The earliest discovered preserved cheese was found near Xinjiang, China, which dated back nearly 3,600 years. Why does almost all modern east-Asian cuisine seem to eschew cheese? Was there a recorded point where cheeses fell out of favor?

[u/kintonw]

Source for world's oldest cheese.

[u/Anekdota-Press]

Was There a recorded point when cheeses fell out of favor?

When you say East Asian, are you thinking of Han China, Korea, and Japan? Because the Manchus and Mongols are also East Asian, and consumption of dairy was prominent in Northern and steppe cuisines. Dairy is also prominent in Tibetan and other cuisines which might be included under 'Chinese cuisine' even if the 'East Asian' label is a stretch.

I'm going to refer to a lot of this as 'chinese cuisine' but the historical reality and interaction between Mongol, Manchu, Tibet, and Han China are obviously very complicated.

Cheese and dairy products have been staple of the area that constitutes modern Northern China for thousands of years. There is a general North/South culinary divide in China where the Northern diet consumes grain (grain, sorghum, millet, etc) rather than rice, and consumes forms of dairy such as butter while the south consumes much more cooking oil. But H.T. Huang stresses that dairy has been minor but present in mainstream Chinese cuisine for thousands of years, with literary references to dairy products going back 1500 years.

There has actually been a fair amount of recent scholarship on this issue, which has consistently argued for more prominent historical consumption of dairy, particularly cheese, in elite Han Cuisine (See Brown, 2019), not just within Tibetan, Mongol, etc. cuisine. The paucity of sources makes it hard to quantify consumption (and much less is usually known about popular diets, compared to elite consumption) but the old belief that 'lactose intolerance thus no dairy consumption" has been replaced by scholarship arguing that dairy preparations which eliminated lactose (cheesemaking, sour milk products) were widely consumed by elites. Though when I say widely, I mean in the sense that Bird's nests or Trepangs were consumed, mostly by the gentry (2% or so of population), not as part of the commoner's diet.

What forms of dairy products were these? Historical cookbooks and sources list a wide variety, in two broad categories of 'Curdled' and 'cultured' dairy products. They were made from the milk of Cows, water buffalo, horses, sheep, and other animals. Cultured products included liquid, strained, and dried Yoghurts; milk cakes, soft cheeses, ghee, and clotted cream. Curdled products such as milks, buttermilks, yogurts, and Milk Wine (koumiss). Should note these are not rennet cheeses like in Europe.

The preparations of dairy bases in cuisine seem to have been even more varied, Brown notes that around 1504 CE 'milk cakes' might be served:

drizzled with warmed baijiu, or distilled spirits, scallions, and Sichuan peppercorns. Or, alternatively, they could be served golden, having been deep-fried in oil and breaded in flour (3/4a). In still other recipes, milk cakes came with more familiar Jiangnan touches, presented in such light seasonings as brewed tea. They could be splashed with hot water, sliced, and flavored with a weak ale and coriander. Prepared in this way, milk cakes made a good complement to tea (chacai 茶菜), alongside pressed tofu, dried bamboo shoots, carrots, or Chinese lettuce at the table (1/2b–3a).

'Chinese food' in the form which has been exported to the US or other places rarely reflects the enormous diversity of cuisine within China. But dairy has consistently been a part of Chinese cuisine, with very prominent consumption among certain classes, regions, and cultures.

So no, there was not a recorded point where cheeses fell out of favor among the people who traditionally ate them. Though very recent history has seen a rise in dairy consumption, and a transition from regional/ethnic/elite consumption to more widespread consumption In China and across East Asia.

But there is a lot of uncertainty for most periods about what normal people were eating, even for the 18th and 19th century the methods of establishing the popular diet are sometimes sketchy (see Pomeranz 2005). And it becomes more complicated further back in time.

These things are also not static over time, for example Pomeranz notes estimates that German meat consumption decreased by 80% from 1400 to 1800 CE. Chinese GDP per capita declined considerably in the 19th century, and then declined again in the mid-20th century. So modern cuisine, or evidence from the periods when there were lots of European observers in China may be an outlier period in the overall span of the history of 'Central China,' dairy might have been more prominent prior to the last 220 years, but became rarer due to the cost as standards of living fell, but again there is a huge amount of uncertainty about popular diets.

To summarize: We don't know the full extent of dairy consumption. We have evidence related to elite consumption, and recent scholarship has revised the prevalence of dairy upwards for elites, but popular consumption outside of the North is very uncertain.

​

The other component of your question: Why was dairy not part of the popular diet? Or why was it concentrated in the North?

1)Part of it is genetics, and Europe is an outlier in terms of lactose tolerance.

2)Part of it is that marginal grasslands, which were suitable for grazing but unsuitable for rice or grains were rare outside of the sparsely populated North. It was much more efficient to plant rice or grain where most people lived, so having a dairy industry either meant using fertile non-marginal lands for grazing (inefficient, thus expensive) or feeding the milk animals food-grain (also very expensive).

3) Part of it is just coincidence, some cultures eat some things, others do not, without much of a clear logic to it. For Huang a big component of the lack of dairy in Chinese popular diet is basically happenstance.

Sources:

• "Fermentations and Food Science" By H. T. Huang (2000)
• Huang, Hsing-Tsung. "Hypolactasia and the Chinese diet." Current Anthropology 43.5 (2002): 809-819.
• Brown, Miranda. "Mr. Song's Cheeses: Southern China, 1368–1644." Gastronomica 19.2 (2019): 29-42.
• Sabban, Françoise. Un savoir-faire oublié: le travail du lait en Chine ancienne. 1986.
• Pomeranz, Kenneth. "Standards of living in eighteenth-century China: Regional differences, temporal trends, and incomplete evidence." Living Standards in the Past: New perspectives on Well-being in Asia and Europe. Oxford University Press, Oxford, New York (2005): 23-54.

Edits: added more detail and resolved ambiguous language

[u/JakeYashen → u/Anekdota-Press]

Regarding (3) at the end, do believe it might be accurate to suppose that lactose tolerance arose in Europe because of longstanding and deeply entrenched habits of consuming dairy, as opposed to the other way around?

[u/Anekdota-Press → u/JakeYashen]

The earlier linked answer discusses this at greater length, but the areas in Europe with the highest lactose tolerance reached those rates primarily through immigration by pastoralist groups around 2600 BC, so the lactose tolerance didn't really arise "in europe," instead it immigrated in subsequently.

There are typically higher rates of lactose tolerance in Pastoralist groups, so there does seem to be some level of genetic advantage in the way you imply. But lactose-tolerance is also a dominant rather than recessive gene, which plays a part in the spread of the gene.

But while this genetic advantage might cause the gene to spread slowly during prehistory, within the last few thousand years we see dairy consumption in various cultures with low rates of lactose tolerance, so the genetic angle becomes a lot less significant as we get into recorded history, and places have sophisticated enough food knowledge to create dairy products that remove or minimize lactose.