Hidden persuaders taking planet for a ride

Like many Indians I like a little yogurt with my meals. And since I knew China to be a land of lactose-intolerant people, I thought it would be difficult to get yogurt in Beijing when I first came here three and half years ago. I was wrong. The racks of the first supermarket I walked into were overflowing with yogurt and milk.

But that didn't solve my problem, either, because most of (almost all) the yogurt sold in Beijing is either sweet or sweet and flavored with strawberry, lychee, pineapple or mango, and I like mine to be plain (or what my Chinese friends call wu tang suan nai.) So I started making my own yogurt, that is, plain yogurt. It's not a difficult thing to do if you have milk and just a tea-spoonful of plain yogurt. You boil the milk, let it cool down to a temperature that allows you to dip your finger without burning it and put the spoonful of yogurt in it, and set it aside to curdle.

My problem solved, I stopped worrying about yogurt. But each time I walked into a market (even an open vegetable market), the racks and crates full of yogurt and milk made me wonder how my Chinese friends could consume those huge amounts of yogurt and milk. Milk products, after all, had not been part of their diet for thousands of years. How could they start swearing by them in just a matter of two decades?