Alternative Milks | Hacker News Reader

Alternative Milks

blog.bramp.net

88 pointsdefaulty202 comments

I think an important thing to look at when considering water usage of a particular food, is the nature of where the food is being produced. Almonds are largely grown in California, where the aquifers are shrinking, and evaporation can take the water much further away. Meanwhile, dairy cows and their food can be raised in lots of climates, including in water-rich places like Wisconsin.

Used water makes it back into the global water cycle someplace. The concern is when we deplete a local water cycle or destroy habitats in our use of it.

Similarly goats can be grown feeding them almost anything in climates where nothing of value can be farmed otherwise.

I see this argument made about other ruminants and even pigs, but is that the reality? Maybe a pet goat eats the vegetable peels out of the family compost bin, but industrially farmed ones will be eating corn-based feed that was specifically grown for the purpose, on land that could grow anything.

Go look at satellite imagery of the Israel-Egypt border. The Egyptians herd goats in the area, the Israelis do not.

You can clearly see the lighter shade of the Egyptian land, because the goats strip it clean. That is mountainous land that has no value for farming, but the goats can roam it and eat anything that happens to grow.

>but industrially farmed ones will be eating corn-based feed that was specifically grown for the purpose, on land that could grow anything.

Not sure how goat farming works, but AFAIK for cows they spend the first half of their lives on pasture (ie. eating grass) and the rest on feetlots (ie. eating corn).

Yes, the NPR piece [1] mentions that as well, that all cows eat lots of grass, and so-called grass fed beef really means grass-finished beef.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/13/746576239/is...

As someone who does not know anything about herding farm animals... are goats easier to shepherd than cows? My first thought is "yea, they are smaller!", but is that true?

Better question...given the nutritional information on goat's milk painting it as more nutrient rich - why aren't we all drinking it?

Goats don’t produce much milk in comparison to a cow

Where does Not Milk fit in here?

Comparing almond water consumption to cattle water consumption is irresponsible, raising cattle takes orders of magnitude more resources. And California also has a huge cattle industry…

Cattle can still be the responsible choice at a local level even if it's bad at a global level as industrial farming is currently implemented.

What? How can the immensely more “expensive” choice in terms of resource use be better?

If those resources are not needed for other things, then the cost "in terms of resource use" doesn't matter. E.g. cattle producing areas could be used to produce a lot of crop x instead, but if there's already plenty of x on the market then it doesn't matter if those areas raise cattle.

Natural resource use is not quite like playing Civ V.. cattle production depletes resources, decreases natural carbon recapture through deforestation and ranching destroying environments, produces more emissions, etc. Also meat production is not all being consumed locally, exports are a thing. 1:1 production at a country level of any staple has not been a thing for a while now.

> decreases natural carbon recapture through deforestation

That's a problem in Brazil but not in the EU.

That's only because the EU had finished a lot of its deforestation by the advent of the industrial revolution.

[edit]

One source: https://news.mongabay.com/2018/01/more-than-half-of-europes-...

The land needs to be converted to natural forest if we want a shot at significant reduction of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Agroforestry and silvopasture are the next best things, but a huge problem with animal agriculture is the land use change. We simply need a LOT of land to go back to natural forest.

Not all land is naturally suited to be forest land. See, for example, the badlands (grasslands) in the Dakotas and Montana. Those badlands are actually pretty good ranchland, since the wrinkled terrain is ill suited to farming.

What resources are used by cattle in Northern Europe? Just go visit Normandy, oh and btw don't forget to bring an umbrella, to witness all the missing water that happens to be falling from the sky.

See also: Scotland

Do they grow almonds in Northern Europe? Also, Cattle in Northern Europe are not cattle in California.

These two places are not comparable.

Cattle production in the U.S. is not comparable to other countries.

Why not?

The United States and China are the dominant producers and consumers of meat. And even between these two countries, apples to apples comparisons are not helpful as production practices are not the same.

>apples to apples comparisons are not helpful as production practices are not the same.

How are the production practices different? How do the differences relate to resource usage?

the differences are too many to put succinctly, they're (IMO) way behind in standards on every level as a result of exponential growth in meat consumption that is practically unprecedented. I'd start here: https://sci-hub.se/10.1126/sciadv.aar8534

Scale, I suspect.

Cattle production in the US is something like 20% greater than Brazil, the next highest producer according to the first source[1] I found, producing literally 1/5 of the world's total beef.

There's piles more data out there, and probably a lot more to say, but this is probably the answer to a first approximation.

1: https://beef2live.com/story-world-beef-production-ranking-co...

>Cattle production in the US is something like 20% greater than Brazil, the next highest producer according to the first source[1] I found, producing literally 1/5 of the world's total beef.

That's not really surprising when US has 2.26x the arable land of brazil. If you normalize for that, brazil is actually 84% more intensive than the US. The European union is even more intensive.

what does "intensive" mean, and what does arable land have to do with cattle production?

