During my Asiatic travels a group of Chinese Buddhists asked me to talk to them--an activity which in those days I was willing to do, unlike today. After the spoken address they invited me to dine with them. There were about twenty of us and when tea was served one laughingly remarked that, in contrast to the English, they put no milk in it. I enquired why milk was rejected. He answered that it was distasteful to many, if not most, Chinese because those who drank it were supposed to emit a cowlike odour, while it was repulsive to the Buddhists among them because its human use was a robbery of the calf.
Milk is an animal product but few Western vegetarians seem able to leave it out of their diet and yet remain satisfied. I am one of the few. Their difficulty lies principally in replacing the nutritive substances and calcium minerals which milk and cheese supply and which are necessary to the human body. I believe this difficulty could be met, as the Chinese meet it, by using soyabean milk and soyabean cheese, whose chemical composition is about the same as the animal product. Or a different and suitable replacement could be nut milk, which is easily made either from almond or coconuts. I do not even use this, preferring tahini, the thick fluid derived from sesame seeds.
-- Notebooks Category 5: The Body > Chapter 3 : Diet > # 179
