping, as is tuna fish.
McD’s serves cheese on the Egg McMuffin and cheese burgers.
Cheese isn’t big in China with the exception of Tibet (and maybe inner Mongolia, but I haven’t been there). Tibetan cheese can be really good made from yak or sheep milk. In the big cities at least you can buy processed sliced cheese in many local supermarkets.
I wouldn’t be surpried if Pizza Hut pizza came without cheese in China. As Marvin Harris remarks in his book Good to Eat (aka The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig) “There are no dairy dishes in China – no cream sauces, no cheese toppings.” (I’m semiquoting from memory). This is in a chapter devoted to why some people eat dairy and some don’t. In this case it’s not strictly cultural (like the saced cow of India), but because people in China and indigenous people in the Americas are lactose intolerant. Eating dairy products causes them intestinal distress, which is not a fun thing. (Pepper Mill is actoise intolerant, too, so I know.)
As corroboration, one of the post-docs at my last school was Chinese, and invited him over for a home-cooked meal. He agreed, as long as I guaranteed no dairy dishes. I thought it was just him, at the time. I didn’ realize that it was a general Chinese condition.
This isn’t to say that lactose intolerant people can’t eat milk, cheese, buter, etc. But they can’t eat a lot of it. Not if they want to feel good.
Since it’s unlikely that a food chain will stay in business if it only sells food that makes its customers ill, Isuspect that cheese-free pizza s a regular on menus in China.
I was under the impression all China-people were lactose intolerant or something, and that cheese, for the most part, is feared as much as a “Joanie loves Chachi” marathon…
Maybe someone was corrupting me during my youth, but perhaps not:
Are the Chinese more lactose intolerant than the rest of us?
The question has evolved, and so shall all of us. Come!
I second what China Guy said about Pizza Hut, in Beijing. By the way, I believe the name of the restaurant is transliterated as Pi Sheng Ke.
The basis of Frumpy’s belief is that Chinese as a rule do not find the smell of cheese apetizing. Exceptions to this have become more common in recent years as exposure to western cuisine has increased.
One can argue that disgust at the smell of cheese is a biological response that a lactose intolerant population has evolved. Or that it is a learned cultural response. Personally, I think it is a universal biological response - IT’S MOLD - that westerners learn to overcome at a young age.
I’ve lived in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Japan and China. My wife is Chinese, born and raised in Shanghai. She drinks a glass of milk every night before bed and she also eats cheese. Her first expience with cheese wasn’t a good one, but that’s because she didn’t know the red wax covering the gouda was not supposed to be eaten! When she was a kid 30 some odd years ago, you had to have a doctors prescription to purchase milk in Shanghai because there was a big shortage. You should see the amount of milk formula babies here suck down. I’ve never seen so many, well, let’s be polite and call them really chubby babies in my life as here in Shanghai.
Tibetans drink tons of yak and goat milk. It is a staple in their diet. Certainly Tibetans are not lactose intolerant. I assume the Mongolians are much the same. For chrissakes, the Mongolians drink fermented mare’s milk.
In all of these Asian countries, it’s the locals buying the milk. My wag is they probably don’t consume as much as the US does, but consumption has been growing over the past 20-40 years. So, to answer the OP, I’ve never seen lactose intolerance problems first hand.
The lactose-intolerant thing varies within populations. To say “Asians are lactose-intolerant” is to mention a satistical generality. A lot of Asians are lactose-intolerant, but not all, and certain populations more so than others. Even within populations where the majority of adults have the trait there will be exceptions that can digest milk into adulthood, and in populations where most adults can consume dairy with no problem there will be some who have lost the ability to digest it.
I would expect groups like Tibetans and Mongols who consume varies forms of milk on a regular basis to retain their lactase into adulthood. Other groups may not. But given invasions, raids, wars, and human nature there’s probably a fair amount of genetic mixing between groups, especially around border areas, so there’s no hard and fast line between groups who can handle dairy and those that can’t.
Another thing to remember is that lactose-intolerance isn’t necessarily and either-or situation. While there are some folks with no tolerance for dairy whatsoever, in most cases it’s a matter of limited capability to deal with it. So infrequent consumption of milk products can be handled, but not a lot. Also, items like cheese, yogurt, and butter may be more digestable for some people than actual milk, and different milks have different levels of digestability. So someone who can’t tolerate liquid cow’s milk might well be able to enjoy yak butter or sheep cheese or fermented mare’s milk with no problem.