I think you're missing the point. GP claims that since the US is the top producer in the world, it's somehow different from the other countries because of "scale". That doesn't make any sense because it doesn't account for land use. Suppose there are 3 equally sized countries (A, B and C), with identical geography and livestock raising practices. Suppose A and B decided to form a union (eg. united AB or AB union). Now you can say AB union has twice the "scale" of C, and therefore you can't compare the production between AB and C. This is despite that in actuality the situation in all 3 countries are identical, "scale" doesn't have anything to do with it, and the the increased "scale" is basically due to arbitrary categorization. Normalizing livestock by arable land attempts to normalize this, since available land does have a material impact on how livestock would be raised.

> What resources are used by cattle in Northern Europe? .. oh and btw don't forget to bring an umbrella, to witness all the missing water that happens to be falling from the sky.

In the UK, the resources include soya-based animal feeds imported from Brazil [0]. Cattle cannot live by rainfall alone.

[0] https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/challenges/soya/

That's just nonsense. There is absolutely no need for UK cattle to be fed soya-based feeds and if finishing lots have recently started using them, it's for a minor percentage increase which might be financially worthwhile but certainly isn't a requirement.

does the u.k. have different standards on grassfed certification? in the u.s. grassfed !== grass finished unfortunately

As far as I am aware there isn't a certification. Because Generally speaking UK are all Grass Fed since there are no cheap source of Grain. And these type of word play are generally allowed in Food Label.

> Cattle cannot live by rainfall alone.

Of course they can, as long as you don't have too much of them. Animals in the wild live on rainwater alone just fine.

Also Normandy isn't in the UK, it's in France. Different countries have different practices around animals.

They also require something to feed on, like grass. Water has next to no nutrients or energy.

By "on rainfall alone", I meant "with no exterior food production". Of course you need land on which grass can grow and sunlight.

Raising cattle in most parts of the country relies on renewable resources. Raising almonds in CA requires heavy use of fertilizers and depletes the regional water supplies.

Don’t mention the fact cattle and cattle feed is the largest cause of deforestation in the Amazon.

So, better for California to compete with cattle raising in Brazil, and then Iowan soybean would be marginally more preferable for cattle feed over Amazonian soybean? I realize it's a more complex system than that, but I would indeed guess that a bigger US cattle industry could result in less total export of Brazilian beef to central American nations, for instance.

Even with those resources, cattle production still takes 10x the water that almond production does and is very destructive to the environment the cattle graze in.

Cattle grazing can be done in harmony with natural grasslands. After all, cattle evolved on grasslands. And back to my initial point, 10 gallons of water in Wisconsin has nowhere near the impact of 1 gallon of water in California, and the chances of that water going back into the Wisconsin water cycle are higher.

I beg of you to investigate real-world cattle raising practices in 2021, this idea of sustainable grazing is not a thing that's happening in the real world. Much of water consumption in order to sustain meat production is not happening locally, other states are farming excess crops expressly for the purpose of contributing to feed.

And the Wisconsin parallel doesn't work -- it is barely a blip when it comes to U.S. beef production. California and Florida both produce more, for example.

EDIT: The Wisconsin factoid is incorrect, it only holds true for cattle raised for beef production, not dairy. Here's the USDA data: https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/...

Sustainable grazing is happening in the real world, just not at scale to really matter. But we can change that. And the political will to change it is likely far higher than political will to get everyone to stop consuming these products entirely.

The problem is you cannot do "sustainable grazing" at the scale we are at now - 7.6 billion humans.

On a well managed farm, you can get 1 cow per 1.25 acres of land, hanging weight about 750lbs. That yields about 750k kcal, which is enough for 2100 calories per day for an entire year.

Nutritionally, you can get all of your fat or protein from 1lb of beef per day. One cow is enough to feed 2 adult humans for an entire year.

This production would require almost zero external inputs. No fertilizer or water, just graze land and water from rainfall.

Just in corn alone, we produce over 10k kcal per person annually in the US. We have a surplus of grains and legumes. We produce an order of magnitude more calories than we need every year.

If you want to solve sustainability, you need to solve waste. To solve waste, you need to fix the incentives. As long as city dwellers demand their cheap industrialized food, taxes will subsidize the cheap industrialized food.

> this idea of sustainable grazing is not a thing that's happening in the real world

It is, in many places. I live in Montana (alongside some 2.6M head of cattle), and we have vast ranches with sustainable numbers of cattle. The land they live on isn't (and wouldn't be) forest, nor is it farmable (typically too rocky or too much grade).

As for the "blip" argument, Wisconson is ranked 9th, while California is ranked 5th. Hardly a "blip". Also Florida? It's ranked 18th, with 1.6M head.

Actually, most of the top 10 states are naturally grassland states, with California being the outlier.

https://beef2live.com/story-cattle-inventory-state-rankings-...

on wisco: was looking at beef production and not including dairy, my bad: https://downloads.usda.library.cornell.edu/usda-esmis/files/....

on sustainable grazing: there's not enough land to produce the amount of cattle we would need to sustain even the U.S. meat consumption sustainably.. we need something else

Since this post is about individual choices, an individual can easily buy milk that is grass raised. My milk comes from a farm 10 miles away. The cows eat grass, drink water, and milk comes out. There are plenty of small businesses and family farms still milking cows.

