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Comment by ardit33 | Hacker News Reader

I don't think this is quiet correct. I am Albanian, and we drink coffee all the time, even in the evening. Even in coastal towns in the south (which is next to greece and south italy). We also use lots of butter/cheese and produce/use lots of Olive Oil as well. Growing up as kids, bread and olive oil, was a common breakfast/snack.

We just don't have any rules on can't have coffee after a meal.

The main reason some places would stop serving coffee after 7pm is because they switch into 'bars', and they'd rather sell alcoholic drinks to make more profit. Many coffee only houses stay open past 10pm, especially in the summer.

It seems this 'don't drink cappuccinos after a certain hour' is mostly a cultural thing.

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Italian here. We don't usually have cappuccino after 12pm because cappuccino is a breakfast meal. We do have coffee after 12pm tho. For Italian people, cappuccino toghether with lunch / dinner is a taboo, it's like broccoli ice cream we can say :)

It's just milky drinks in general. I always found it weird to see people having milk with lunch in American TV shows. Its sweetness doesn't pair well with saltier lunch and dinner time food.

It's not a lactose intolerance problem at all.

When I was child then I liked milk with everything.

Same. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner I drank milk.

Is it possible it was skimmed milk? I can't imagine having whole milk with, say, pizza. Too thick, hides all other flavours.

Milk isn't sweet, though?

I'm curious, are you from a country where milk is conventionally UHT treated? UHT milk has a sweet (and plasticky) taste to me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweetness#Examples_of_sweet_su...

while it is at the bottom of the list, lactose is sweet

It is sweet if your diet is not sugar heavy. Hi America.

AFAIK most Italian milk is UHT treated, yes.

Yes exactly: drinking milk with salty meals is a taboo in Italy. I've always being shocked by the fact that UK/US citizens drink mainly milk instead of drinking water. Moreover, I visited US a couple of years ago, and it was shockingly hard to find normal pure water, since people there use to drink almost only water variants or other beverages. In Italy the only beverages you usually find on the table during lunch/dinner are water and wine.

I once traveled from the U.S. to Italy with a colleague who insisted on ordering cappuccino after supper. I think he mainly did it because he enjoyed scandalizing restauraunt staff.

Great, now I want to have a taste of broccoli ice cream. Thank you very much...

I wonder if Polly Ann is still doing vegetable ice creams during COVID...

I'm not sure that's quite fair to what the video is saying.

For one, he didn't say anything about coffee, but rather cappuccino (and other milk-based espresso drinks) specifically. A quick google seems to show that this holds up — I found a number of other easy sources that say the same thing.

They also mentioned wide variation in lactose tolerance, including between the north and south of Italy. You'd probably want to make sure that Albania is expected to have a similar lactose intolerance as Italy's population. Even within Europe the variance is very high — head a country or two north and you suddenly get up to _huge_ population-level tolerance levels of 75-80%+ in Scandinavia.

You mentioned butter/cheese and the video covers that specifically, saying that especially hard cheeses only have a tiny fraction of the lactose content that milk does (~5%, but varying by the type of cheese). So there's no reason for cheese to be treated with the same level of care.

Who knows, but I found the video to be as convincing as any other rationale for the taboo.

Hey neighbor! Greek here, I can confirm we do the same as all the above.

My brother in law is from Marocco and always drinks coffee too.

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