The rise of alternative milks
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
People need to stop expecting replacements to taste 100% identical to what they're use to and give their tastebuds some time to adapt. Same with meat alternatives. It's an extremely unrealistic and pretty silly requirement in my opinion especially if you're concerned with climate change.
If you have a soy vanilla latte that’s basically a three bean dip (apologies to those who know that neither vanilla nor coffee are really beans)
I find the sugar is completely unnecessary, and usually skip the flavor as well. Soy and coconut milk have the best texture IMO.
I grew up drinking soy milk, it's much more palatable when you don't treat it as its own drink instead of a milk substitute. I never put soy milk into my coffee/tea/cereal.
For me it's the same with fake meat. They tend to be carb heavy and little fat. Although beyond meat macros look pretty decent. Unfortunately it's $14/lb.
The cost of dairy milk is the methane side effect that is actually more harmful to our eco system than carbon ..especially with our changing climate.
I really like what’s happening with synthetic foods made using algae etc.
Have you looked into seitan and vital wheat gluten? You can make it yourself and it's very high in protein.
Pouring it into a bowl with soy milk makes it a lot more palatable, but if you're just concerned about your macros, there are definitely more sustainable, plant-based ways to get 'em.
[0]: https://healthyeating.sfgate.com/foods-make-complete-protein...
I politely disagree.
1. If you don't want people to expect it to taste identical, don't call it a "meat alternative". Just call it what it is (“soy patty”?), and then people will expect it to taste like that. 2. Have you tried the Impossible Burger? It’s pretty damn close.
Maybe beef burger replacements are coming but we're not going to have indistinguishable alternatives to bacon, whole roast chicken, pulled pork, sirloin steak, duck etc. any time soon so people are going to have to be less picky for global meat consumption to be reduced.
I think it's important to separate the utilitarian argument from the moralistic argument here. Climate change is in large part accreted by large corporations, and the manner that they interact with corporate social responsibility and regulation is largely what has the potential to change things. Beyond that, it's hard (though not impossible) to get the same macronutrient profile without meat consumption. And beyond pure nutrition, many gastronomic entities are simply out of reach. I think you have to really think about what the purpose is of food (lots of sides to that) and not work backwards from the premise that meat consumption is intrinsically a poor choice.
Vat grown meat technology is progressing at a pretty impressing clip from what I've seen. I think that's probably the technological change that will make this a lack of an issue.
Is this actually a feasible solution if meat is fundamentally inefficient?
"It would be far easier to feed nine billion people by 2050 if more of the crops we grew ended up in human stomachs. Today only 55 percent of the world’s crop calories feed people directly; the rest are fed to livestock (about 36 percent) or turned into biofuels and industrial products (roughly 9 percent). Though many of us consume meat, dairy, and eggs from animals raised on feedlots, only a fraction of the calories in feed given to livestock make their way into the meat and milk that we consume. For every 100 calories of grain we feed animals, we get only about 40 new calories of milk, 22 calories of eggs, 12 of chicken, 10 of pork, or 3 of beef." https://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/feeding-9-bi...
"Huge reductions in meat-eating are essential to avoid dangerous climate change, according to the most comprehensive analysis yet of the food system’s impact on the environment. In western countries, beef consumption needs to fall by 90% and be replaced by five times more beans and pulses." https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/10/huge-red...
> Vat grown meat technology is progressing at a pretty impressing clip from what I've seen. I think that's probably the technological change that will make this a lack of an issue.
I used to think this but it seems really silly to me now. We're going to require cutting edge technology to find a solution to the problem that people are too stubborn to adapt a little to combat climate change?
There's plant based alternatives that exist today that taste somewhat like meat that don't require expensive technology and research to produce. We already know how to grow plants on a massive scale and I can't see how vat grown meat is going to compete with that any time soon.
The requirement that we must have something that's close to indistinguishable from meat for people to switch seems an impossible bar to reach. Are people going to stick to cow milk until we devise technology to make a milk like product that's indistinguishable as well?
Perhaps if meat was taxed based on its contribution to climate change people would be less picky. Waiting on vat grown meat doesn't sound like a realistic solution, especially given what's being said about the time we have to act on climate change.
