Specifically cheese. Is it because most of us are lactoce intolerant or did lack of drinking lots of milk and eating cheese cause this intolerance?
It can’t be lack of farmland, which I could understand if we’re talking about Korea or Japan. China has had tons of farmland and cows to pull them historically. And we eat plenty of things like offal so it can’t be that we’re grossed out by milk and cheese. Cheese also doesn’t really take too much preparation so the poor peasants could probably afford to make and sell it.
Did we simply not luck into the idea of cheese? I can’t think of one east Asian cheese! No common dish in Chinese cooking has a sprinkle of cheese on top!
Because the mutation for adult tolerance of lactose either didn’t occur, or didn’t spread in that population.
No sense inventing food that you can’t eat.
Babies don’t usually have a problem with lactose, but that ability soon fades. With the lactose-tolerance mutation, the ability to process lactose can remain into adulthood, making dairy products a viable adult food source.
It’s the other way around. 20,000 years ago, virtually all adult humans were lactose intolerant. Those societies where there were milk-producing livestock evolved a mutation to be tolerant into adulthood.
Anthropologist Marvin Harris devoted an entire chapter to this in his book Good to Eat/The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig. It’s not just the Chinese (and Japanese and Koreans) – People of Native American ancestry (both North and South) have the same problem.
It’s not that lactose intolerant people are incapable of eating dairy, of course, and some items (like ice cream ) are making their way onto menus at Chinese restaurants. But, many years ago in grad school, I made dinner for some Chinese post-docs, and they were very definite about my not including anything dairy-based. I thought at the time it was just their individual dietary requirements – I had no idea how widespread it was. Harris’ book is worth reading.
No, that is partly the cause.
With the large population of humans in China, spare land to pasture dairy herds is in short supply (or actually, needed more to raise food crops).
Also, animals used to pull plows are not very effective as dairy producers. First, they are mostly male (bullocks, not cows) and are typically oxen, not dairy breeds. Oxen produce enough milk to feed a calf, and possibly a handful of humans, but nowhere near the surplus needed for a dairy operation.
I thought I could make millions selling a bastardized concoction of Chinese food with cheese in/on it, on the reasoning that Westerners like both – but no one, Chinese or gwai lo, thought it would be anything but disgusting. Maybe it just doesn’t fit the flavor profile – like you could put habanero sauce on leberkaese, or beef Wellington but . . . no, sorry, doesn’t even work for me.
There is one Chinese dish I’ve had that successfully uses cheese – my Hong Kong friends unhelpfully referred to it as just “Cantonese lobster,” and apparently it’s known outside Hong Kong too: Stir-fried Lobster with Butter and Cheese - Rasa Malaysia
My local Chinese delivery had Crab-Cheese Rangoons.(Mostly crab(not Krab) and cream cheese with a few other things in a deep fried Wonton and a pot of mango dipping sauce. They threw in an order with any delivery of 20 bucks or more. Damn they were good.
I don’t think anyone in China has ever heard of Crab Rangoon. I’m of Chinese descent and had pretty much never heard of it until moving from California to the Midwest.
Rangoon/Yangon is not even in China, so I wonder where this dish came from and why it’s ubiquitous in greasy Chinese takeout places.
It depends upon the circumstances. One pizzeria I knew made “Chinese Pizza” by putting chinese food on ordinary cheese pizza. Pepper Mill tells me that she knew people who did the same, and I have on occasion seen it elsewhere.
so Chinese food can go with cheese. If you do it right.
Cows are not a huge part of the Chinese diet. Pork is the staple meat. In areas that do raise cows- Tibetan and Mongolian areas- you do find a greater reliance on dairy, including cheese. It’s probably no coincidence that these areas have lots of wide open pasture land.
In modern times, dairy is starting to become more popular. Flavored milk, yogurt and ice cream are widely consumed.
I put cheese on almost everything I eat, It grosses my Chinese wife and mother-in-law out. I got a couple boxes of plain old macaroni and cheese from back in the US and made it for them once. They ate two bites and pushed it away…then they were sick for the rest of the afternoon. Meanwhile, I ate the entire pot myself!
I think it has to do with the lack of arable land. Cows simply are not that efficient.
Dairy is a stable in Tibet and Mongolia. Both areas of goats. Tibetan pastoralists herd yaks for the most part and yak milk is delicious. AFAIR, Mongolians primarily herd horses and mares milk was/is a staple.
This is often cited as the most clearcut example that human evolution has continued till recent times. It’s even been cited as a reason for the unexplained expansion of the Indo-European languages! (Earliest Indo-Europeans were dairy pastoralists.)
Isn’t this maybe putting the cart before the horse (or ox)? Did lactose tolerance accidentally enable the consumption of dairy in the west, or did lactose tolerance get selected in the west because the alternative to a diet containing dairy was malnutrition and/or starvation?
If I understand correctly, lactose tolerance (among adults) originated in Europe. It appears that the only other places that it has spread to (if we ignore European-conquered areas during the past 500 years) are limited regions of Asia. Africans, native inhabitants of the Americas, Pacific Islanders, and most Asians tend to be lactose-intolerant, so there are few dairy items common in those places. This is one of those topics that people of European ancestry don’t seem to know how untypical they are. They don’t realize that their diet is quite uncommon in including dairy items.
I was under the impression that lactose tolerance developed because Europeans (especially those further to the north) needed more vitamin D since they weren’t getting enough of it from sunlight. Both lighter skin and lactose tolerance developed so that they could get more of the vitamin. Is this true? It’s been a long time since I read about this, and I admit I might be getting some of this wrong.
This might only be a phraseology nitpick (in which case I apologise), but it would be more likely to be something along the lines of the people with the vitamin deficiency experiencing reduced reproductive success, compared to those who had enough of it, because they happened to be lactose tolerant.
Or in other words, the tolerance became a selectable (i.e. favourable) mutation in the context of the local nutritional need.
This leads to the question: are there some kind of costs to lactose tolerance in contexts where dairy foods are not nutritionally necessary? Is it disadvantageous to be able to eat dairy products, if you don’t actually need to?
Mangetout, that’s what I meant. I assumed that I didn’t have to spell out that when I say that a certain characteristic developed among a group of people, the reason that it developed was that it enhanced reproductive success. I’m assuming that everyone here already understands Darwinian evolutionary theory and that that is the reason that a characteristic develops.