Yeah but those 10 gallons of water in Wisconsin could be put to more efficient use than cattle

> Cattle grazing can be done in harmony with natural grasslands.

"can be" is trying to do a lot of work there.

in reality very little cattle grazing is done in any kind of natural harmony.

> cattle production still takes 10x the water

Yes, but in many parts of the USA, water is practically unlimited and free. Most of it flows into the Mississippi or the the Atlantic. In fact, in many areas, there's too much water, you have to put in drainage or it might flood during heavy rains and kill your crops in the spring.

> very destructive to the environment the cattle graze in.

This is only true for feed-lot cattle raised in arid, marginal land. Pretty much anywhere east of the great plains, cattle have almost no impact on the land.

Almonds in the USA are pretty much only grown in arid and desert environments. Almonds grown in CA are destructive to waterways and natural aquifers.

So, it's a question of renewable vs non renewable. In most of California, water usage is non renewable. It is being used at a rate far faster than nature can replenish it.

>"Comparing almond water consumption to cattle water consumption is irresponsible, raising cattle takes orders of magnitude more resources."

You say it's irresponsible to compare the two, then immediately proceed to do it!

Perhaps you meant to say that it was irresponsible to imply they were similar? In any case, rational decision-making requires comparing options, and reactions of disgust are generally unproductive, both for thinking and for debating.

is saying a comparison is irresponsible the same as disgust? is every comparison valid? what's more unproductive, pure pedantry, or disagreeing and then sharing information? who is really showing disgust?

"comparison of almond water consumption vs. cattle water consumption for the purposes of justifying the elimination of one or the other is irresponsible, because their impact on the environment (and in fact, the California water supply) is incomparable, and seriously comparing the two after realising this fact would mean that you are misunderstanding the statistics or purposefully telling half-truths. The only responsible version of this argument, one that seeks to limit the impact of agriculture on the water supplies of states like California, would be one that proposes that we need to reduce or eliminate or severely reduce both."

hope this more pedantically phrased version helps :)

Also, w.r.t water consumption, cows still put back in some water to the cycle via peeing and pooping, something that several studies I've seen don't account for.

Trees don't really give back water, they just consume.

My takeaway is that, for water consumption/concerns, alternative milks aren't really beneficial, especially as you mention in California.

I still do believe they have other benefits though (land use, CO2, nutrition, etc.) which is why I keep buying them.

Regarding CO2, seems like cows would only produce as much as they consume from feed that first captured that CO2 from the atmosphere, so if you are sourcing local and not shipping feed / cows around seems like it should be close to zero?

Cows produce huge quantities of Methane, which has a GWP of 40. They are a huge contributor to climate change.

If you are growing the same quantity of cattle then their methane in the atmosphere would be at steady state, not growing and therefore not contributing to change. If you grow more cattle then more methane would be produced.

On the other hand, isn’t cattle production displacing wild ruminants? If we stop producing cattle, will nature fill in with bison, deer, moose, etc?

It's possible that methane from cattle isn't any higher than methane from the wild ruminants they replaced. Had this been studied?

>their methane in the atmosphere would be at steady state, not growing and therefore not contributing to change.

Assuming that methane is removed from the atmosphere by something? AFAIK methane doesnt get consumed by anything natural, so it should just be growing in an absolute sense as long as total cows (and other producers) are above 0

No, methane degrades in the atmosphere with a half-life of around 9 years.

Trees don't "consume" water any more than any other citizen of the natural environment does. The real challenge with trees is that they have a lot of knock-on effects—mostly beneficial—which are pretty hard to quantify, like the effect of root systems in soil, preventing erosion and promoting water retention.

Doesn't do much to help with climate change though, which is a much more serious issue. Sounds more like a rationalization for continuing to drink dairy milk.

Grass-fed cattle can have a negative carbon impact. This was linked here previously.

Would be great to see a link on this. When I search, most results suggest the impact of grass-fed cattle is no different, e.g:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/10/grass-fed-cows-won-t...

I don't think it's really that clear-cut, particularly when the animal-welfare and planet-welfare arguments get intertwined:

"A number of past studies have found lower greenhouse gas emissions associated with the feedlot system. One reason is that grass-fed cows gain weight more slowly, so they produce more methane (mostly in the form of belches) over their longer lifespans...

To many grass-fed advocates, this is one of the main reasons for switching to grass-fed beef. After all, cows evolved to live this way."

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/08/13/746576239/is...

Another lens: if I remember right, almond crops are actually one of the most lucrative crops in California per unit of water. So if you looked at it from the perspective of "what crop could I grow to make the most money with the least water", then the math changes substantially once again.

I suggest everyone to read https://www.sacredcow.info/helpful-resources before jumping the bandwagon that milk is bad and the plant alternative is good.