I'm a little curious as to why you didn't address my other points. I really don't agree with the premise of that guardian article. We need huge reductions to corporate emissions to avoid dangerous climate change. I think it's a bit of an anthropomorphic fallacy to believe that our consumption habits have a larger impact on the climate than demonstrably larger corporate contributors. It's pleasant to believe that we really have that much direct agency. But, it's wrong. If we really want to battle climate change, it requires coordinates, global pressure to the top.
Do we have a history of eating so much meat, corn and diary? Humans in history have had very varied diets depending on location as far as I understand and the existence of vegan + vegetarian athletes is very convincing to me we don't need meat.
> I'm a little curious as to why you didn't address my other points.
Which ones? I probably tried to implicitly.
> We need huge reductions to corporate emissions to avoid dangerous climate change. I think it's a bit of an anthropomorphic fallacy to believe that our consumption habits have a larger impact on the climate than demonstrably larger corporate contributors.
Given these figures, do you still think believe this?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding... "The new analysis shows that while meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein, it uses the vast majority – 83% – of farmland and produces 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions."
> If we really want to battle climate change, it requires coordinates, global pressure to the top.
Yes, but consumers definitely have an influence too. There's certainly been more demand for meat-free products in the last decade which companies are acting to profit from for example.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
And this is just in the USA. Only 9% of emissions comes from agriculture. Even if you cut out all of that, you don't even nearly make a dent in greenhouse emissions. The real challenge is figuring out how we clean up our transportation, energy and industrial infrastructure. The problem is, consumption doesn't necessarily have an impact there.
I think I principally just really disagree with you about consumer activism. I think that the reason why regulation was needed in the first place in order to accomplish many overall wins was because consumer activism is just too weak. Long term, externalities will produce a race to the bottom that is disastrous for society -- individuals don't give things up for moral reasons, they give them up because of incentives. I think we need to close the feedback loop and take the negative externalities of all of these contributors to climate change and integrate them back into our financial, political and social incentives system.
But that requires us to take aim at businesses. Big businesses, of course, would rather us take aim at each other as consumers. If consumers are busy policing each other, they'll get distracted from ever holding the big businesses to task when they're not doing their fair share. And of course, it's scary to hold them to task. They have endless resources, they can bury individuals in court, lobby politicians, spend on PR campaigns that serve as risk mitigation for their regulatory costs. It's much safer to change your behavior as a consumer and moralize other consumers if they don't change their own.
But again, it has limits. Once you get beyond those limits, consumers do not have influence. But, consumers are citizens, and citizens have influence over their country. They can participate in their communities to perform direct action, they can run for office to effect political change, and they can organize to vote for politicians that can make changes that help society run better. I believe in there being more than consumerism to citizenship (not saying you don't).
See https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/10/huge-red... and the link to the Nature article:
"The research also finds that enormous changes to farming are needed to avoid destroying the planet’s ability to feed the 10 billion people expected to be on the planet in a few decades.
Food production already causes great damage to the environment, via greenhouse gases from livestock, deforestation and water shortages from farming, and vast ocean dead zones from agricultural pollution. But without action, its impact will get far worse as the world population rises by 2.3 billion people by 2050 and global income triples, enabling more people to eat meat-rich western diets."
> I think I principally just really disagree with you about consumer activism.
What should consumers do then? Nothing? Demand better meat alternatives? Keep eating meat? Stop eating meat?
Would your views here change if you agreed consumption has a big impact?
The biggest problem with respect to climate change is sustainable industrial infrastructure. It is not enough to consume sustainable products. We must demand and politically organize for sustainable infrastructure globally -- demand the allocation of resources, the stewardship of research and infrastructural development that will require. I think moralizing about the choices of what people eat suffers from a bit of tunnel vision. I'm also skeptical of any study that draws conclusions about climate change based on 9% of something's contribution to it. What is expected to happen with the other 91%?
Soak almonds. Peel. Purée with water..strain. Or don’t. Fresh almond milk.
I realize many people won’t have the time to do it. And that’s ok. But I just want to put this out there because it’s so easy and there is no special process or ingredient. And it’s cheaper and more sustainable. And lesser carbon and fossil fuel foot print.
Plus pistachios make a great nut milk too.
No additives. I swear by this brand.
The oat milk you get in a latte only tastes the way it does because it has oil and emulsifiers in it. If you just stick oats in a soy milk maker it's not going to come out the same way.
