Why Do Lactose-Intolerant Chinese People Still Drink Milk?

“A glass of milk a day, a stronger China” – I’m sure this advertising slogan is familiar to most readers. In reality, the majority of Chinese people are lactose intolerant, and drinking milk can cause diarrhoea, bloating and other discomforts, yet on today’s dining tables milk has become a perfectly ordinary presence.

Food-safety scandals involving milk have even been etched into a generation’s collective memory. After the 2008 melamine incident, China’s “milk boom” did not subside – if anything, it sparked a craze for purchasing milk powder from overseas.

Two articles previously published by Foodthink also explored whether milk from smallholder dairy farms or from large-scale dairy farms is safer and more nutritious, as well as the predicament of smallholder farms being marginalised within the dairy cattle farming industry.

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Smallholder vs. Large-Scale Dairy Farms: Whose Milk Is Safer and More Nutritious?

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In fact, owing to its extreme susceptibility to spoilage, milk inevitably faces all manner of safety risks along the path to becoming a modern commodity capable of long-term storage and long-distance transport. So why do people around the world today still need milk so much? In truth, it has barely been more than a century since the Chinese began drinking milk as an everyday beverage – how did this transformation come about?

When you habitually pick up a glass of milk, perhaps you, too, have paused to wonder about these very questions. In this episode of Food Talk, we sit down with Zhang Sirui – history editor at Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press and food-history researcher – to take a fresh look at this seemingly simple white liquid.

*Click the cover to purchase this book. From religious rituals to the family table, from the farm to the global market, 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 and become a symbol of scientific progress and economic development – to the point of being hailed by modern nutrition as “the perfect food”.

You will find that milk is never “simple”: to the ancient Greeks it was a “barbaric drink”; it once sailed across the globe aboard Dutch trading vessels; in the West it was packaged as “the perfect food”, while in China it was entrusted with the mission of “strengthening the nation and the race”. In this episode, we will discuss:

How did milk go from “despised” to “deified”?
Why is India today the world’s top milk producer?
What code of modernisation is hidden in Shanghai’s milk-drinking habits?
From New York’s “swill milk” to the former melamine crisis, why has the road to milk safety been so long?
Why can we say that milk is more than nutrition – it is a story written together by science, politics and global trade?

How did milk make its way onto the everyday dining table? How did milk pasteurisation become a public health system? And how did Shanghai become the birthplace of today’s milk regulation system? In this book, Zhang Sirui takes us back to twentieth-century China to re-examine the evolution of milk regulation, trace the formation of industry standards, and explore the dilemmas and challenges facing Shanghai’s dairy sector.

We also extend the conversation beyond milk, exploring how food helps us understand the world – from Canned to Foie Gras to Ice Cream, every mouthful carries the flavour of history.

Whether or not you are a milk drinker, after listening to this episode you will likely find yourself peering into your glass, remembering the long, complex and ever-evolving story of humanity’s relationship with food behind it.

Milk-powder advertisement from the Republic of China period, linking milk drinking with “strengthening the nation” and “strengthening the people”, reflecting the national and modernist imaginaries attached to milk in modern China. Image source: Zhang Sirui

Another milk-powder advertisement from the Republic of China period, promoting milk powder as a “scientific” alternative when breast milk is insufficient. Image source: Zhang Sirui

◉ A Republic of China–period milk advertisement from a particular brand, showcasing “pasteurised milk” production, reflecting the introduction of Western pasteurisation technology and its localised marketing at the time. Image source: Zhang Sirui

A diagram of “standardised production” in a Republic of China–period milk advertisement. Image source: Zhang Sirui

GUEST

Zhang Sirui

A food lover who has never successfully lost weight, and a food-history researcher; history editor at Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press and book-series curator for the Food Words imprint

HOST

Xiao Jing

Host of Food Talk, a sufferer of lactose intolerance who, at some point without quite knowing when, started drinking a glass of milk every day

TIMELINE

03:04 Bright Dairy, Mengniu, Sanyuan… What’s the milk you drink most back home? We start with the regional memories tied to milk.

04:21 How Professor Zhang “fell down the rabbit hole of milk research”: it all began with helping make a documentary about the 2008 melamine incident.

11:17 Milk was originally a local food, not an inherently globalised commodity – at one point in ancient Greece, Rome and medieval Europe, it was even regarded as an “uncivilised” drink.

13:17 How did dairy cattle, cheese and trade networks push milk onto the global stage?

21:45 A prime case in globalisation: why is India – not a Western country – the world’s top milk producer today? How did India’s White Revolution and cooperative model carve out a path distinct from the Western industrial dairy sector?

25:15 Back to China: it has barely been more than a century since the Chinese made milk an everyday drink – how did that shift come about? Taking Shanghai as a case in point, how was milk the first to become commercialised and part of daily life in a modern city, turning into a modern consumer good?

29:23 How did milk go from a “winter tonic” to an everyday food for the masses? What roles did nationalism, scientific discourse, nutrition science and advertising play along the way?

34:29 All the while, safety concerns have dogged milk’s development: from New York’s “swill milk” scandal to the melamine crisis in China.

39:22 Today, milk is not just a drink but a modern lifestyle – one that is written, edited and continually constructed.

49:45 Faced with widespread lactose intolerance, how did milk navigate a far-from-smooth “localisation” process in China?

54:29 From milk to the birth of the Shikeyu book series: why publish food-related titles like A History of Japan’s Coffee Culture, Foie Gras and Sharing the Table, Sweet and Bitter?

62:05 At last, back to a seemingly simple question: why do we understand the world through food?