Behold Milk; The King Of Kings
April 5, 2015 in Daily Bulletin
Milk may well be the manna that turned human civilization into what it is today writes The Economist:
- Only about a third of people can digest milk well into adulthood.
- Data indicates that places where humans had the ability to digest milk, such as Western Europe, went onto become more developed countries.
- Milk is good because it’s a source of on demand liquid energy.
- Its nutrients help provide for a balanced diet in all seasons.
- It also increased the returns from agriculture since not only did it allow for animals to provide wool, fertilizer, and ploughing power, but also food.
- This increased population density which made it easier to create infrastructure, laws, and overall society.
Read about the theory, the role that war plays in it, and more over here.
Source: The Economist
Oh come now! Not a whole lot of milk drinkers in East Asia, where civilizations have been around for the past four thousand years, or Central/South America, going back about three thousand. Where did those milk drinkers hang out? Europe — which except for Italy and Greece. has largely been the province of thuggish barbarians for all but the last six or seven centuries.
Sure, milk’s a food and thus valuable for keeping a batch of people alive. But it makes more sense to say some human populations grew large enough — desperate enough! — to exploit milk as a food source than to suggest that some peculiar characteristics of dairy products underpin European domination of the modern world.