Quick summary based on hazy memory

- Cow breeding isn't inherently bad. It depends how industrialised the process is

- Not all land can grow crop while cow glazes on infertile land.

- The water usage in raising cow does not account for where the water come from. It come from natural rain water if the cow is relatively free-ranged. Growing almond/oat on the other hand definitely rely on irrigation water. California wastes majority (can't remember the percentage) of its precious water on growing almonds

edit: https://www.sacredcow.info/helpful-resources contains some infographics of those quick facts

I'm fairly sure you don't need irrigation to grow oats -- I'm surrounded by oats in Scotland, and I've never noticed any irrigation. On the other hand, the cow watering troughs are definately filled by taps.

Also, that website compares meat to "avocados, walnuts or sugar", 3 foods well known to require lots of water.

I agree with you that cow breeding isn't inherently bad, at least in its traditional forms. I also agree with you that almonds use so much water that it's incredibly wasteful to use them for milk in California, where they account for a significant percentage of the state's water use.

But in places like California, and the American Southwest in general, dairy farming is not sustainable. In the Colorado River basin, over 50% of the water is used for cows in some fashion (drinking water for the animals, irrigation for food crops, etc). It's just not responsible.

Soy and oats, which are grown in places with lots of water, transported dry and in bulk (i.e. the trucks are not hauling water) and reconstituted locally, are much more responsible. My preference is for soy since it provides a lot more protein.

[oops]

Your link says 200g oats have 8g sugar.

To clarify: The linked oat milk has 10% oats, oats have 4% sugar [0]. So if the oat milk only had sugar from oats, it would have 0.8g of sugar (0.1*0.04*200g). So how does it have 5.84g of sugar if they advertise "There is no added sugar whatsoever."? [1] The trick is that some of the oats are chemically converted to sugar.

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=oats+100g

https://www.oatly.com/uk/products/oat-drink

The dairy cows that produced the milk you bought at the grocery store, in the USA anyway, were highly unlikely to be eating only grass growing on "infertile land" watered only by the rain. They are eating corn and grain grown on fertile land, probably with irrigation.

Is there even enough "infertile land" in the USA to produce grass to feed enough dairy cows for USA consumption? I doubt it.

So that argument still leads to drastic reduction in dairy consumption required, and in the USA anyway probably much higher dairy prices.

It's not a bandwagon , you're on the popular side here almost everyone in the us consumes dairy and meat. It's actually the other way around people should be more open to alternative milks and meats instead of looking at incorrect reactionary sources

Like just take a look at their meat won't kill you infographic ,it just shows the total daily calories from various sources. It has nothing to do with the actual title ! The whole website got incredibly high production quality but is intellectually bankrupt.

I find the oat milk I drink is like 95% of the way there in terms of being exactly the same taste as regular milk (not oatly, I found that one to be not great). The last 5% is an almost imperceptible "toasted oat" taste, and it's a little on the thick side. I also find that I have to dilute it 1:1 with water if I want it to work right in my coffee.

Ive had the same experience in terms of not-totally-there. But I honestly like the oat milk taste better, especially in coffee and cereal.

Those are my two main uses for milk so I dont really buy regular milk anymore unless I need it to cook with or something.

Same, i only buy cows milk for certain baking recipes at this point. Oat Yeah (which i think is just a silk brand) has been my favorite I've found. It doesn't taste quite the same as cows milk which i am more than okay with.

Maybe I'm just unlucky with brand/batch but I found the opposite: oat milk I bought that was specifically marketed as being ideal for coffee has a rank, salty taste and frankly I'd rather drink or mix something obviously different but pleasant like coconut or almond milk

Unsurprising since most dairy-free milks have more salt/sodium than regular milk.

Love oat milk, specifically Silk's Oat Yeah!

I think it's a good replacement. Since I eat a lot of _replacement_ foods, you kind of learn that you don't need that 100% to appreciate it for what it is. It's all learned taste.

I usually drink my coffee black, but a long time ago I made the switch to soy milk, and after a while it became natural in coffee. Oat latte's are pretty great too.

I have an issue with coffee + soy sometimes where the soy proteins appear to... curdle? cook? It seems to vary by brand of soy and coffee. As a result, I've generally been happier with my wife's recent switch to oat milk.

Have you had similar issues?

iirc the taste was ok but I was unimpressed with the nutrition label. I tried a pea-based milk substitute and loved the flavor and the nutrition label. Just wish it wasn't so expensive (got it on a one-off sale for 50% off)

The thing with alt-milks is that you have to watch out for sugar and additives if you care about those things.

For example, Oatly has 7g of added sugars, rapeseed oil and a few other additives.

Worth noting that the "added sugar" in a lot of oat milks is a regulatory labelling artifact, and it doesn't appear in some places. They've undergone an enzyme treatment that converts some starch into sugar, but the total carbohydrate content isn't changed.

Good to know. Although that doesn't really change much for me since simple carbs are still different than complex carbs.