(Although homemade almond milk would seem to have a lot more than boxed. 1.5 cups of almonds to 3 cups water is 7g protein per cup. Close to soy milk. Whereas commercial almond milk has more like 1g per serving)
I can only assume that it’s not ok to grow hemp in every state(USA)
I also use it as a body scrub. It’s too abrasive for a face scrub.
I wonder if pigs or chickens would eat them...why waste?
Here in Taiwan, most mom-and-pop (i.e., non-chain) breakfast shops will make their own soy milk by the vat every morning. You can swing by with an empty jug and fill it up at less than a dollar (US) a liter. Most of that money goes to labor, as the beans and sugar required to make a liter of soy milk cost less than 10¢. This is, to me, the ideally sustainable solution: micro-mass production, so to speak.
(Of course, very few people actually do it this way anymore, as most people here prefer the convenience of disposable cups and straws. But that’s another question for another time.)
Also assuming we’re talking per gram of protein and fat here. Cup for cup almond milk might be more sustainable but there’s far more nutrition in a cup of cow milk.
That doesn’t matter, sustainability-wise. What matters is that the cycle gets closed, not its duration. Insects typically live shorter than mammals, but eating them instead of cows and pigs is a net win.
”and a lot of water”
California produces about 80% of the world’s almonds, and each nut requires 12 liters of water that do not get replenished.
”It’s beyond unsustainable.”
Not that different from almonds.
The heuristic “plants are generally more sustainable” reads true to me. But “pick the better kingdom” seems like such a low bar to clear. I’d like to head towards actual understanding of embodied energy, cruelty, etc per unit of useful nutrition in specific meal plans.
2-3 years ago many grocery stores added other milk alternatives. While I think almond milk is the best, oat milk is the second place but much cheaper.
Generally, milk is heavily subsidized in Germany and alternatives are 2-4 times more expensive, so I don't know if this a little hype or the start of a lasting change. Milk costs like 0,60€ a liter, oat milk costs 1,50€ and organic almond milk can cost up to 4€ a liter.
According to a source, "almond (64 percent market share), soy (13 percent market share) and coconut (12 percent market share)"
http://www.mintel.com/press-centre/food-and-drink/us-non-dai...
EDIT: I should add, for those interested, that this dominance is perhaps less strange when noting that California alone produces around 80% of the world's almonds.
I also like rice-soy milk, it doesn't have the strange after tastes of soy milk, but it's just so thin, hehe.
Milk is subsidised in many markets, either directly or indirectly; but the demand side makes a big difference too. Also, things are often priced to what people will pay...
It was like a negative aha-moment, a taste that was always there but I never noticed it, when it finally clicked, and I found out it was a fishy taste soy milk pretty much died for me.
My wife, on the other hand, budgets her lactose intake, prefers lactose-free milk (which I find unpleasantly sweet), and will readily drink almond and soy milks which I can't stand. But I'm firmly ready to believe that I'm the dinosaur here.
Take a month off then try a unsweetened coconut/almond blend, get over the hump, wait two months. You’ll be surprised at the taste and possibly disgusted you ever breastfed as an adult at a random animal you don’t know.
Doesn't make 'perfect sense' to me. Maybe poetic sense if you're coming from a certain point of view.
Calling breast a reproductive gland is weird. It's a secondary sexual feature, sure, but it's a feeding gland, whose specific purpose is to provide edible nourishment.
And this:
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150725-breastfeeding-has-an... : why did some animals evolve milk and breastfeeding
Your explanation of breasts is kind of odd, too. Biologically, the only purpose they serve is reproductive. Who exactly do you think is being fed by those glands? Your best friend’s mom? You are trying to say that nourishing your young is not a reproductive activity? Then what is it? Fine dining? If the purpose is to provide ‘edible nourishment’ for just everyone apparently, where are all the breast cafés? I would love some edible nourishment.
Yes, but not the one you mean.
Cow milk: can consume it straight as it is produced by nature, right out of the cow (but chilled is probably tastier). Can consume milks from lots of other animals, too. The only reason adult animals don't frequently consume milk is probably just availability. https://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/64822/are-humans... has interesting info, including adult wild birds finding they could peck through aluminum lids to get milk and wild gulls consuming seal milk.
