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stevenjohns
shortsightedsid
The article is definitely Eurocentric and skips South-East Asia and India. Milk, Butter, Ghee and Yogurt have been part of Indian culture from the start. E.g. references in the Vedas central to various rituals, Lord Krishna loving butter as a child, etc..
What I found really interesting is the premise that the article makes about spoilage. If dairy spoils in the warmer Mediterranean causing the inhabitants to find it unappealing, then why is it that the people living in hotter climate of India found dairy to be integral to their diet? Is it because because of Ghee which has a longer shelf life?
And Yogurt too - even today - integral to any number of Indian households.
captain_price7
Am from Indian subcontinent. Butter isn't exactly that popular where I'm from (Bangladesh). Milk is usually collected at dawn and consumed in liquid form before the day is over, no need to store anything.
hkarthik
Probably butter isn't as common where you're from, but ghee is. Ghee really made butter more viable by increasing it's shelf life, and was a bit of a technological achievement of food science.
JetAlone
I'm looking briefly at the history of Indian cheesemaking. Seems like rennet wasn't used, but instead things like lemon juice. Paneer seems to be the first word that comes up, consistently along with a few other varities. Looks pretty tasty :P
duncan-donuts
I think yogurt is an exception here because it ferments quickly and doesn’t necessarily need refrigeration. A number of the Indian families I know will make yogurt every day. I suppose you could make a similar argument that butter could be made daily in small batches, but the labor involved in butter making is orders of magnitude greater.
canadianfella
It’s 100 times more effort to make butter?
xyzzyz
Ghee doesn’t spoil without refrigeration like butter does, which is why it has been popular in India.
OJFord
Perhaps it's just my cooler climate (UK), but (unclarified) butter lasts ages unrefrigerated. Far far longer than it takes me, alone, to consume it.
It's not the first time I'm hearing this at all, so I'm not saying you're wrong, I just don't understand.
stevenjohns
Actually it would be exactly that — when it mentions butter it’s highly unlikely that it is referring to clarified butter.
captain_price7
> major Abrahamic faiths venerated milk consumption
In Islam, Milk is considered the drink of paradise. There are quite a few ayats (verses) in Quran about the greatness of Milk.
https://damdaran.ir/en/articles/a-glance-at-milk-from-quran-...
account-5
A whole cucumber? As in an approx foot long fruit. I'm an adult, mostly, but if a colleague pulled out a whole cucumber and started munching on it you know I'm commenting about it!
bserge
Growing up we only had the short (10-15cm) variety, and indeed I was munching on them lol
When I first saw the long ones I was like "wtf did they do to them?". They also taste worse imo, but that could be because of greenhouse growth.
namdnay
Ive always heard the small ones called “Lebanese cucumbers” , much nicer indeed than the “Dutch cucumbers” you usually see
There are also the provencal cucumbers, which are larger but shorter than Dutch cucumbers, have a thicker rougher skin, and a much stronger taste
watwut
That is because there is culture of not eating vegetables. Cucumber tastes good, is quite watery and does not have to be huge.
have_faith
> Cucumber tastes good
Let's not get ahead of ourselves
pvaldes
Would made a nice anti-bulling food. The Veggies for bullies movement.
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yunohn
Why are you commenting on your colleagues’ food? Moreover, something as normal as a vegetable.
account-5
Why not? It's not an insult. I know it's not any of my business but neither is anything else I might make small talk about.
I regularly ask what my colleagues have for lunch/dinner, I like to see if they have something better than I do.
thaumasiotes
> Specifically that cows aren’t the only source of milk: sheep, goats, buffalo and horses have all been milked throughout history
Sheep and goats are major sources of milk today, just not milk for direct consumption.
netcan
This is more about "barbarian" as a concept than dairy, IMO.
No use trying to define it specifically, the word cannot be separated from its snobbery. In any case, almost every non modern piece of human culture comes from barbarians, inventions, customs, livelihoods. The iconic Roman gladius. Every Egyptian military paradigm: swords, chariots, & such came from barbarian pastoralist.
Pastoralist cultures are very poorly recorded, as a rule. These societies can get pretty big, and seem to federate easily. Wealth accumulation happens naturally, with the size of the herd. Trade tends to happen a lot. Some pastoralist cultures may have specialized in trade very early. A nomadic traveller culture who own pack animals are well placed for this. Seasonal migrations sometimes necessitate bimodal society structures, say independant family groups in one season and a large tribal hierarchy in another. They can merge into large super groups. Cultural exchange between groups, bilingualism and such happen a lot.