The value in "complex" carbs over "simple" is the fibre and micronutrients that comes along for the ride. They're mostly still present in the treated oat milk (a lot of the insoluble fibre will be discarded, but the soluble fibre responsible for the beneficial health claims of oats is kept).

Starch vs. the maltose that the treatment produces shouldn't make a material difference in most peoples diets. It's all glucose in the end. (Maltose by itself has a higher glycemic index, but with the fat, fibre and protein it won't matter.)

Yes I understand the difference between complex and simple carbs. Even if it doesn't matter very much I'd still rather avoid simple sugars.

For example, I'd rather buy Elmhurst Oat Milk (https://elmhurst1925.com/collections/plant-milks/products/un...) that uses a different process. It has fewer calories and zero added sugar.

If I wasn't trying to avoid simple sugars I might have never found out about Elmhurst so to me it is worth it just to find better products.

Bingo. Most oat milks, including standard Oatly, have significant added processed vegetable oils to achieve the fattiness that most expect from milk. Can’t be healthy.

The only one I’ve found without them is an Oatly “lite” version but even that is hard to find.

I'd recommend checking out Elmhurst milks. I found them at Publix Supermarket and love the simplicity of the ingredients.

https://elmhurst1925.com/collections/plant-milks/products/un...

Seconded. Of all the milk alternatives, oat milk tastes the best and has great viscosity. (maybe even better than whole milk, certainly better than 2%)

It also serves as a great ingredient in beverages and avoids the allergen & California drought issues of almond milk.

I tried soy and almond and didn't care for them at all. When oat milk was all the rage I wrote it off as hype. Last week I decided to buy a half gallon of planet oat unsweetened original and I was surprised how much I liked it. I actually wound up pouring small cups as a treat and finished the half gallon in a week. I bought the dark chocolate version yesterday to give it a go. It has a pleasant coca flavor without being too chocolaty or sweet. Its like a thin chocolate shake. Dangerous as I drank 2/3 of it already.

Ditto. Did not enjoy Oatly, but the store brand was great for use in cereal (and I drank regular milk forever). It was the same for my kids. Not complaining since the store brand is even cheaper.

I can't say enough nice things about oat milk. It's made cereal leagues better, and I welcome the toasted oat taste in my coffee way more than soy.

Oat milk was what got me to drop whole milk (and now ice cream with oat based deserts). That was pretty much the remaining bit in terms of being full vegan. I still eat local eggs and fish maybe once a year. But as a latte drinker, milk had been one of the high carbon impact foods I was still consuming and oat milk made it easy to drop. I was never a big fan of almond milk in my coffee — too rancid when steamed for my taste.

I also buy oat milk now (since I use it as an additive, not for nutrition), but haven't replaced yogurt. I've not yet seen any research comparing yogurt with its alternatives.

We buy Forager (cashew) yogurt for smoothies. Have no idea regarding how it compares — though there’s a lot of plant-based cultured products out there. I’ve seen some interesting accounts on Instagram of people who make their own cultured plant-based cheeses.

> I also find that I have to dilute it 1:1 with water if I want it to work right in my coffee.

Try brands/packaging explicitly made for baristas. I find them perfect for coffee. It even works for frothing and steaming if you're into that.

Normally I don't like indulging in pedantic things like this, but I think I'm on-board with "we shouldn't call the stuff that doesn't come out of mammals 'Milk?'"

It just doesn't fit with how we seem to most often use words in foods et al, e.g: We call it 'egg substitute' or 'krab' when the thing is not the thing.

The only outlier I can think of here is things like 'Root Beer' and 'Ginger Ale' and we know why those are that way.

https://xkcd.com/1483/

That's assuming fake milk drinkers will be strong enough to finish us.

OP states that oat milk and coconut milk contain even more calcium than dairy milk; you won't stand a chance in the inevitable bone-to-bone combat.

Given that the title of the post is "Alternative Milks" I think the general usage of "milk" is simply a shorthand for "alternative milks" which would be synonymous with your want to call them milk substitutes.

We've been using "soy milk" for the better part of a century and we all know what it means. I don't see how this isn't more like "root beer" now, even if the etymological story isn't quite the same.

(edit: see below, attested for many centuries -- 'milk' as non-animal milks.)

And “almond milk” for almost a thousand years (it was big in the Middle Ages because it was then not acceptable amongst many Christian and Muslim communities to use milk during fasting periods).

It was called 'almond milk' (or the equivalent in Old English) at the time?

Yep. Here's a medieval recipe for butter made from almond milk (from http://www.godecookery.com/mtrans/mtrans54.html):

Botere of almand melk. Tak þikke almound melk & boyle it, & as it boyleth cast yn a litel wyn or vynegre, & þan do it on a caneuas & lat þe whey renne out. & þan gadere it vp with þyn hondes & hang it vp a myle wey, & ley it after in cold water, & serue it forth.

Yes, almond milk was a popular substitute for regular milk in recipes and meals on days when dairy consumption was forbidden. [1] has a modern cook recreating some of these recipes, but I've seen similar recipes in older (~10-11th century) stuff from the Islamic world, where it wasn't merely a substitute.

