Dairy products have the big advantage of being available as long as you can keep a cow or sheep or goat or horse or camel alive which has made them staple foods

Dairy products have the big advantage of being available as long as you can keep a cow or sheep or goat or horse or camel alive which has made them staple foods in some places where food could get scarce because of cold, drought or a generally barren landscape. This is probably also what drove the evolution of a lactose-tolerant branch of Homo Sapiens in these regions as well as the growth of dairy-consuming cultures. The fact that Asian cultures tend to use fewer dairy products can be traced back to the fact that the conditions during the last glacial maximum [1] which gave rise to lactose tolerance mostly occurred in western and northern Europe. They also occurred in northern America but that continent seemingly did not have any humans on it yet. The mere fact that Asian cultures consider western dairy use to be extreme does not say that much, the same is said in many western cultures about some aspects of Asian food cultures. Fortunately we live in a time when people in east and west can partake in varied food cultures so we get to have cheese fondue one day, char siu the next and gravlax (cured salmon) the day after. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum#/media/File:Last_Glacial_Maximum_Vegetation_Map.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum#/media/Fi...