I can’t answer for China, but can chime in on the subject of Japanese pizzas.
While Pizza Hut in Japan offers “set” pizzas that don’t include cheese (including their “Idaho Special” and “Idaho Curry” that have a mayonnaise base), I have to conclude that their basic pizza does include cheese, as the topping menu (in Japanese here) includes “extra cheese” as a choice, but not “cheese”.
I have never been to the orient (I’d love to go), but nothing I’ve read here invalidates what I’ve written above.
Read the relevant chaspter in Harris’s book. Lactose intolerance, as noted above, is not an either/or thing. Pepper Mill, for all her lactose intolerance, eats pizza. But she knows that eating pizza and drinking milk within a short period of time is really asking for trouble.
Mongolians and Tibetans certainly do eat dairy products – it’s part of their cuisine. Indian cuisine is inseparable from butter. But we’re talking about the Chinese here – they don’t have a tradition of dairy dishes. And if lactose intolerance is a deciding factor, it’s not just that a love of milk has to be “learned”. Harris describes how humanitarian aid workers in South America had problems introducing powdered milk (a cheap, storable, highly nutritious food) to the locals. They got sick, reportedly, and the aid workers attributed it to people eating the powder, raw. Or mixing it with dirty water. “No,” replied the descendants of South American Indians," we’re not that naive, the stuff just makes us ill." (Harris, an anthropologist, had first hand experience with this issue). The real reason, Harris claims, is that the Indians had no milk-bearing animals, and no reason to be lactose-tolerant as adults.
Surprising fact: Pure hard cheeses do not contain lactose!
Really. Check the label on a hunk of “natural” cheese sometime - not process cheese, cheese spread, cheese food or anything like that, just plain ol’ cheese. It should list something like “Carbohydrates - 0 grams”, which means no sugars and therefore no lactose. Early in the cheesemaking process, the milk is split into liquid whey and semi-solid curds. All the lactose is in the whey, but hard cheeses are made from the curds!
Process cheeses, including cheese spreads, cheese food, etc., add milk (among other ingredients), usually to make the end product melt better and to reduce manufacturing costs. These will have lactose from the milk.
Someone who is lactose intolerant, but capable of digesting the proteins in cow’s milk, will tolerate natural cheeses just fine. (Note that I don’t know if dairy protein sensitivities are common in China…)
Seriously lactose-intolerant person here. Flodnak is correct. I tolerate most cheeses easily, for the reason that they contain little to no lactose.
BTW, Cal, Mozzarella is a semi-soft cheese because of the way it is made. It goes through the same separation process, curds vs. whey, as the hard cheeses. I tolerate it quite well. It’s those sneaky ‘cheese-like substances’ that ambush me.
Frumpy, I believe your wife and my wife must be using the same ‘secret wifery’ manual.
Forgive my stunning ignorance on this whole topic, but if people are lactose intolerant are they able to cope with their mother’s milk? Or does human milk lack lactose? (I must admit, I thought there was more lactose in human milk than in cow/yak/sheep milk…)
If they are intolerant to human milk, how do they survive when they are born?
IIRC “lactose intolerant” refers to trouble digesting lactose when you’re a grownup. Everyone does indeed digest it from their mother’s milk as a baby. When you get older, many people lose the ability to break it down, evidently, so bacteria in your intestines get to try at it, with disgusting results (cited in Harris’ book).
I recall from somewhere (and I can’t recall where) that, even though cheese is much like “digested” milk products (rennet, used to curdle cheese, is found in animal stomachs), the lactose-intolerant still have a problem with it. I’m not sure if this article was referring only to “cheese-like” products, as flodnak notes, but I still have the examples of my wife and my former Chinese associates, all of whom were careful about dairy products in any form.
I’m Chinese, and have no problem drinking milk or eating cheese. My mother and sister love cheese, but my grandmother hates it. I think a lot of it is cultural, as my sister and I both grew up here. One of my cousins is lactose-intolerant, but he’s one out of 16 of us that has issues.
I’m slightly to moderately lactose-intolerant and I have noticed that cheese bothers me less than straight milk.
Does anyone know if regularly eating and drinking dairy products helps people retain the ability to digest lactose? Does the body just get “out of practice” in producing lactase?
