Civilizations divide into sweet-milk, sour-milk, and no-milk zones

Evidence

One can, in a sense, divide the civilizations of this planet into three zones: the sweet-milk zone, the sour-milk zone, and the no-milk zone. The sweetmilk zone is Europe and the Americas; the sour-milk zone the Islamic lands and India; the no-milk zone China and Japan, where they neither drink it nor use it in their traditional cuisine—no milk, no cheese, no butter. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 239

Categorization

• DEFINE: A clean, memorable tripartite classification of milk use as a civilization marker.
• SHARE: Send to anyone into food geography or lactase-persistence history — the sweet/sour/no-milk trichotomy is a crisp mental map.
• SEED: An article angle: lactose tolerance and dairy-culture zones as a lens on ecology, genetics, and culinary divergence — why China never domesticated the dairy complex.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 239
• XREF: connects to: Lactase persistence varies dramatically even among neighboring African ethnic groups. — Joseph Henrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture…, 294