Science Quote by Marvin Harris

Harris is doing what he did best: taking a seemingly petty cultural quirk and using it as a trapdoor into bigger, testable explanations. The line has a dry impatience baked into it. "Chinese don't like milk because they don't like milk" is his caricature of a lazy, circular account of culture - a non-explanation dressed up as common sense. He is signaling that the real work starts when you refuse to treat preference as a final cause.

The intent is methodological. Harris is defending the impulse to replace "they just do" with "what conditions make this pattern likely?" In his cultural materialist framework, food taboos and tastes aren’t primarily mysteries of national character; they’re outcomes of ecology, economy, history, and bodily constraints. Milk is a perfect example because it invites romanticized East/West storytelling, yet it has blunt material hooks: high rates of lactose intolerance in many East Asian populations, the historical scarcity of pastoral dairying compared with regions where cattle-raising was central, and the fact that fermentation technologies can change what "milk" even means as a food.

The subtext is a critique of how anthropology (and pop cultural commentary) can smuggle in essentialism under the banner of respect: "They’re different, end of story". Harris wants differences to be explainable without being insulting, and explainable in ways that generate new questions - about trade routes, land use, labor, climate, microbial practices, and state policy - rather than shutting inquiry down with a shrug. He’s also quietly staking a claim for science-adjacent rigor in the humanities: culture isn’t magic; it’s patterned, and patterns have causes worth arguing about.