It’s hard to milk rice I guess.
Oh yeah. And we all know how squeamish the Chinese are.
I don’t know where to start.
Okay, first, one has to decide if Tibet and Mongolia are part of China, as both areas have since time immemorial have used dairy products as a staple. A large part of the tibetan population even today are nomadic pastoralists, who tend their flocks of yaks, dri (a yak cow hybred) and goats. Mongolians also milk horses and fermented mare’s milk is a delicacy. Other Chinese minority groups such as the Bai and Naxi in Northern Yunnan province have also eaten cheese since historic times. I can’t find a link for it, but there is a nunnery in Qinghai province that now exports cheese to Chinese supermarkets.
I am less certain about China proper, or the areas traditionally controlled by the Han Chinese. Manchuria probably has cheese but I haven’t been there and can’t tell you. I have personally eaten indigenous goat and yak cheese throughout various parts of Tibet, as well as the Bai, Naxi and Qiang areas.
That was historic. Now you go to supermarkets in all major Chinese cities and can buy at a minimum processed cheese slices. These are supermarkets for the locals and not expats. Chinese happily go to Pizza Hut and McDonalds and eat cheese. Local restaurants serve sinified western food with cheese. There are cheese factories in China now. Lactose intolerance has been discussed in other threads. Ancedotally, you just couldn’t have China’s dairy industry if the vast majority of Chinese are lactose intolerant.
China has not had a big cattle culture. They have traditionally used water buffaloe as beasts of burden. Water buffaloe also produce milk, and I assume that was somehow used by the population. Certainly, an available food source is not allowed to go to waste.
Really, do you think a culture that uses mold to ferment winter melon (chou dong gua), which coincidentally has a taste and texture very much like danish blue cheese, thousand year old eggs, all manner of pickled animal products, etc, would find the concept of cheese disgusting? The Cantonese have an expression that they “eat everything with the back facing the sky.”
I’m surprised China Guy forgot about eryuan cheese a specialty of Yunnan Province.
You can read a little bit about it here and there.
So, yes, there is a place in eastern China where people have been eating cheese for a while.
Whilst I am sometimes wrong on what I post about China, it isn’t often. I did mention to the Bai of Northern Yunnan Province. I have in fact eaten their “fried cheese” and it was quite tasty although a bit greasy. Thing to remember about the Bai is that they are essentially neighbors with Tibet.
I’ve done some googling, but can’t find anything on cheese for the geographic area of traditionally Han China. You don’t have widespread cattle grazing in Han China, but it does exist. Again, I can’t find historic information.
Ancedotally, milk was available during the cultural revolution in Shanghai with a doctors prescription. Just about everything was rationed back then. So, there was some sort of dairy industry around here. That may have been a holdover from the opium war colonial days. Dunno. Like to see info if anyone has any.
From Why We Eat What We Eat (1991) by Raymond
Sokolov:
"We can also assert with confidence that Chinese, when dining as Chinese, do not ingest chocolate or cheese although they do eat an abundance of foods…"
The part about no chocolate may be more alarming to certain
members of this board.
Okay.
This ain’t China, but I’ll submit it anyway.
In his book Japanese Are Like That by Kawakaki Ichiro it’s pointed out that in the Japanese culture milk is considered to be food for babies.
After a certain nursing time the child is moved on to other dietary things.
The ability to digest milk, inherent in babies, evidentially disappears in adults who do not ingest dairy.
When I lived in Hong Kong (1992-1995) there was a campaign to persuade people of Chinese culture to ingest milk products, in order to increase calcium intake and help ward off osteoporosis. Anyone who has seen the preponderance of bent-over little old ladies in non-milk cultures will understand why they did this. Since cow’s milk does not feature in the southern Chinese (Cantonese) diet, there was both a perception problem and an adverse-reaction one. Many of my Chinese friends reported feeling bloated and unwell if they ingested cow’s milk, including in the form of ice cream. ‘They’ (the government?) attempted to get round this by promoting milk as a yogurt drink (‘Yakult’ being the brand name I recall), which, according to popular concensus, had already been worked on by the enzyme that many Chinese people ‘lack’. It appears to be very popular now.
On another of the topics raised above, the closest thing I saw in Cantonese cuisine to cheese was “chao dao fu” - ‘stinky tofu’ - which is sold on the streets. The smell is so powerful that you know it’s being sold up to three blocks away. IMHO it blows away even the strongest blue European cheese for ‘ripeness’. Also IMHO it is one of the most disgusting foods on earth, but many Chinese people would no doubt think that about Stilton.
I finally found my copy of The Sacred Cow and the Abominable Pig by Marvin Harris. The Master speaks (Chapter Seven: “Lactophiles and Lactophobes”, esp. pp. 148 on)
“Another long-standing criticism (of his theory) holds that lactase sufficiency among Europeans coul not have been crucial for obtaining calcium from milk since it is easy to convert milk into substances which break down lactose into simpler sugars. Cheese, yogurt, and fermented milk, for example, are calcim-rich dairry products which do not produce unpleasant symptoms among lactose-intolerant individuals. But the cnversion of milk to cheese, yogurt, or fermented milk means that lactose will not be available to facilitate the absorption of calcium…Since lactose enhances the absorption of calcium, lactose-tolerant drinkers of fresh milk would still enjoy a reproductive advantage over lactose-intolerant drnkers of ermented milk, cheese, and yogurt…”
But this barely begins to cver the topic. Harris maintans that you cannot explain Chinese avoidance of milk products on the basis of lactose intolerance – they are lactose intolerant, he maintains, because they did not need milk in the first place. “The Chinese did not spurn milk because they are lactose intolerant; the are lactose intolerant because hey spurned milk…This eans that in the Far East people were never obliged by their habitat or mode of subsistence to depend upon milk for their calcium or for any other nutrient.”
Harris’ work is controversial, but it deserves to be read in its entirety. Many of his points are subtle, but distinct and consistent. I find his theory of Cultural Materialism compelling and convincing.
Since the op also mentioned Japan, I should say that while dairy products are inextistant in traditional Japanese cuisine, milk, cheese and yogurt are very much a part of the modern diet here.
In elementary and junior high school milk is served everyday with the school lunch, which means that every single kid in Japan drinks at least one serving of milk per day.
The Japanese love cheese cake and do terrible things to camembert. Yogurt is probably the most popular of the dairy products here. When I used to teach, at school we were often served a strange desert that consisted of yogurt, bits of cheese, apple and cabbage. Yes, cabbage.
From their nutritional habbits, it doesn’t look like the Japanese people are incredibly more lactose-intolerent than Europeans.
This is posed as a question.
from http://www.vegsoc.org/info/cheese.html
Is it possible that the Chinese culture didn’t slaughter young calves to obtain the rennet (obviously the Indian cultures wouldn’t)? Could this also be an explanation?
I’ll second what jovan said. I’m Asian and my parents made me drink at least a glass of milk everyday when I grew up, and I don’t have any problem with diary product. I think Asians who are raised on a more or less Western style diet is not any more lactose intolerant than Caucasians. I think it has more to do with exposure to diary product as one is growing up rather than any predisposed genetic differences.