The word milk in general could refer to any dairy-like liquid though. According to [2] that usage is attested from as early as ~1200.

[1] https://historydollop.com/2016/11/09/almond-milk-the-medieva...

[2] https://www.etymonline.com/word/milk#etymonline_v_16158

Here's an example in what I think is Middle English: https://www.reddit.com/r/medieval/comments/gu70rh/the_recipe...

Almond milk seems to have shown up by the 12th century, but Old English was mostly dying by then.

Much longer than a century apparently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soy_milk#History

> "Soy milk" entered the English language (as "soy-bean milk") in an 1897 USDA report.

A lot of vegan restaurants, blogs, etc. spell it "mylk".

After first cringe, I like this. The same as the "krab" thing. (Anyone else colloquially say "KAY-rab" to audio-distinguish?)

Let's see, how about mincemeat, mountain oysters, pork butt, Welsh rabbit, prairie oyster, black pudding, sweetbreads, and (the most delicious of the bunch) beavertails.

There are plenty of names of foods that do not at all describe the actual ingredients in them, and people get along just fine. Nobody believes almonds have tiny mammary glands that are being milked. As long as you clearly label the source ingredient (almond, soy, oat, etc.) for reasons of preference and allergens, nobody's getting confused here.

Right, perfectly reasonable. I'm still sort of on the fence.

I guess where I would respond though is: Most of what you're talking about are singular rare-ish exceptions. We're talking about a very common staple here (which means, yes, there will be confusion of some sort, perhaps in baking?)

I think my reasoning here is, we're not calling margarine "plant butter," we're not talking about "tapioca/potato eggs" (had to look that one up.)

Overall, even, I feel like things would go smoother if we used some other word, e.g. I know "Silk" is trademarked, but something along those lines.

> we're not calling margarine "plant butter,

I know people that just call this "butter" so idk if i follow. Also no one complains about "Peanut Butter" being not butter :)

In my experience, people call the dairy stuff "butter" and the plant substitute "margarine" rather consistently. But yeah, good point about the peanut butter.

I don't have an deep source on this, but it looks like this is not something new. https://www.etymonline.com/word/milk says:

> Of milk-like plant juices or saps from c. 1200.

Its as ridiculous as when I see a package in the store labelled “beefless beef.” Why not just call it what it is, which is plant based ground chuck. Beefless beef sounds like something from rick and morty. Lots of things have some references to chicken too.

wait, chuck doesn't mean meat? I'm even more confused now.

It's not a pedantic thing.

Nut/Seed drinks are not milks. They're just as much milk as coffee is tea and apple juice is vodka.

It's absolute nonsense to call it milk, just because some "clever" marketing department somewhere decided to name it such in an effort to peddle their product more effectively.

> coffee is tea and apple juice is vodka

You brew coffee and you brew tea. Tea is plant products brewed in hot water, and coffee is... a plant product in hot water?

We call all sorts of soups soup even though they contain different ingredients, so why not Milk?

> We call all sorts of soups soup even though they contain different ingredients, so why not Milk?

Because soup is any kind of liquid food. If you had made a soup that was made entirely of Milk, it would simply still be soup.

Milk is specifically produced by mammary glands of...a mammal.

Not sure why I have to explain how words and definitions work on HN, but there it is.

Not only milky liquids are called "milk", but oily liquids are called "oil" e.g. fish oil (etymologically oil refers only to oil extracted from olives, but already Pliny the Elder used the name "fish oil" and many other oil names for oils extracted from other things than olives) and buttery substances are called "butter", e.g. cocoa butter, even if the bu- from butter means cow (in Greek).

Sure. I just find it perhaps interesting that e.g. we went out of our way to invent the word "margarine."

I have recently started drinking almond milk. It does feel like a rip-off because a 1 litre carton of almond milk is approximately 97% water, 2% almonds, 1% thickeners.

Companies charge what they think the market will pay and in this case, consumers (like me!) are willing to pay for almond milk even when it costs more than fresh dairy milk.

But make up your own mind: is almond milk a rip-off given the ingredients? Or a perfectly fine product? Here are the ingredients for two different unsweentened almond milk brands:

- Alpro Almond Milk - 1 litre (Alpro is a popular European brand)

Water, Almonds (2.3%), Calcium (Tri-Calcium Phosphate), Sea Salt, Stabilisers (Locust Bean Gum, Gellan Gum), Emulsifier (Lecithins (Sunflower)), Vitamins (B2, B12, E, D2)

- Asda Almond Milk - 1 litre (UK supermarket own brand)

Water, Almonds (2%), Emulsifier (Sunflower Lecithins), Calcium Phosphate, Stabilisers (Gellan Gum, Carboxy Methyl Cellulose, Xanthan Gum), Salt, Potassium Iodide, Vitamins (B12, D2, B2)

Prices:

- Alpro: £1.80 ($2.50, 2.10€)

- Asda: £0.85 ($1.15, 1.00€)

I have noticed the same problems with the ingredients.