Soy milk: consuming a liquid produced by soaking, cooking, blending, and straining a plant part that is unsafe for humans to eat until processed by heat or fermentation. https://healthyeatinghttps://healthyeating.sfgate.com/happen... Then if you're buying it from a market, it has probably been packaged into a plastic or plastic-lined container (like commercial cow's milk) and processed to be shelf-stable for months, all to provide a close similarity to that "weird" drinking milk as an adult.
"Natural", although often overloaded and used politically, can't quite stretch that far.
But why are you blending and steeping and straining the coconut/almond material instead of just eating it? Oh yeah, because you want it to be like what you'd get from "breastfeeding from a random animal" as an adult.
Lactose intolerance is about as relevant as nut allergies, except it's unlikely to kill you.
But in drinking "not animal milk" you're trying to artificially approximate the experience of drinking "animal milk", which you described as unnatural.
Note that I'm not one to say that "unnatural == bad". I think cooking is good. I think dairy is good. I think consuming something nutritious in its natural state is more natural than cooking something.
You're free to differ.
1. unsweetened hemp milk has the best taste and consistency but is too low in protein to be a full substitute
2. Silk's Protein Nutmilk has the next best flavor and an acceptable consistency but with a better nutrition profile
After a couple of weeks, I stopped craving cow's milk. Still eating plenty of cheese and yogurt though.
why do you need to? it's understandable that others want alternatives for whatever reason, but there's no shame in liking cow milk. it's delicious.
sometimes the next new thing really is better (to you), but worrying about what's fashionable becomes a tiresome treadmill.
I think most of these alternatives are targeted, at least in part, at that market.
I myself enjoy cheese and fatty meat on daily basis.
The Oatly post here a few days ago may have been a shill, but it was enough for me to try it. Far closer to the taste of cows milk than Almond milk IMH(non Vegan)O.
But another source on the top links of Google says it takes about 4 gallons of water to make a gallon of milk. This is a difference of 250x. That would imply almond milk takes 25 times as much.
It shocks me how such a seemingly basic consumer question could have such wild orders of magnitude variance in the apparent answers.
https://sciblogs.co.nz/waiology/2012/05/24/how-much-water-do...
To me that was a pretty striking example of how the realities of what climage change is going to push us towards are sinking in.
Plus: production of greenhouse gas, water pollution
And how are alternative-milks a better solution especially as they are also (but directly) plant-based?
> Plus: production of greenhouse gas, water pollution
If people are actually concerned about the natural environment they would be giving up their cars, instead of going on a plant-based diet, which raises the question of just what other biases cause people to do so.
"Animal agriculture is responsible for 13–18% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions globally, and less in developed countries (e.g. 6% in the USA). Fossil fuel combustion for energy and transportation is responsible for approximately 64% of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions globally, and more in developed countries (e.g. 80% in the USA)." https://skepticalscience.com/animal-agriculture-meat-global-...
Come on. Yes you also need plants, but way way way less than using cows. In other words, cows are a very inefficient source of milk compared to oat or soy or almonds.
> If people are actually concerned about the natural environment they would be giving up their cars
It's not all-or-nothing you know, it's still good to do some effort, and it's way easier to give up cow milk than to give up cars (just buy a different kind of milk VS move out). And some people actually are giving up their cars. I wouldn't go as far as to say it's the same people without some statistical source.
Probably someone somewhere out there already is and we’ll start seeing the headlines, blogs and podcasts about it in the near future. By building our societies around globalization, we have in some ways made our societies necessarily globalized. Everything we import/export has a fuel cost including ourselves when we’re the passengers, and that cost doesn’t stop at National borders, but incurs every time we move anything anywhere any distance.
So when you have a popular crop, coffee, almonds, tea, coconuts, whatever that can only be grown in certain parts of the world, it is going to have an outsized impact on the global fuel economy relative to crops that are grown and consumed locally. The more fuel we consume, the greater the amount of carbon emissions we output, and carbon dioxide only has a global warming potential of 1 (as the base unit). Methane has a GWP of 86 across a score of years and 34 across a century.
