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I guess I must be missing something, because there's a rather obvious explanation of the article's central paradox: lactose has calories. To wit, it takes abou
by zeteo 14y ago
I guess I must be missing something, because there's a rather obvious explanation of the article's central paradox: lactose has calories. To wit, it takes about 10kg of milk to make 1kg of hard cheese, i.e. 6000 vs 4000 calories. So if you have milk directly, instead of cheese, you get ~50% more calories. This would presumably make quite a difference for semi-starving pastoral populations in 10,000 BC.
- malkia 14y agoYou can preserve cheese for much longer, and use it in much more foods.
- zeteo 14y agoYes, but, when starvation looms, it seems you're better off having the milk directly (if you can).
- etfb 14y agoThat's for sure. By the time you have something halfway edible as cheese, a whole village could have died of starvation. Horrible finicky stuff to make, even with modern refrigeration.
- 001sky 14y agoyhogurt is pretty easy and good for you, too =D
- jpatokal 14y agoNot quite -- fresh cheeses can be made in a matter of hours, and quite dependably. Obviously they don't last as long as the harder kinds, but they're still more stable than milk. Here's one process: http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Paneer-(Indian-Cheese) http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Paneer-(Indian-Cheese)
- etfb 14y agoYeah, but unless you use them like paneer (ie in curries) they taste bland and icky. But I'm a blue cheese or vintage hard cheese man myself.
- gadders 14y agoI always thought the first cheese was made accidentally by storing milk in animal stomachs (which was a natural sort of Rennet). That, and the motion of being carried while riding/moving was enought to create a bsaic cheese/yoghurt.
- etfb 14y agoHaving attempted to make cheese, I can report that it's almost certainly not compatible with hunter-gatherer (ie nomadic) cultures, so the logic seems to support the idea that agriculture came first, then milking, then cheese, and that therefore the change was already happening. That is, whatever caused lactose tolerance to be such a huge evolutionary advantage didn't require cheese to be a large part of the equation.
- ekianjo 14y agoIt's quite obvious it went this way: agriculture, then domestication (since you need to provide food to domesticate animals), then milking, then cheese-making. There is no question that it was not a nomadic culture thing.
- sageikosa 14y agoRaising cattle isn't presupposed on agriculture. It is possible to manage herds of cattle over a wide grazing area without having to tend to feed stock.
- vidarh 14y agoI'm not so sure why this is obvious. A large part of the domesticated animals bred in e.g. Norway (because I happen to be from there, not for any particular other reason) are bred largely independent of the agriculture. Goats and sheep have been popular in Norway for a long time exactly because you don't need to provide food for them from a field you tended, but can send them out to graze in untended fields or in particular up in the mountains during the summer, and can if you don't have access to hay from a farm, collect hay/grass from untended fields to serve through winter. While there's certainly benefits to combining the two in climates like Norway where you need to collect a substantial food source for winter, even in Norway that was/is a convenience rather than a pre-requisite. Up North, the Saami people have been nomadic for as long as we have recorded history of them, without any agricultural tradition, and some communities eventually took up herding and taming reindeer while continuing their nomadic lifestyle, following the migrations of the herds, in large part because while there's copious food for the reindeer, the soil and climate is not conducive to agriculture. They've largely done this without any nearby source of hay or other food from agriculture available at all. Whether or not there's historical basis for saying agriculture came first or not, I don't know, but there are plenty of examples that shows that agriculture isn't required for domestication.
- kamaal 14y agoSorry didn't understand your statement. If it takes 10kg of milk to make 1 kg of cheese. Than eating 1 kg cheese is like drinking 10kgs of milk. How then does milk give you more calories than equivalent quantity(in kgs) of cheese?
- bryanh 14y agoSome parts of the milk are discarded when making cheese.
- skeletonjelly 14y agoSome being all that delicious whey. Whey chock full of protein! Discarding is optional of course.
- vidarh 14y agoYou can make several different types of cheeses from whey too (with other stuff). Boiling milk, cream and whey gives you Scandinavian style "brunost" (brown cheese), traditionally mainly made from goats milk, or you can make "prim" (soft spread; not usually considered a cheese) if you add more fluids. Both very sweet.
- aptwebapps 14y agoThe weight difference is water. But if you loose a third of the calories when converting to cheese then I assume they're in the whey. I doubt that people who were hard up for calories would discard the whey unless they had some cultural objection or superstition.
- gliese1337 14y agoThat may be part of it, but another large part of the difference is that, as previously stated, turning milk into cheese destroys lactose. You get fewer calories from the cheese because microbes already used up some of the calories that were originally in the milk in order to turn it into cheese, and thus those calories are no longer available for you.