i know this sounds totally stupid, but in nearly every country–from tibet to france to chile to lebanon–we all have a variety of cheese. goat milk or yak milk cheese, yogurt cheese, whatever.
however in China and Japan they appear not to have developed any cheese-making. somebody told me tofu and/or miso was Chinese cheese and that’s just crazy talk.
a co-worker thinks it’s because the Chinese were short of grazing land for cows, but if that were the case, how come way poorer countries with rougher landscapes have cheese in some form, while the Chinese don’t?
I remember hearing/reading that the Chinese generally think the concept of cheese (fermented milk) is disgusting. (Come to think of it, there isn’t much dairy at all in Asian cooking, is there?)
Whether tofu is analogous to cheese (as, for example, kangaroos are analogous to rabbits) <- {hey look, a meta-analogy} is dubious, in my mind. I like the idea of miso soup, I’m less sure about soup with pieces of cheddar in it.
Now, actually, there are lots of Japanese cheeses, and they tend to be copies of European cheeses, just as Japanese (and Chinese) beers are similar to European beers. I don’t think there’s a native cheesemaking tradition.
I don’t believe the “shortage of land” story. When it comes to landscapes, you name it, China’s got it. Also, even in crowded rice-growing areas in the south, you have cattle fertilising the fields, why not milk them too?
I suspect it’s because the Chinese and Japanese have some genetic problem with dairy products (though my wife who can’t drink milk can eat cheese).
So there you have it. I dunno. I’m not even clever enough to understand Eve’s post.
No cite, but until somebody more knowledgable comes by …
I recall reading a article about some of the more “unusual” aspects of Chinese cuisine. (“Unusual” to us Westerners, anyway.) The article concluded by saying that it’s important to keep in mind that the Chinese find the idea of eating curdled cow’s milk, flavored by molds, just as repulsive as we might find some of the dishes that had been described.
AFAIK, at adult age, Asian people usually lack the enzymes necessary to digest milk and dayry products, while caucasian people don’t lose this ability past childhood.
Thinking twice I’m not sure about the “dayry products” part. But if cow’s milk isn’t proper food, it’s not surprising that no effort has been made to produce it and to find a way to preserve it. Hence cheese couldn’t become a culturally acceptable food, not even an existing food. On the other hand, mongols did invent the yoghourt, didn’t they?
Seriously, though, it may be a combination of factors: lactose intolerance in various degrees(many or most Asians do have this problem); cultural prejudices; perhaps the relative preciousness and rarity of beef – I don’t know, but I’d guess the strongest factor would be cultural values.
But there’s no shortage of “disgusting” fermented Asian foods: the Japanese have nato (fermented soybeans, turned all brown, sticky, and very stinky); the Koreans have kimchee (fermented cabbage – very, uh, piquant odor and taste). I think the Chinese ferment duck eggs, but I’m not sure about that. To westerners, these are very much acquired tastes, but these foods are arguably no farther removed from their non-fermented sources than cheeses are to milk.
Just goes to show how culturally arbitrary cuisine is.
[I wonder what the average Chinese peasant would make of an American pressurized can of “processed, artificially flavored and colored cheese food product”?] :rolleyes:
Mmmm, French onion soup, Mmmmmm… (And although I normally make it with Gruyere, I have tried (Swedish Kvibille) Cheddar. It’s even better! (But hard to find in Switzerland.)
Back to the OP. Wasn’t there a thread here about cheese on pizza in China, that addressed the issue? Ah, yes, here it comes:Pizza Hut in China: Cheese or No Cheese CalMecham semiquotes Marvin Harris:
Note that hard cheese does not contain lactose, but I believe that cheesemaking would have a hard time to become popular in a culture where milk was shunned.
I believe the main question is whether lactose intolerance caused dairy-avoidance, or vice versa.
It’s also worth noting that not all Chinese are lactose intolerant. For the rest I believe that it is mainly a cultural barrier.
Just what I would’ve said – just what i did say in a recent thread on just this topic. As I noted then, very similar words were expressed by anthropologist Marvin Harris in his book The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig, AKA Good to Eat, where he examines “foodways” – why certain foods are taboo in ccertain cultures. This is one of the rare cases where there is a physiological basiis for food avoidance.
Although people disputed this in the earlier thread, it agrees with my experience with Chinese grad students and post-docs, and Harris lists a lot of relevant cites. OPerhasps his biggest point is that there are no Chinese dairy dishes – no cream sauces, or dishes with cheese, etc. Certainly I’ve never seen them in any Chinese restaurant. (Ice Cream isn’t a Chinese dish – he claims its presence on Chinese restautrant menus is a concession to Western tastes.)