IMO all these make it likely that many economic and political institutions (eg voting, accounting, etc) originate with pastoralists, showing up in historical records only after being adopted by settled cultures with civilized urban centres. Milk is likely one of those things. If your culture revolves around goats, horses, cows or such... dairy is probably a major part of your culture. Another, snobby culture that eats less dairy comes in and says "yuck, so much milk."
Romans had milk, but they didn't have milk 100 different ways. Shepards and such were low on the Roman hierarchies. What Romans had was trees. Trees, and orchard ready land were wealth. Trees stayed put, could be tended by slaves. You could have a nice villa overlooking your trees. That's civilized.
hyperpallium2
Yes, the separation and mixing of pastoralist cultures sounds like it would evolve innovations more quickly than homogenous, standardized, organized city states.
Could also apply to the evolution of the mutation for lactose-tolerance in adulthood.
“You want the taste of dried leaves boiled in water?”
“Er, yes. With milk.”
“Squirted out of a cow?”
“Well in a manner of speaking, I suppose…”
“I’m going to need some help with this one.”dustintrex
These days the word "butter" evokes an inoffensive pale white stick in your fridge, but in the days before refrigeration, butter was made at home. And while it keeps much better than milk, it can and does get seriously funky over time.
You can get a faint taste of this (literally) with French cultured butter like Pepe Saya, which blurs the line between butter and soft cheese, but if you ever visit Tibet or even a Tibetan temple, the entire place is permeated with the smell of what the Western nose and palate would consider straight-up rancid butter. No wonder the Romans weren't keen on the stuff. (Of course, I imagine the "barbarians" felt the same away about the ubiquitous Roman condiment garum, aka fish sauce.)
skinkestek
> the smell of what the Western nose and palate would consider straight-up rancid butter.
We produced very high quality (as determined by the local dairy who paid us for it) milk at the farm where I grew up.
Yet I remember that whenever we tried to make butter at home it would invariably turn rancid within a very short time.
I know there are a few people here with farming background and whatnot, anyone has an idea why that would happen? What did we do wrong?
katbyte
Salt. Salt preserves butter and without it will go bad faster then you would expect
ksdale
I don't know if this is too basic, but we tried to make butter from scratch one time and everything we saw said that if there was even the tiniest bit of liquid left when you're done churning, it would cause the butter to go rancid basically overnight, and sure enough, that's what happened the first time! The next time we made sure there wasn't any liquid left and it lasted much longer. I don't even know what the liquid part is called, but it would get stuck in tiny little air pockets while you were churning and it was very difficult to ensure that it was all gone by the end.
floren
> I don't even know what the liquid part is called
Buttermilk.
skinkestek
From the ideas so far (thanks everyone!) this sounds most probable since salting and pasteurisation seems like something we either did by default or after the first spoiled batch.
Also, even if it is well over half my life so far ago I think I can vividly remember small drops of water in the butter.
mannerheim
Was it made from unpasteurised milk? Maybe that's the difference.
JohnWhigham
Probably still had a nontrivial amount of water in it. Last time I helped make butter, we repeatedly squeezed it through the cheese cloth to get as much water out as we could.
tdeck
One thing I learned recently is that salted butter used to be much, much saltier for preservation. People basically washed it with water to reduce the salt content before eating it.
namdnay
The salted butter we use today is actually “Demi-sel”, “half-salted”
OJFord
> the word "butter" evokes an inoffensive pale white stick in your fridge
...perhaps where you live!
A pale white stick in my fridge would be goat's cheese. Butter is a yellow block in a dish on the side, not refrigerated (except the spares, and the unsalted for cooking).
dustintrex
Butter color depends on animal feed (grass-fed = more yellow), but commercially produced butter is often dyed.
OJFord
I'd be surprised if that's allowed here, certainly quickly checking a few - including supermarket own brand, i.e. the cheapest - none lists ingredients other than milk (or derivatives, incl. simply 'butter') and optionally salt.
Sounds more like margarine to me, to have additives like colouring. 'Pale white' and I doubt I'd even recognise it as butter - probably assume it was lard. From 'sticks' I think this is the US, though there's at least one French brand that does sell it like that as well as the normal (to me) block or tub (more common in France in my experience, but some here too).
Jun8
Drinking milk and consuming various dairy products (kefir, yogurt, cheese, etc.) are strongly associated with "steppe people" which were seen as barbaric (sometimes rightly so), so this perhaps explains some of the points in this post.
