An old legend, oft repeated in dairy circles, holds that this accidental discovery occurred about 9,000 years ago, when
an Arab traveler using a stomach to store dairy went to take a swig of milk after a long day on the road and found that in the heat, rennet, bacteria, and other contaminants had created curds within the container.
We’re now pretty sure that this old tale is ********. According to
Paul Kindstedt, a cheese biochemist and historian at the University of Vermont (of course), as of 7000 B.C., most adults worldwide
were lactose intolerant.
But early herders, and agriculturalists around whose crops herd animals congregated, got the bright idea to supplement human mothers’ milk with animal milk to provide a extra caloric security for babies and toddlers.
Kindstedt suspects that from there, in a period of intense food scarcity, some adults started risking the upset stomach dairy gave them. They would eventually try eating the curds left behind in seemingly spoiled milk in stomach skins, only to discover that (thanks to the fact that separating whey from curds removes up to 80 percent of dairy’s gastrointestinally offensive lactose) they could stomach it better than the straight liquid they gave to their kids.
