When Only Barbarians Drank Milk

“Butter eater” was once a terrible insult.

During a visit to conquered Britain, Julius Caesar was appalled by how much milk the northerners consumed.
The Romans often commented on the inferiority of other cultures, and they took excessive milk drinking as evidence of barbarism. Similarly, butter was a useful ointment for burns; it was not a suitable food. As Pliny the Elder bluntly put it, butter is “the choicest food among barbarian tribes.” People who ate butter and drank milk were uncivilized outsiders. Drinking milk was something that only crude, uneducated rural people did and was rare among adults of all social classes.

Japanese Buddhists looked down on Westerners, who they thought consumed too much dairy. They claimed they could smell it on them, and even into the 20th century used the pejorative term Batā dasaku, or “butter stinker,” for a Westerner.


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