I was curious about milk and cheese consumption in Ancient Greece and found the following in the Everyday Life of Greeks and Romans (https://www.google.com/books/edition/Everyday_Life_of_the_Gr...) about Greek desserts:
"Piquant dishes, stimulating the guests to dining, were chosen in preference; amongst cheeses, those from Sicily and from the town of Tromileia in Achaia [in Southern Thessaly http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0064:id=achaia-geo] were particularly liked; cakes sprinkled with salt (epipasta) were another important feature of the Greek dessert" p. 266jasonhansel
Here's my question: why didn't the Romans ever (so far as I can tell) use clarified butter? Like olive oil, it is shelf-stable and has a high smoke point; it was well known in ancient India, so I find it surprising that the idea was never imported.
bane
Probably not any reason to. They already had access to other good oils that could be made for far less energy cost than having to raise a cow, milk it, turn the milk to butter, then clarify it.
cmrdporcupine
It was, and remains, a culture of the olive tree and its oil.
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markdown
Maybe they didn't know how.
throwaway59553
Barbarians having better (or at least more) sources of proteins seems to be a recurring theme. The Huns and Mongols probably ate more meat than the average farmer from the lands they conquered on their path.
I wonder if this isn't similar to the recent push to substitute meat with these fake meats, which are nothing but highly processed vegetable oils, some shady vegetable proteins and lots of flavouring, all mixed together, and the same to all those "milks", from soy to almonds.
bee_rider
> Curiously, the Greco-Roman disdain for dairy stopped short at cheese.
I was almost upset to hear that they hated dairy -- given how much wine they had around, how could they not have cheese? Thankfully this line redeemed them.
mr_toad
I wouldn’t be surprised if there were class differences. Wine and cheese for the patricians, bread and milk for the plebs.
throwawaylinux
> Curiously, the Greco-Roman disdain for dairy stopped short at cheese. In Rome, cheese was eaten by both the rich and the poor.
staunch
A kind of similar funny example is in Xenophon's Anabasis, where he mentions "millet-eating Thracians", which always cracks me up. Lots of people ate millet, including Greeks, but this group got referred to as millet-eaters. Seems hilarious to me.
"When all of them had been prevailed upon, they continued the march with Seuthes, and, keeping the Pontus upon the right through the country of the millet-eating Thracians, as they are called, arrived at Salmydessus."
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1...
stevenjohns
This is actually a great reference. The Roman festival of Parilia was celebrated by offering millet and milk to Pales, followed by drinking wine mixed with milk. This event eventually became Rome’s birthday celebration :)
EGreg
I am not sure that was ever true. In the Old Testament, there are lots of references to drinking milk.
There is even a saying: Do not boil a baby goat in its mother’s milk. From which rabbis derived various prohibitions on milk consumption together with various meats.
Perhaps you’re going to say the milk was always curdled or formed into cheese? And I would ask, how do we know that they didn’t just drink it?
LAC-Tech
> I am not sure that was ever true. In the Old Testament, there are lots of references to drinking milk.
Wouldn't the people who wrote the old testament have been considered barbarians by the Romans?
arrosenberg
Judaism was an ancient and long established religion in the Levant by the time the Roman Republic came into contact with them. They had been under the suzerainty of the Seleucid Greeks for about a hundred years, and had a culture that deeply valued learning, literacy and the law, so they weren't barbarians by any definition. The Romans respected their culture as ancient, and being on par with other cultures in the region (at least until the Judeans started rebelling too frequently).
LAC-Tech
Would be interested in some sources for this. My understanding is that anything non-Roman was barbarian by definition.
oldgradstudent
Similarly, butter is referenced multiple times as well.
The climate is warmer than Rome's, so the argument seems weak.
cies
> Remembering When Only Barbarians Drank Milk
It's how I still feel about it. The way cows are treated (caged, fed unnatural food, preventive antibiotics, babies taken away right after birth, the misery of slaughter) shows me that the act of paying for the products derived from cows is, frankly, quite barbarian to me (as in: not very sophisticated).
Especially given that milk product are known for decades to be unhealthy for humans after the weaning stage.
cheese_goddess
> Especially given that milk product are known for decades to be unhealthy for humans after the weaning stage.
