Why don't they use Milk?

[Cocobeau]

I'm always curious when I visit other countries why they don't seem to have the obsession with milk that we have in the UK? In some countries I've visited it's been nearly impossible to find any fresh milk even in large supermarkets, just UHT. Other places you can find fresh milk, but very limited in small sections. I've certainly never seen anything like the entire fridges dedicated to the various milk types we have in the UK (maybe except for NZ). So why do we feel such a strong need for fresh milk and not the rest of the world? What do they use instead? Do they just give their kids water once they've come off breast/infant milk?

Europeans are genetically weird in that they can continue to digest milk as adults. Thought to have come about due to a population squeeze post ice age

A quick wiki and Primary hypolactasia and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3048992/ popped up.

Was explained by Prof Alice Roberts when I saw her plugging one of her books a while back.

@Nimbostratus100

yes, fair enough, the majority of people I know are white despite living and working in London. Non-white is maybe 20% of my colleagues.

But, it was said "majority of adults", so that means then "majority of non-white adults" who can't tolerate lactose.

That is a well-known and established fact and I don't say it's not true. But it's equally true that a large portion of the white population can digest lactose.

If such a large proportion of us adult (white or non-white) are lactose intolerant I would expect the shelves with dairy products a lot smaller and there would be less cream cakes/trifels and other desserts available.
It doensn't add up.

It's not just Europeans though! Yaks milk is used in Mongolia, camels milk is consumed in the Middle East, and was once a staple of the Bedouin. India has the biggest diary herd globally...

As Richard Dawkins notes in "The Ancestors Tale" it's entirely possible to deal with lactose intolerance in adults by simply removing lactose - which is what the various processes of yoghurt and cheesemaking do. When food is scarce you try not to waste anything that can be used.

I briefly dabbled in looking into lactose intolerance after a friend developed it, and it turned out (un beknown to them) that they had a slightly less than 100% European genetic experience (as they described it). Fascinating and a reminder why I didn't do biology ....