Some time ago I have bought samples of 6 or 7 brands of various kinds of vegetable milks and I have tested the results of making vanilla cream and cocoa cream when the cow milk is substituted with cashew milk, almond milk, coconut milk, soy milk and so on.

The creams with vegetable milk were acceptable, but I also did not like the list of ingredients found in all brands, without exception.

There is no doubt that instead of buying commercial vegetable milk it is far more healthy to just buy almonds, cashew nuts etc. and make milk yourself using just water, whenever you need it.

The problem is that you need to have a suitable blender and much more importantly you have to spend extra time with this activity instead of just buying the milk.

It is likely that the commercial vegetable milk needs stabilizers and emulsifiers to have a reasonable shelf life.

If you make yourself vegetable milk and consume it immediately, there is no need for those.

Alpro is part of Danone. I generally avoid their products because of the amount of thickeners, emulsifiers, sugars etc. they add.

Emulsifiers lead to a more stable drink that does not coagulate when poured into coffee. Thickeners and sugar probably let them get away with lower almond content.

There are much better options, but I can't tell you where to find them in the UK. For instance, this almond milk is made of only water, almonds (7%) and sea salt: https://www.alnatura.de/de-de/produkte/alle-produkte/milch-u...

With 70g of almonds per liter for EUR 2.69 it's about twice as expensive as unprocessed almonds from the same brand.

They’ve missed pea milk, which as far as I remember is even more efficient than soy.

Though people are a bit weird about peas; while a lot of meat substitutes use pea protein, they’re virtually never marketed as such. Oat and even soy protein seem to be more consumer friendly.

I'm more excited about synthesized milk:

https://www.smh.com.au/business/entrepreneurship/csiro-brews...

I've lifted weights recreationally for 20 years and find most of the dogma and heated debate about dairy products fascinating. It's not uncommon to see a fitness enthusiast warning about the dangers of dairy while simultaneously selling nutrition supplements derived from milk as part of a multilevel marketing scheme.

At this point, I think everyone should have the dignity to believe what they want to believe. But personally, I consider all milk substitutes to be a waste of time unless someone has a specific reason (like lactose intolerance) to drink them.

Some other truths that people love to debate for some reason: yes dairy is horrible for the environment so it is best to eat it in moderation if you aren't exercising (best to get to it soon though). Yes diary is always more ethical than meat. Yes most nutrition advice post-WWII is propaganda put out to bolster certain big agriculture companies. Yes high cholesterol in the body probably has more to do with genetics and other risk factors than how much cholesterol is consumed.

The fastest way to get healthy that I know of is to go on the gallon of milk a day (GOMAD) diet and hit the gym 3 times per week for 45 minutes or less with no cardio. This is 1970s "technology" but it works.. astoundingly well. I used it in my 20s with great results.

The rest of the hype, eh, I try to tune it out. Avoid dairy to save the planet, that's great. Avoid dairy to save your health and.. your health will probably decline because it's usually something else like poor work-life balance or a sedentary lifestyle that's the culprit.

> Yes diary is always more ethical than meat

How do you figure that?

Because you don't have to kill the animal to get it?

To give milk, a cow has to be pregnant about once a year. So unless you want a geometric expansion of cows, you're going to be killing quite a lot of calves.

Fair point. I guess the question is whether those calves would have been born/slaughtered for another reason (meat/leather), or whether milk demand is the only reason they exist.

The latter, in modern farming. They'll be used for meat and leather and so on anyway, but as a byproduct; many calves will be killed within days of birth, in many countries on the farm rather than in a proper facility.

In a hypothetical world where people didn't want meat or leather at all, but wanted current volumes of milk or anything like them, you'd still be producing and slaughtering a lot of calves.

Thank you, I didn't know that so I learned something today!

This seems like quite a ridiculous problem since surely hormones could induce lactation. I did a quick search and stumbled onto this from 1994 where they had cows that lactated without being pregnant:

https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/milking-the-cattle-31995

So milk without killing calves has been available for quite some time. This probably coincided with bans on hormones in milk though (which I was all for) that happened in the 90s and early 2000s maybe? But people were never given the full story.

Maybe this could be a long-term sustainability/awareness project. Give cows hormones to simulate pregnancy and birth, then stop and sell the hormone-free milk for as many months as milking typically lasts.

This is definitely something that has been and continues to be investigated, and if it was workable the industry would definitely be keen on it. As of now it’s experimental, tho.

I did a quick search and here are the first 10 results I found about using hormones like progesterone to mimic pregnancy (similarly to how birth control pills work) going back to at least 1975.

From quickly skimming them, it looks like dairy cows on hormones cost about 1.5 times normal and the biggest side effect is hormones in the milk, which seems like something that could be bound to and removed by another compound. I haven't had time to read them all yet though, so someone please correct me if I'm wrong:

https://www.journalofdairyscience.org/article/S0022-0302(86)...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002203020...

https://www.publish.csiro.au/bi/pdf/bi9750183

https://www.scielo.br/j/rbz/a/qqDfVHKjYcRS7w43zpC5m4t/?lang=...

https://www.journalofdairyscience.org/article/S0022-0302(78)...

https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/bitstream/handle/10919/33721/f...

https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/farming/opinion/111492644/a...