Now so far as I know, the GWP metric is only used for individual gases, but if you were to try to isolate it on a commodity by commodity basis, I’m betting Cow’s milk as transported to and sold in the supermarket today wouldn’t look great. I’ve worked in a cafe and I know approximately how much milk we went through in a week, often because I was the one buying it. Even a small mom and pop café can easily go through 40+ gallons a week, and that was hardly the only dairy product sold (cheeses of all sorts, whipped cream, ice cream, cheese cakes, chocolate cakes, pastries). I don’t even want to think about the amount of milk a single corporate chain like Starbucks or Peet’s goes through on a weekly basis.
Fortunately cow’s milk is still available. That is really an understatement on your client’s part. I think humanity will sooner die out or go back to a technological dark age from which it never fully recovers before we give up cow’s milk in its entirety in just the US, never mind the rest of the world.
There are other variables involved including farming efficiency, transportation efficiency, and the logistics of distribution. Going to get your groceries from a 5 minute away grocery store that gets their groceries from thousands of miles away in bulk shipments may ironically be more efficient than driving an hour away individually to get groceries from the local farmer's market. Essentially for the same reason that concluding that buses are worse than cars because they get lower miles per gallon is incredibly wrong.
Though I agree with disliking the sweetened stuff. I'm not sure who the market for the sweetened stuff is for - coffee creamer maybe, or trying to simulate milk lactose? but the unsweetened works just as well in any scenario.
Additionally, nut and oat milks are very easy and cheap to make with just a blender and cheesecloth. You can control the amount of food you want to "milk" and change the thickness/mouthfeel, add a little vanilla and end up with a much better result than the 'watered-down' store brands.
That's a completely different argument from your original one. And you could apply it to any food, a lot of people find cow milk "fucking disgusting", there's no point arguing on subjective taste
I don't know why you'd write that. The almond milk I buy is unsweetened, and I'm pretty sure it's a popular one since they sell it by the pallet at Costco. All the common soy milks offer an unsweetened option AFAIK.
It may be unsweetened, but it has a lot of added ingredients you might not want. Here are the nutritional facts: https://www.costco.com/wcsstore/CostcoUSBCCatalogAssetStore/...
* Organic Almond Base (Filtered Water, Organic Almonds)
* Organic Vanilla Flavor
* Sea Salt
* Sunflower Lecithin: this is an emulsifier
* Organic Locust Bean Gum: a thickening and gelling agent
* Gellan Gum: another gelling agent
* Vitamin A Palmitate: an ester of retinol, less bioavailable than the retinol vitamin A found in animal foods
* Ergocalciferol (Vitamin D2): a different type of vitamin D than D3 (cholecalciferol) which is found in organ meats, eggs, diary,
* DL-Alpha-Tocopheryl Acetate (Vitamin E): a synthetic ester of alpha-tocopheryl, with less than half the bioavailability as alpha-tocopheryl vitamin E, but longer shelf life
* Riboflavin (Vitamin B2)
* Zinc Gluconate
* Cyanocobalamin (Vitamin B12)
I came to the same conclusion, to expand on this point: lactose = glucose + galactose, and there is some interesting research on the benefits of galactose:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3240634/ Galactose Enhances Oxidative Metabolism and Reveals Mitochondrial Dysfunction in Human Primary Muscle Cells
normally it is broken down to glucose, which can be quickly used for energy by the muscular system. In contrast, sucrose = glucose + fructose, the fructose requiring a complex breakdown process by the liver (see Robert Lustig's research, especially his 2009 lecture _Sugar: The Bitter Truth_).
Milk can actually be quite healthful, an excellent source of fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, and K2, depending on the conditions the cow was raised in and the forage and pasture she was fed. It is also absent of many of the compounds found in nut-based products, including phytoestrogens: plant-based estrogen found in soybeans, phytic acid: inhibits absorption of dietary minerals calcium/iron/zinc found in oats (although the phytate content can be reduced by soaking the oats overnight, how many producers of oat-based products do this?) and almonds/hazelnuts/peanuts/tiger nuts/walnuts/cashews, lectins: carbohydrate-binding proteins found in legumes including peas and soybeans.
From a purely nutritional standpoint, these alternative "mylks" (hat tip to the EU for preventing a corruption of the meaning of the word "milk") seem to be strictly inferior: lower in the good stuff, higher in the bad stuff.
> Otherwise, I might as well drink soda,--from looking at the sugar content of most of these "milks" it's roughly as healthy.
