Dairy, dairy, quite contrary

Dairy, dairy, quite contrary,

how does your biome grow?

With bunged-up guts or constant trots

and toilet rolls all in a row.

With all the bad press grains (rightly) get for having been so recently assimilated into the human diet, relatively speaking, it’s easy to forget that dairy has been a regular for only about the same length of time, in the region of 10,000 years.

So can the arguments against grains – we haven’t evolved to eat them, we flourished and thrived for millions of years without them, we only tolerate them at best but ultimately they make us ill, etc – equally be applied to dairy? Should we drink milk? Should we eat cheese? And who are ‘we’ exactly? If you’re of old European stock, the answer might not be the same as if you’re of, say, Vietnamese extraction.

In the 1970s, archaeologists excavating a Stone…