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> In Shanghai, cheese is something of a novelty item, but milk is sold in every convenience store. I find this surprising given that more than 90% of Chinese are lactose intolerant.

I'm not sure that that's that surprising (particularly if it's UHT/shelf-stable milk); go to any convenience store anywhere in the developed world, and you'll find plenty of items that far less than 10% of the customer base have any interest in buying. As long as _enough_ people will buy it, they'll sell it; doesn't need to be the whole population or anything like it.

> I'm not sure that that's that surprising (particularly if it's UHT/shelf-stable milk)

It isn't! To get UHT milk, you have to go to a supermarket - it's an imported product. Supermarkets will also have cheese; kind and quality of the cheese vary by store.

Convenience stores only carry fresh milk. I think my favored brand is from a local dairy.

The price of milk in Shanghai, by the way, is much higher than the price anywhere in the US. This is an extreme reversal of the normal situation for food products. Imported UHT milk is quite a bit cheaper, I assume due to economies of scale, but I can't stand the taste of UHT milk.

> go to any convenience store anywhere in the developed world, and you'll find plenty of items that far less than 10% of the customer base have any interest in buying.

Mostly those items are theoretically capable of being used to full effect by 100% of the customer base. Here we have a situation where less than 10% of the customer base is even included in the potential customer base for the product. And given that milk has no place in an ordinary Chinese diet, a very large majority of those potential customers are never going to consider buying it.

Singapore is a bit more westernised, so people are more familiar with dairy products. We also have enough people from the wider Indian subcontinent (India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, etc), who traditionally have more of a dairy culture.

Plus Singapore is reasonably fond of her time as a British colony.

> She was confused when I responded that that wouldn't happen to me because I'm white.

Of course, we also have populations of westerners with less lactose tolerance. I think Italians fall among them?

European-style lactase persistence is centered in northern Europe, so yes, Italians have less of it.

But the maybe 38% of Italians who can digest lactose ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28673071/ ) still dwarf the ~7% of Chinese who can. If your only exposure to whites was Italians, with their very strong cultural features of cheese†, cream-based sauces, and ice cream‡, you'd still know that (1) whites consume much, much, much more dairy than Chinese do; and (2) they are much less likely to suffer any negative consequences from doing so. On the other hand, Italians would probably sympathize with the risk of indigestion from drinking milk "wrong" where Danes or Dutchmen would most likely just be confused at the idea.

My white ancestry is mostly drawn from England, Ireland, Sweden, and Russia, so the baseline expectation for me to be able to digest lactose would be a lot higher than the Italian baseline. Visually I do look more like a southern European.

† To the best of my knowledge, there is no significant amount of lactose in cheese. But it is still a good indicator that milk features in the culture.

‡ Ice cream is also very popular among the native Chinese.

> † To the best of my knowledge, there is no significant amount of lactose in cheese. But it is still a good indicator that milk features in the culture.

Lactose content depends on the kind of cheese. As a rule of thumb, the longer your cheese is matured, the less lactose remains.

>This is several cartons; the largest carton you can buy is 1350 mL of milk.)

Even in other highly-lactose tolerant countries, I don't think I've ever seen milk sold in a carton or bottle more than one litre, outside of the US.

1.5l and 2l plastic bottles are quite common in eg Singapore.

In Australia the ratio in a typical supermarket is around:

- 40% 1L - 40% 2L - 20% 3L

You drink half a gallon of milk a day? Wow. I'm about as white as they make 'em, and if I drank a half gallon of milk, I'd absolutely have an incident.

There's a famous weight-gaining diet called Gallon Of Milk A Day (GOMAD) recommended by strength coaches, most recently Mark Rippetoe of Starting Strength. He gets asked about it a lot: https://startingstrength.com/resources/forum/general-q-and-a...

Well, he didn't exactly recommend it outright.

It was more like a dare, along the lines of: if you claim that you can't gain weight, just take whatever you are currently doing, and add a gallon of milk a day.

A jar of peanut butter a day would also work. Or just increasing your intake of calories overall.