This reminds me of the push to replace soda with fruit juice, but then it turned out they both often have a comparable sugar content: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/06/09/319230765/fr...
History repeats, and yet again we see a similar push. Personally I am sticking with good old-fashioned milk myself, the bar to replace a 10,000 year old (estimated 9000-7000 BCE) food is quite high.
I first found out about soaked oats from _Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods_ by Sandor Ellix Katz, but interestingly it is an older practice, we now know improves digestability (excerpt from page 118):
> Oatmeal (or "oytmeal", as my father always calls it, in imitation of his immigrant grandmother) is the quintessential comfort food. It is soft and mushy, harkening back to that long ago time of infancy, when all our food was of such a consistency and lovingly spoon-fed to us. In early modern Europe, according to an article by Elizabeth Meyer-Renschhausen in the anthropology journal _Food and Foodways_, porridges were generally fermented and eaten as a "sour soup"[10]. Fermenting oats before cooking them not only makes them more nutritious and digestible, it makes the resulting oatmeal much creamer as well. For the freshest, most nutritious oatmlea, coarsely grind whole oats yourself when you are ready to use them, though steel-cut oats or rolled oats will work fine, too.
[10] _Food and Foodways_: "New Chapter Health Report", Elizabeth Meyer-Renschhausen, 2000
2. Some people have been on 100% Soylent diets for years now. I don't believe there's been any indication of nutrient deficiencies yet.
3. This argument seems weak because you don't know how unhealthy the diet you're replacing is. If I grab a Soylent for lunch instead of getting a burger or pad thai at the food court, which is healthier? Are the high levels of cadmium in spinach unhealthy? How many naturally occurring carcinogens in natural foods are still undiscovered? Any diet has risk. You need to show why Soylent is worse than what it's replacing.
Soylent is at least somewhat balanced. Everything is in a ratio that someone at least actively looked at. When I cook up a meal it certainly isn't.
All of these things are just ways to extend the dominance of big agriculture, dressed up in various healthy use cases.
All things being equal, my major issue with alternative “milk” isn’t the semantic debate though. The fact that they’re often high in sugar, low in protein and fat is a bad sign. The fact that many (especially almond milk) are mostly water isn’t promising, and the environmental impact of chugging almond milk should become clear to California within a decade or so.
Mostly it’s just another fad (in terms of scale), promulgated by people who should know better, and others trying to sell you their “milks.”
As for alternative milks being a fad, it's a fad that's more than a thousand years old -- for example, almond milk was important in Europe for meatless Fridays and during Lent. I'm not sure who "should know better" when it comes to religious doctrine affecting food choices.
If you wanted to focus on a single point I made, I’d suggest: All told drinking a lot of anything other than water is probably a bad move....
And if we want to talk water usage and environmental impact, any cattle/dairy product is consuming at least order of magnitude more resources and emissions than oats or soy beans.
Oat milk isn’t even a rounding error of total plant “milk” consumption.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/693015/dairy-alternative...
Almond dominates by an order of magnitude, and has grown a loooot just since 2013, while soy milk consumption has actually dropped. Worse, it is projected that consumption of almond milk will more than double, while all other types are effectively flat.
When we talk about this subject, it’s important to realize that to the first order, we’re just talking about almond milk, a trend which continue into the future.
Almond milk still uses less water and way less CO2e emissions than dairy to produce the same volume of milk.
Animal agriculture is horrendous for the planet, any increase in non-dairy milk at the expense of dairy milk is a definite win for the environment.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46459714
From the BBC calculator, which comes from University of Oxford researcher Joseph Poore, and Thomas Nemecek of the Agroecology and Environment Research Division in Zurich, Switzerland
1 glass (200ml) per serving almond milk daily
Over an entire year your consumption of almond milk is contributing 51kg to your annual greenhouse gas emissions. ... 27,042 litres of water
1 glass (200ml) per serving dairy milk daily
Over an entire year your consumption of dairy milk is contributing 229kg to your annual greenhouse gas emissions ... 45,733 litres of water 652m² land
Especially when looking at the graph on the page you linked to, it becomes clear that the CO2 emission question is spurious. Dairy is fairly efficient, but actually killing and eating the animal isn’t. Fortunately beef cattle are not dairy cattle, and while the industries are linked, they are not inextricably linked. Most of all though, I’ll say it again, All told drinking a lot of anything other than water is probably a bad move... To that I’d add that if your real concern is environmental, milk is the least of it, cheese being a far bigger offender. Cheese being effectively condensed milk means that your kilogram of cheese took 10kg of milk to make.
