By WL Hangshing
Have your milk. It will make you tall and strong”. Everybody has been told so. It is not unlikely that that was all one would have remembered their grandmoms saying. My grandmom was different. She would tell us to stay away from milk.
Have you noticed that Indian food is all about milk and milk products? Ghee, curd, paneer, raita, lassi etc etc and the sweets are all of milk and cream. The same is true of the gastronomical environment all westwards of the subcontinent. Central Asian, West Asian, continental cuisine — they are all about milk. Butter, cheese, cream, yogurt and all the shakes. The recipe for non-vegetarian cooking will, more often than not, include milk, or would at least be a marination in curd. Milk or some form of it is the defining recipe.
But lo and behold! There is no milk and milk-related items on the menu in the oriental world, Tibet and eastwards, the North East, the Arakan states and eastwards. Burmese food, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, you name it, will not have even one item of milk or milk product, whether it is snacks, main-course or after meal tidbits. No! Tofu is not milk and not anywhere akin to paneer. It is soya.
The oriental races are lactose intolerant. They are genetically devoid of lactase, which is the enzyme that enables digestion of the lactose sugar found in milk. Owing to this, cattle as a source of milk never assumed any importance in the daily food habits of the oriental world. Cattle is good primarily and only as a source of meat protein.
In the typical interiors of the sub-continent, a family can scratch a living with a cow and a patch of land. Contrastingly, in the hinterlands of the North East, a walk into the jungle for a kilometre or so would source enough grub for the family pot. So it is that in the deepness of the orient, cow and milk can never be of core relevance. That enzyme lactase or the lack of it is the key to that dietary culture, social psyche, the very way of life! Thus east will go east and west will go west and as the world is round, the twain may meet on the other side!
(The author is Chief Commissioner, GST & Customs, NE Region, Shillong)
