Why Do Chinese People with Lactose Intolerance Still Drink Milk?

“A glass of milk a day, to make the Chinese strong” — this advertising slogan is no doubt familiar to most people.

Most Chinese people actually have lactose intolerance; drinking milk can cause diarrhoea, bloating and so on, yet on the table today, milk seems to have become the most ordinary of all foods.

Food-safety incidents involving milk have even been etched into the collective memory of a generation. After the 2008 melamine incident, China’s “milk craze” did not abate; instead, it sparked a boom in purchasing overseas milk powder through personal shoppers.

Two earlier articles from Foodthink also explored small farms and large farms, asking which of the two produces safer, more nutritious milk, and considered the predicament of small farms being shut out of the dairy-cow farming industry.

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Small farms vs. large farms: Whose milk is safer and more nutritious?

Small farms vs. large farms: Whom should we support? How should we support them?

In fact, given its tendency to spoil and go off so easily, milk inevitably faced all kinds of safety risks on its way to becoming a modern commodity that could be stored long-term and transported over long distances. So why do people all over the world still need milk so much today? Chinese people have only been treating milk as an everyday drink for a little over a century; how did this shift happen?

When you habitually pick up a glass of milk, perhaps you have, without quite realizing it, felt puzzled by these fundamental questions. In this episode of “Food Talk”, we sit with Zhang Sirui, a history editor at Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press and a food-history researcher, to re-examine this seemingly simple white liquid.

*Click the cover to buy this book. From religious rituals to family tables, from farms to global markets, milk has become an indispensable part of human civilisation. This book traces milk’s remarkable journey from ancient sacrificial rites to modern industry, delving into how this white liquid has permeated culture, shaped society, become a symbol of scientific progress and economic development, and even been held up by modern nutrition science as “perfect food”.

You will notice that milk has never been “simple”: to the ancient Greeks, it was a “barbaric drink”, and it once sailed across the world on Dutch merchant ships; in the West, it was packaged as “perfect food”, while in China, it was given the mission of “a strong nation, a strong race”; in this episode, we will discuss:

How did milk go from being “despised” to being “deified”?
Why is India today the world’s top milk producer?
What modernisation code lies behind the Shanghai habit of drinking milk?
From New York’s “swill milk” to the earlier melamine problem, why has the road to milk safety been so long?
Why do we say that milk is more than nutrition—it is a story co-written by science, politics and global trade?

How did milk make its way onto the everyday table? How did milk pasteurisation become a public-health system? How did Shanghai become the birthplace of today’s milk management system? This book by Teacher Zhang takes us back to twentieth-century China to revisit the history of changes in milk management, examine the formation of industry standards, and delve into the difficulties and challenges facing Shanghai’s dairy industry.

We also go beyond milk and talk about how to understand the world through food—from “Canned” to “Foie Gras” to “Ice Cream”, every bite carries the taste of history.

Whether or not you like drinking milk, after listening to this episode, you will probably find yourself looking at the cup in your hand and thinking of the long, complex, ever-changing story of humanity and food behind it.

A Republican-era imported milk powder advertisement linking milk drinking with a “strong nation” and “strong people”, reflecting the imaginings of nationality and modernity attached to milk in modern China. Source: Zhang Sirui

Another Republican-era milk powder advertisement, promoting the idea that when mother’s milk is insufficient, milk powder can also be a “scientific” alternative. Source: Zhang Sirui

◉ A Republican-era milk advertisement for a certain brand, promoting the “pasteurised milk” process, showing that Western pasteurisation technology had already been introduced and marketed locally at the time. Source: Zhang Sirui

A diagram of “standardised production” in a Republican-era milk advertisement. Source: Zhang Sirui

This Episode’s Guest

Zhang Sirui

A foodie and food-history researcher who has never succeeded in any diet, and a history editor at Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press and book planner for the Shikeyu brand

This Episode’s Host

Xiaojing

Food Talk host, a patient with lactose intolerance who has been having a glass of milk every day, though they don’t know when the habit started

Timeline

03:04 Guangming, Mengniu, Sanyuan … what is the milk most often drunk in your hometown? We start with regional memories of milk.

04:21 How Teacher Zhang “fell down the rabbit hole of milk research”: starting with involvement in the production of a documentary about the 2008 melamine incident.

11:17 Milk was originally a local food rather than a naturally globalised commodity; in ancient Greece, Rome and medieval Europe, it was even at one time regarded as an “uncivilised” drink.

13:17 How did dairy cows, cheese and trade networks drive milk’s global spread?

21:45 A typical case of globalisation: why is India, rather than a European or American country, today’s top milk producer? How did India’s “White Revolution” and cooperative model forge a path different from Western industrial dairy farming?

25:15 Turning to China, Chinese people have only treated milk as an everyday drink for a little over a century; how did this shift happen? Taking Shanghai as an example, how did milk in a modern city first achieve commercialisation and become part of daily life, turning into a modern consumer good?

29:23 How did milk go from a “winter tonic” to a mass-market food? What roles did nationalism, scientific discourse, nutritional science and advertising play?

34:29 At the same time, safety issues have always accompanied milk’s development: from New York’s “swill milk” incident to melamine in China.

39:22 Today, milk is not only a drink but also a modern way of life that is written, edited and continually constructed.

49:45 Faced with widespread lactose intolerance, how has milk in China gone through a not-so-smooth process of “localisation”?

54:29 Starting from “milk”, how the “Shikeyu” series came into being: why make books about food such as “A History of Japanese Coffee Culture”, “Foie Gras” and “Eating Sweet and Bitter Together”?

62:05 Finally, returning to a seemingly simple question: why do we turn to food to understand the world?