In comparison, soda is 11g/100ml, juice is 9g/100ml, iced tea is 8g/100ml.
Perhaps it is different in the US.
I am amazed though, when I see people buying "skinny oat(or whatever) milk". Pretty sure you can achieve the same at home by mixing regular oat milk and some filtered/softened water.
So, it appears to be quite similar to skim milk, which is milk with reduced fat (cream skimmed off), not watered down milk.
What amazes me is the strong opinions people have about this topic.
n. A fluid naturally contained in plant or animal tissue: fruit juice; meat braised in its own juices.
n. A bodily secretion: digestive juices.
n. The liquid contained in something that is chiefly solid.
They’re macerated and crushed, their contents mixed with water. Of course by the same token milk is also a subset of juice, of the type “mucosal excretion.”
By that standard, human breast milk should be considered unhealthy (0.8%-0.9% protein, 3%-5% fat).
Interestingly, the fat content of milk can vary drastically between species, from Holstein cows 3.6% (popular for high volume milk production, but less fatty), Brown Swiss cows 4.0%, Jersey cows 5.2% (prized for their rich creamy milks), Zebu cows 4.7%, goat 4.0%, up to buffalo 6.9%, yak 6.5%, sheep 7.5%, reindeer 17%, and even fin whale a whopping 42% fat and a similarly staggering 12% protein. (Source: _On Food and Cooking_ by Harold McGee, page 13).
https://www.imedpub.com/articles/biochemical-differences-in-...
Human milk composition is dynamic, and varies between mothers in the same and different populations. Breast milk content was also found to vary diurnally, over a feeding and in some species according to the gender of the breast feeding infant. This study aimed to determine if there are any quantitative differences in the biochemical constituents of breast milk according to the gender of the breast feeding infant. Forty eight breast feeding mothers participated in the study, 24 were breast feeding male infants and 24 were breast feeding female infants. Five ml of breast milk was collected from each mother then analyzed for lipid contents, carbohydrates, proteins and calcium. Carbohydrates, amino acids and calcium concentration were measured using colorimetric test of absorbance. There were significant differences in the concentration of lipids and calcium in breast milk of male and female breast feeding mothers (P-value<0.001 and 0.02, respectively). Our study indicates that breast milk is more dynamic than previously thought and concentration of breast milk contents should not be taken as fixed. This can lead to developing personalized formula feeding specific to the baby’s gender and age and matches his/her growth needs.
Biology is damned complex.
Astute as ever, America's finest news source turns this marketing-driven terminology on its head.
This has happened before, industries creating imitation products deceptively similar to the real thing. For example in the early 1900s, states fought back against fake butter, but were ultimately overruled by the Supreme Court: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/t...
> Margarine manufacturers, to better appeal to the public, wanted to tint their product yellow; butter producers objected, claiming that yellow margarine, fraudulently masquerading as butter, was a deliberate ploy to deceive the public. (Butter from corn-fed cows is also anemically pale, and is routinely dyed to turn it an attractive butter-yellow; this practice, however, butter makers argued, was simply a cosmetic tweak.)
> By 1902, 32 states had imposed color constraints on margarine. Vermont, New Hampshire, and South Dakota all passed laws demanding that margarine be dyed an off-putting pink; other states proposed it be colored red, brown, or black. The “pink laws” were overturned by the Supreme Court (on the grounds that it’s illegal to enforce the adulteration of food) but the ban on yellow margarine remained. (The last hold-out, Wisconsin, only repealed its margarine-color law in 1967.)
Partner of a nut anaphylaxis sufferer, parent of a formerly cow milk intolerant child so I've straddled both sides of what people need in their life. The answer imnsho is clarity: call it what it is specifically. (Which most people here do. Nut milk. Oat milk. Soy milk) but please, don't call it milk, unqualified.
I've got some medieval cookbooks digitized on my webpages, what punishment do you propose for people like me?
EDIT: Removed the first sentence as recommended.
edit: Ah, I should have quoted, lesson learned. The comment began "Please don't lie", which has been removed, and people are downvoting me and responding as if I'd read the edited comment, so mine appears nonsensical.
