Simple, elemental and versatile, yogurt is a universal foodstuff. In fact, if cuisines were like Jungian myths, yogurt would be at the forefront of our collective culinary unconscious.
Traditions of yogurtlike foods have been popular for millennia in the area food writer Anne Mendelson calls "Yogurtistan" (the Middle East, the Balkans, and northern Africa). But varieties have also sprung up in Vietnam (sua chua is a condensed milk-swirled version, usually topped with fresh fruit); Denmark (ymer is served with breadcrumbs and brown sugar for breakfast); and Mexico.
Here in the United States, yogurt has been through faddish cycles of boom and bust, first cropping up in 1970s hippie health food markets, then sweetened and frozen for the blissfully ignorant dieters of the 1980s, only to be repackaged as "custard" and Key lime pie substitute in the 1990s.
Then, in the last decade, cultured milk has again become a cultural obsession. Debates rage over fat and probiotic content; goat, cow, or sheep's milk; fruit on the bottom or stirred in. Recent parallel trends of Greek yogurt and Icelandic skyr have seemed to double the holdings in supermarket dairy aisles. The industry group Mintel has predicted that yogurt sales will continue to grow 28 percent by 2014.
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