Traditional Tibetan fare mainly consists of two basic items, salted tea mixed with yak butter, and tsampa. Tsampa is a coarse flour made from parched barley whose main virtues are that it is nourishing and ( in a land where fuel is scarce) it does not need to be cooked. The tea, brewed in water, comes from bricks of tea has been a major trade item for over 800 years. The brewed tea is poured into a long cylindrical churn make of wood banded with brass, along with salt and a small lump of butter. After vigorous churning, the opaque liquid is decanted into a teapot or a thermos, where it is kept for drinking throughout the day. ( Sometimes a more concentrated brew is made with added wood-ash soda to bring out the colour, and later churned with added hot water, salt and butter.) The resulting drink is more like bouillon than tea as Westerners or Chinese know it. The body needs this extra fat intake to power its higher metabolic rate at high altitude, especially in cold weather. Tea provides a constant source of hydration and is everywhere socially important.

Mixed with ( tsampa, this tea makes an edible paste. Add some dried yak meat or chiura ( dried cheese crumbs made from the residue of boiled buttermilk ) and it with the fingers of the right hand while the left hand while the left hand rotates the bowl; a visitor's first attempt at this invariably dumps half the contents on the floor, to gales of laughter from his Tibetan hosts. The best tsampa, like good coffee, is fresh-roasted and ground, enough for a week at a time, and has a nutty flavor.

Drokpa ( nomad) yak-herders produce a wonderful yoghurt from the thick creamy milk produced by their drinks ( yak cows; a yak is actually a bull). Its strong flavor comes from the special process of manufacture. The milk from the evening milking is boiled, left in a pail overnight to turn into yoghurt, and mixed with boiled milk from the following morning's milking before being churned. It is this half-yoghurt mixture, not rancidity, that gives Tibetan butter its strong taste. In eastern Tibet, the evening and morning milk are churned separately to produce sweet butter, sometimes also found in the street market in Lhasa. In some low valleys around Lhasa, the milk comes from recently introduced cattle herds.