I've shopped extensively for plant-based milks on three continents in countries that represent nearly half of the world's population. I can provably claim that they are not "usually" colored artificially in even a generous use of "usual." This has nothing to do with knowing the person who wrote the comment.
If you're familiar with soy milk and almond milk, it's a pretty dubious claim. The most well known brand in the US is Silk, which contains no such whitening ingredients that I have seen (see https://silk.com/products for ingredient information) nor have I encountered any other brands that contain whitening ingredients.
I think it's justifiable to say that claim is a falsehood.
I was referring to whether it's true that it's a lie or not, not whether the claim is true or not. I seem to have not made that clear enough, sorry for that.
If someone says something false but they believe it's true, that's not lying. On the other hand, if someone says something true but they believe it's false, that is lying. Whether what they're saying is actually true or false is irrelevant to whether they're lying. Lying is saying something different to what you believe, with intent to deceive.[0] It's about a difference between what you say and what you believe. I think getting things wrong is a lot more common than lying on this planet, and labelling every getting-wrong of things a 'lie' should be considered harmful. Getting things wrong is natural, unavoidable, 'innocent' - lying is not.
[0] Or something like that - trying to make precise definitions is hard and not so useful.
Please don't accuse people you don't know and second guess their motives in a conversation with them.
>I've made cashew milk and oat milk at home and they're naturally colored as they are on store shelves
Which is neither here nor there. I didn't say all are colored white: I used the term "usually". Second, even naturally white "alternative milks" have artificial coloring added for when they hit the shelves for consistency etc (manufacturers that don't do that are glad to advertise it in the box).
Second, both are not milks. Milks are what comes out of animals mammary glands (even legally in most jurisdictions). Advertisers and "health product" peddlers hijacked the term (that existed for millennia) to mean "random juices".
As I commented below, a moment before your reply, I edited it out as I understand that it is unproductive.
> I didn't say all are colored white: I used the term "usually". Second, even naturally white "alternative milks" have artificial coloring added for when they hit the shelves for consistency etc (manufacturers that don't do that are glad to advertise it in the box).
See my other comment, reproduced below:
"I've shopped extensively for plant-based milks on three continents in countries that represent nearly half of the world's population. I can provably claim that they are not "usually" colored artificially in even a generous use of "usual." This has nothing to do with knowing the person who wrote the comment."
> Second, both are not milks. Milks are what comes out of animals mammary glands
Sure, but this is your opinion which you're welcome to hold.
> (even legally in most jurisdictions)
Source needed for "most". I can confirm that plant milks can be labeled as milk in the US, Canada, and India, and the notable exception that I am aware of is the European Union.
"In English, the word "milk" (at the time spelt "mylk") has been used to refer to "milk-like plant juices" since at least 1200 AD." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_milk https://www.etymonline.com/word/milk#etymonline_v_16158
Please don’t be this sort of pedant. It’s been common for a long time to refer to various substances with a similar appearance to milk as “milks” - see coconut, Magnesia etc.
More to the point, “mylke of almaundes” as a term was around in the 15th century, so at this point it’s hardly unreasonable that it’s entered common usage.
The word milk has a somewhat broader meaning than what comes out of mammary glands. I would say that the default meaning, with no other modifier, is definitely mammary gland output. But checking various dictionaries I see definitions that include:
The white juice of certain plants, such as coconut milk.
A food product produced from seeds or fruit that resembles and is used similarly to cow's milk, such as coconut or soy milk.
A liquid resembling milk in appearance such as the latex of a plant.
And there's milk of magnesia.
I don't know when these various terms came into use, but the Online Etymology Dictionary suggests milk of almond and similar constructions have been around since the late 14th century:
Could you give some examples of this? I'm not that familiar with the different brands, but I've tried quite a few, and at least in the US I don't think that any of them I've tried add artificial coloring, and I don't think I've noticed packaging touting this as an advantage. Maybe this is a regional difference?
Here's an example of what I think the ingredients usually look like: https://silk.com/products/original-soymilk (click on ingredients)
And here's a breakdown of the standard ingredients in almond milk that doesn't mention artificial coloring: https://spoonuniversity.com/lifestyle/a-breakdown-of-every-s...