But you miss the point. I'm not saying milk is strange, I'm saying cheese is. Cheese, yogurt, bread, alcohol...many things that we eat are the waste byproducts of microrganisms.
Yep! But keep in mind that it's human standards that call that "weird" to begin with, and I'd consider those standards wrong, not the food. The problem is that we like to lump everything together into broad categories like "waste" or "rotting" when its relative value is very dependent on circumstances. For instance, the reason you can freak people out about cheese by saying it's, for example, "rotten milk" is because of the association people have between "rotten" and
other microbial action. Basically, you're tricking your brain into comparing apples and oranges.
The reason you think it's strange to eat something that some other organism has worked on first is strange is because the only time you
do normally think about the microorganism activity is when it
is harmful, like when something rots. Because we normally don't think about microorganisms when we think about food, we don't have it in our heads that microorganism activity can be a good thing, so we associate it with the bad when it is brought up.
Asian staple foods are generally exactly what I said they are: dead plant or animal. Rice, fish, bird, vegetables. Dead plants and animals. Breads and cheese are staple western foods, and again, these things are made by infesting something with microorganisms as part of the process of making it.
Fish sauce actually is a pretty staple thing in a lot of areas, as a seasoning and condiment and ingredient. Alcoholic beverages are also pretty common no matter where you go, soy sauce is fermented and
extremely common, miso is fermented, and some other soy products. I'll give you that bread is definitely more of a huge staple than probably any fermented Asian product, sure, but fermented foods are still extremely common in Asian cuisine and still probably exist in most meals eaten, or at least a very large proportion.