With Shavuot on the horizon, many Jews are preparing for fillings of blintzes and cheesecake. Dairy products (as Eric noted below in his post “Got Shavuot?“) have a number of intimate connections with the festivals that marks, among other things, the giving of the Torah to the Israelites at Sinai. But what are we to make of it that so much of the world’s population is unable to digest lactose, the sugar in milk products?

Years ago, while waiting for the ice cream truck to come by the neighborhood, I recall a friend who would ritualistically take his “dairy pills.” While less painful than the insulin injections that another friend surrendered to, I was puzzled at his body’s intolerance as well as his reason to continue eating milk products if it caused such problems. Little did I know that so much of the world’s population is lactose intolerant, figures hovering between the 66-90 percent mark.

According to a study from the Harvard School of Public Health, “90 percent of Asians, 70 percent of blacks and Native Americans, and 50 percent of Hispanics are lactose-intolerant.” As a whole, Europeans, Australians and New Zealanders, and white Americans are the least likely to have lactose intolerancy. Even in the U.S., divergent cultural histories demonstrate the role of culture in lactose intolerance, where nearly 75 percent of Black Americans and 90 percent of Asian Americans are unable to digest the sugar found in milk. Clearly, the ability (or lack thereof) to digest lactose is a cultural issue.

Not all cultures, indeed very few, rely on milk to such great degrees in their diets as we do in the United States (consider our staples of pizza, macaroni and cheese, ice cream, cereal and milk, etc). In a July 2005 article looking at potential connections between culture and lactose intolerancy, a Cornell University study found “that it is primarily people whose ancestors came from places where dairy herds could be raised safely and economically, such as in Europe, who have developed the ability to digest milk.” The study concludes that people whose ancestors raised cattle (people in temperate climates or nomadic people, for example) are able to digest lactose because of evolutionary “gene mutations that maintain lactase into adulthood.” Above all, this study demonstrates the ability for people’s cultural history to guide their biological evolution.

Which has left me wondering, what are we to make of the Jews around the world that have partaken in different cultural histories than Jews in the U.S. and Europe? How do they celebrate Shavuot? Kulanu, an organization that prides itself on “finding and assisting lost and dispersed remnants of the Jewish people,” works with Jewish communities from Brazil to Uganda, China to Guatemala. The people in these geographies are culturally diverse, and their local climates are just as diverse. So it can fairly be assumed that of the nearly 80 global communities of “lost” Jews, at least some (and probably most) people in these communities are lactose intolerant (Kulanu has a page of culturally diverse Jewish foods, but it is limited to charoset). So how do they celebrate Shavuot?

Certainly, this situation is not unique. And truth be told, I do not know exactly how (or how not) milk is used in geographies in which the majority of people are lactose intolerant. Therefore, I just want to raise the bigger question of, what is the applicability of culturally-specific foods to non-culturally specific groups of people (or culturally-specific anythings)? Perhaps the particular foods are altered based on their geographies, or perhaps the people adopt particular foods and eventually develop the ability to digest these foods. Or a third possibility, that the situation is a catalyst for innovation and that “milk” is taken to mean any kind of food that we call “milk” today (rice, soy, and almond milk, to name a few).

In certain respects, this situation seems to parallel the recent dilemma in the Conservative movement over ordination of lesbian and gay rabbis and the performance of same-sex unions. No, issues of halakhah are not present, but several arguments for changing the movement’s stance addressed the Torah’s prohibitions as a reaction to the practices of the Canaanite “cults,” which the Israelite leadership wanted to separate itself from as much as possible. Since the law was culturally specific, it is no longer applicable (it’s more complex than this, of course). The rereading of texts based on cultural specificity is one of the ways in which the movement’s legislative body was able to vouch for changing the law, a stance which, while ambiguous, opens new spaces of contestation and innovation within the movement.

A parallel can be drawn to the eating of milk products fo non-Western Jewish communities. For Ugandan Jews, for example, the eating of milk may not be a regular practice in the community. So they use another food, ________ (insert whatever you like…coffee?). Not only does the ritual embody Jewish liturgy, but it embodies the unique smells and tastes of the local Ugandan Jewish community. And maybe this culturally-specific food creates a certain ritual that sets it apart from its Brooklyn Ashkenazic counterpart. Rather than challenging the “universality” of Jewish tradition (and food?), the acknowledgement of different traditions based on culture can be a source of life for local communities.

So it seems that an acknowledgement of the cultural uniqueness of different communities can be a creative source for those communities (and a way to eat what is local and digestible, of course). Next time that you’re celebrating chagim abroad, then, maybe consider ways to bring in the local culture to the festival. But we shouldn’t milk this one too much, of course, because we want to remember what we’re celebrating and why we’re celebrating it in the first place.