. In my readings I’ve come across another possible answer as to why the Orientals folks are not milk consumers
…lactose intolerene aside…
. It seems we Human beings are rather abbhorrant of the foods of our invaders.Some food products are not eaten simply beacause they were eaten by those peoples who took over.Who want’s to eat the dishes of the enemy?
. I’m typing straigt out of James Tragers ‘Foodbook’ here below…Page 21
“China was very early a nation of farmers and perhaps the first Range-grange battlegrounds. Since dairy foods were associated with China’s herdsman enemies, the Tartars and Mongols, the Chinese did not use milk or milk products as did thier neighbors in India. Instead they developed derivatives of the soy bean, a legume which grows only in temperate climates. They made soy milk,soy pudding,soybean cheese”
. Clearer now?.
The genetics of lactose intolerance is kind of interesting. Most mammalian species are lactose intolerant as adults. There are physiological changes that happen during maturation - presumably so that once the young are too old to nurse, they can’t anyway or they get sick. Races of people that are generally lactose intolerant seem to have the same system in place. Europeans and other milk tolerant races seem to share a genetic mutation that disabled this system many many moons ago.
Most adults around the world are lactose intolerant, not just Asians. The lactose intolerance theory fails. Now, some cultures have a mutation…adult lactose TOLERANCE. But even in Europe this is not common. Adult lactose tolerance is caused by thousands of years of dairying, not the other way around. It is an advantageous trait in a dairying culture and has been selected for…but it is by no means fixed. Lactase is the enzyme that splits lactose into its constituent parts. But producing any enzyme costs energy, so most mammals stop producing it once they are weaned.
But this is beside the point.
Cheese, yoghurt, koumiss, and many other prepared dairy products don’t contain lactose. Lactose is a simple disaccharide sugar. Sucrose is another example, being made of one glucose molecule and one fructose molecule stuck together. Lactose is composed of one glucose and one galactose. (Hijack: The word “galaxy” comes from milk…it was imagined to be milk from Hera’s breasts squirting across the sky). But in any fermented dairy product the yeasts and bacteria and molds break down the lactose at least into simple sugars, and usually there are very few sugars at all left in cheeses. They have all been eaten by the yeasts.
Lactose intolerant people can eat cheese and yoghurt with impunity, since cheese and yoghurt contain only trace amounts of lactose. It is true that some people are allergic to proteins found in milk, but this is completely different than lactose intolerance.
Cheese can be eaten by Chinese people with no ill effects. They just think it is gross. Like we think unborn chicks, or jellyfish, or fermented fish paste is gross. But of course cultural attitudes change. Twenty years ago most Americans were horified by the thought of eating raw fish. But now sushi is acceptable to many Americans. My grandma wouldn’t eat it, my dad wouldn’t eat it, but I like it and most of my friends like it.
Just to reiterate: The lactose intolerance theory is completely incorrect, in case anyone missed the previous paragraphs.
The answer is simply geography. Most parts of Asia are not suitable for dairy farming of the sort practised in W Europe and N America. The climate isn’t right, there’s not enough spare land for grazing, etc. (Where it does happen, eg parts of Japan, it’s on a small scale and the prodce is highly specialized, not to say expensive.)
The outcome is that dairy products don’t form part of the traditional diet, and older people hate the idea, just as Anglos hate the idea of such French foods as snails and horsemeat.
When they first tried opening pizza joints here in HK it failed, supposedly because of the local aversion to cheese. However, it has since caught on.
The less cosmopolitan people here still distrust cheese a bit, especially the stronger smelling and blue types (types of cheese, that is:)). I can’t put gorgonzola in the office refrigerator, for example.
Some older women here have crooked backs because of the calcium-poor diet they had in the past, but this was because of poverty rather than lack of cheese. Tofu is a good source of calcium.
CalMeacham is right about anthropologist Marvin Harris. Harris oversimplifies at times, but does wonderful job showing why we eat what we eat.
In his book * Our Kind* Harris states that the Chinese didn’t really need to raise cattle the way other sociey’s like India, Middle Eastern or Northern Europeans did. They were able to trade for the relatively few traction animals they needed for agriculture.
**Hemlock ** is right, it comes down to geography.
“…but in nearly every country–from tibet to france to chile to lebanon–we all have a variety of cheese. goat milk or yak milk cheese, yogurt cheese, whatever.”
Not quite “nearly every country.” AFAIK, the only indigenous cheese in the 30+ countries of Subsaharan Africa is “Fulani” cheese, made by a pastoral people of the Sahel, the Peul.