That's not true. Here:
>Background
> There is scepticism about health effects of dairy products in the public, which is reflected in an increasing intake of plant-based drinks, for example, from soy, rice, almond, or oat. Objective
> This review aimed to assess the scientific evidence mainly from meta-analyses of observational studies and randomised controlled trials, on dairy intake and risk of obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, cancer, and all-cause mortality. Results
> The most recent evidence suggested that intake of milk and dairy products was associated with reduced risk of childhood obesity. In adults, intake of dairy products was shown to improve body composition and facilitate weight loss during energy restriction. In addition, intake of milk and dairy products was associated with a neutral or reduced risk of type 2 diabetes and a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease, particularly stroke. Furthermore, the evidence suggested a beneficial effect of milk and dairy intake on bone mineral density but no association with risk of bone fracture. Among cancers, milk and dairy intake was inversely associated with colorectal cancer, bladder cancer, gastric cancer, and breast cancer, and not associated with risk of pancreatic cancer, ovarian cancer, or lung cancer, while the evidence for prostate cancer risk was inconsistent. Finally, consumption of milk and dairy products was not associated with all-cause mortality. Calcium-fortified plant-based drinks have been included as an alternative to dairy products in the nutrition recommendations in several countries. However, nutritionally, cow's milk and plant-based drinks are completely different foods, and an evidence-based conclusion on the health value of the plant-based drinks requires more studies in humans.
> Conclusion
> The totality of available scientific evidence supports that intake of milk and dairy products contribute to meet nutrient recommendations, and may protect against the most prevalent chronic diseases, whereas very few adverse effects have been reported.
From:
Milk and dairy products: good or bad for human health? An assessment of the totality of scientific evidence
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5122229/
The article is a review and it's from 2016.
betwixthewires
I agree with you that many modern commercial dairy and meat farming practices are barbaric, but milk is a nutrient dense superfood, whole cultures subsisted for centuries eating basically just dairy products. Milk products are not bad for you.
cies
> nutrient dense superfood
Is marketing speak my friend dont fall for it.
Oil is nutirent dense. Sugar is. It means nothing. Maybe you mean "micronutrient / calorie" dense. But even that, due to the high calorie content is not so true (lettuce is much more dense in this sense).
> cultures subsisted for centuries eating basically just dairy products
Subsisted in harsh climates on dairy (mainly in winter) as a supplement to their grain based food: yes, that happened in many areas. But that does not mean it's healthy.
> whole cultures subsisted for centuries eating basically just dairy product
which?
betwixthewires
The Mongol, Uyghur and other central Asian cultures subsisted almost entirely on horse and goat milk for centuries. Many northern European cultures subsisted almost entirely on dairy for periods in history. Nomadic pastoral cultures did not have land to grow grain, as they were nomadic, they lived basically off of foraged plants, dairy and meat of animals that they no longer could use for other purposes. Later, when these cultures moved away from a nomadic lifestyle and began growing grain yes, dairy was supplemental, but for many of them for centuries they subsisted largely on dairy products.
Milk is a nutrient dense superfood, whether grifters like to toss the terms around or not. That's the whole point of mammals creating the substance to begin with. It exists to provide complete nutrition all by itself.
josephcsible
> milk product are known for decades to be unhealthy for humans after the weaning stage
That's an extraordinary claim. Source?
cies
> That's an extraordinary claim. Source?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3c_D0s391Q&list=PLMZWHcTgQ3...
wazoox
On this subject, be sure to read acoup.blog piece on how the Mongol (and other steppe nomads) could raid hundreds of kilometres from their bases by using mares that would provide them both drink and food while travelling light and fast (no chariots, no soldiers on foot). Milk as a strategic military advantage!
smorgusofborg
I think this is ignoring Roman and Chinese urban density which pushed them into this difference over generations. Much of the food necessary to feed a city was imported on a scale and timeline similar to global trade today. I don't know anyone who buys foreign fresh milk and butter but cheese is different.
naturalauction
The “Anchor” brand of butter in the UK used to be made in and exported from New Zealand between 1924 and 2012.
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I feel like this is glancing over various points. Specifically that cows aren’t the only source of milk: sheep, goats, buffalo and horses have all been milked throughout history, and would have been the main source for milk in Rome. And it wasn’t historically looked down upon: major Abrahamic faiths venerated milk consumption. For some reason yogurt is also glanced over even though Oxygala (or something like it) would have definitely been consumed almost daily.
It seems like this is a fairly Eurocentric view. Not even that, really, but a specific-period-of-time-in-Rome view.
The Romans didn’t like butter… that’s about it. And they didn’t like it because it spoils too easily in their environment. Expanding that to dairy in general is quite a reach.
Looking at what someone eats and picking on them for it still takes place in 2021 — try sending your kid with a whole cucumber to school.