World cuisines divide into sweet-milk, sour-milk, and no-milk zones

Evidence

What were the ingredients of ancient cuisine? We start of course with milk and honey. Milk is a very basic foodstuff, taken sweet, curdled, clarified, and various other ways. 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

• XREF: Echoes the milk-processed-as-culture axis in curdling/clarifying; ties to food-as-civilization markers common in Said-adjacent analyses of how regions get characterized.
• DEFINE: Introduces a staple tripartite food-zone framework for classifying civilizations by dairy.