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Comment by zeteo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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You can preserve cheese for much longer, and use it in much more foods.

Yes, but, when starvation looms, it seems you're better off having the milk directly (if you can).

That'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.

yhogurt is pretty easy and good for you, too =D

Not 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)

Yeah, 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.

I 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.

Having 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.

It'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.

Raising 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.

I'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.

Well, having made beer and wine before, it's not really compatible with previous lifestyles as well. The way we do things in the modern world is not at all similar to the way historic societies worked. In the earliest days, beer was an accident that turned out well. We wouldn't recognize what they called beer. I'm not a historian, but it's possible that what they called cheese was at odds with our modern definition.

First you make something. They you make it good. These days we call it "minimum viable product (MVP)".

It's worth pointing out that our methods and tastes also evolved because the raw materials and industry trends are changing.

Get a bottle of fat milk straight from a cow, leave it on the kitchen table for a couple of days to turn sour (depends on room temperature) and you'll get yogurt, maybe not as thick as the one you can buy at a store, but it's good nonetheless. Then if the batch was good, you can save some of this batch for later batches, for an addition of bacteria cultures, thus with each successive batch you'll get better and better results. There are absolutely no additives needed (unless you make a business out of it, in which case you want predictable results), with the end-result being 100% chemicals free.

Now try doing that with the bottled milk you can find in the stores.

EDIT (reformulated):

So, consumer tastes are changing based on industry trends ... like these fuckers put extra sugar in everything, being a vicious cycle, because extra sugars in foods give dependency on foods with extra sugars in them. And let's not forget of additives like gels for extra-thickness, or dyes, or powder milk, or other chemicals (because degreased milk or yogurt does not resemble real milk or yogurt, so they have to make up for it somehow) and also preservatives for longer shelf life, etc, etc...

Many consumers would turn their nose on real, fat, non-pasteurized milk or on fat barbecued pork neck, because it's somehow unhealthier than McDonalds' burgers or diary products enriched with chemicals.

And tastes are grown, so if people get used to Danone yogurts that never rot, then that's what they start expecting.

Funny story, the punch line for a Danone milk cream in my country on a TV commercial has been "look how well it dissolves". And I was like "oh wow, can cream really do that?". Go figure.

> with the end-result being 100% chemicals free.

I truly doubt that.

There is absolutely no such thing as "chemical free". Water, lactic acid, casein, and so on, they're all chemicals, even if you have glorified them with a stamp that says "natural".

Your statement is true, but also useless, as in the true spirit of hacker culture, you're arguing semantics.

"Chemicals" when used in the context of food, means "artificial food additives".

You may disagree that such additives are bad for you health - but just how our early ancestors had low-lactose tolerance, we also have low tolerance for such additives. Maybe our children's children will be able to digest such foods better / more efficiently and without side-effects, but in the meantime there's a wealth of research showing strong links between food additives and increasing rates of cancer, obesity and diabetes.

> agriculture came first, then milking, then cheese

I don't think sequence is quite right. There are several non-agrarian nomadic peoples that raise large land mammals for their milk. Keeping it in the cow/horse/camel keeps it from spoiling.

Cheese and butter just makes it easier to transport the energy without having to transport the cow.

(fermenting it also gives it longevity and was known in much of the ancient world)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kumis

Also Bog Butter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bog_butter

Paneer/soft cheese and curd though is very easy to make, and requires just the ability to let the milk settle.

You may not get to creating Emmenthal/Parmesan straight away, but there are many other viable steps prior to modern cheese.

Sorry 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?

Some parts of the milk are discarded when making cheese.

Some being all that delicious whey. Whey chock full of protein! Discarding is optional of course.

You 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.

The 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.

That 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.

> I doubt that people who were hard up for calories would discard the whey unless they had some cultural objection or superstition.

Indeed, Norwegian goat cheese is a whey cheese, made by boiling milk, cream and whey leftover from other production (such as more usual casein based cheese). There are a number of other traditional whey cheeses from other countries as well.

The conversion process consumes lactase, a sugar that's responsible for a significant part of the calories available in milk. Thus, eating cheese is not calorie equal to the volume of milk needed for it's production.

> Lactase

Lactose :)

You can have 10 kg of coal or 10 kg of greenhouse gases and ash. Guess what gives you more potential calories?

Bacterias split lactose to grow, consuming energy in the process and dissipating it as heat and runaway gases.

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