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/316230842_Artificia...

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/animal-science/artic...

https://www.pashudhanpraharee.com/protocols-for-artificial-i...

If someone wanted to throw some investment money at a real problem, this is it. I would gladly pay the organic milk price (about twice normal) to know that the dairy products I'm buying don't have the collateral damage of killing countless calves.

I think it’s probably a limited market, honestly, unless it’s cheaper. The cow still only produces milk to an efficient level for about five years; after that you kill it. People concerned with the ethical issues won’t want it, generally; they’d continue to use either plant ‘milk’ or just no milk.

And the startup costs would be high; getting it approved for human consumption would not be cheap, and there’d be a risk of it being barred on animal welfare grounds anyway. Notably, the reason, at least officially, that hormones can’t be used on farm animals in the EU is animal welfare, not safety (you could speculate that it’s actually about safety, but animal welfare is an easier one for governments to win on).

Ultimately you’d be looking at a high risk of never getting it approved, and even if you did it’s unclear who’d want it.

Dairy cows are killed for meat about 5 years into their 25 year lifespan when they stop producing as much milk. That's on top of being made pregnant (so they produce milk in the first place), having their offspring taken from them (so they don't take the milk) multiple times and male offspring being killed for veal. I don't see how it's any better than eating meat - you're still paying for animals to be killed for products that aren't essential.

Strength is only one aspect of healthy. Another is longevity, and yet another is avoiding illness. I.e. do powerlifters live longer? Are they less likely to develop cancers?

Furthermore, being healthy in your 20s is like not having engine problems in a brand new car.

> One way I tried to do this, was to switch the kind of milk I drink. This also had a secondary impact on reducing my environmental impact.

This is why I'm not hopeful that lab grown meat will be transformational. We already have a handful of sustainable, widely available, and affordable cow milk alternatives right now and people aren't switching over in droves. Getting people to change their habits is hard without a huge incentive. I can't see how lab grown meat is going to be substantially cheaper (soy/rice/oat milk is more expensive than cow milk in the UK still) or much better tasting to make people switch.

I see people saying things like "I'm sure to switch when it's cheaper and tastes the same or better" but I'm not sure how we'll avoid global warming when people aren't willing to really change anything (vs only willing to switch to identical alternatives).

They are taste very differently and every time I try to make baked foods with substitute milk something is wrong. Lab meat has appeal because is the exact same.

Also, people with ethical concerns about killing cows > people with ethical concerns about drinking their milk

I don't act much on my moral convictions, but generally I'm anti-torturing farm animals. The lives of beef cows seem way, way better than the lives of dairy cows.

Drinking cows’ milk at any scale requires killing cows, though possibly people are less aware of this.

Lab-grown meat (and presumably lab-produced milk) are going to be a different sort of product than Morning Star patties or Pea Milk. Lab-grown meat would be meat, not merely some thing that is vaguely meat-like.

I really like soy milk and almond milk, but they remain twice as expensive as milk and distinct in taste.

I'm not sure anyone thinks that lab-grown meat will go through the roof if it's not cheaper than farm-grown meat.

In the EU, people are switching over in droves - to the point that the dairy lobby got a law passed that they cannot be called milk, and cannot be advertised in ways evocative of milk.

Maybe people aren't switching over in droves but when I opened up my 21 yr. old daughter's fridge the other day she had oat, soy and almond milk in there but no dairy.

Personally, I like all the alternatives except soy but my goto remains 2% cow milk for my tea in the morning. All other uses I could switch to alternatives without too much pain.

Alternative milks make up about ~10% of the US market according to this report [1].

If the trend continues, in 6 years, they're likely to make up ~50%.

[1] https://www.totallyveganbuzz.com/news/vegan-milk-sales-grow-...

I think milk substitutes are fine alternatives for drinking and cereal, but not baking/cooking. I don't know how much that matters.

But I do think in general people will buy whatever's cheapest, and it is an uphill battle against the many dairy assistance programs the government provides: https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/animal-products/dairy/policy...

Sure but very few of those affordable cow milk alternatives are a really good facsimile.

I've had so many of them and the pea protein ones are probably the closest in texture and the barista oat milk tastes pretty good but none of them are exact copies.

Lab grown meat is by definition a good facsimile. I don't think people care too much if it spent time as part of a cow or in a bag/vat.

Lab grown meat (and milk, for that matter; there’s some work on that) should taste much like real meat. Milk substitutes don’t really taste like real milk.

It’s also likely that at some point animal agriculture subsidy will end, and cost of externalities may be tacked on. At that point price will influence consumer behaviour. Plant ‘milks’ are currently more expensive than actual milk largely because farmers don’t have to pay for emissions, largely don’t have to pay for water, and are quite heavily subsidised in other ways; this can’t continue indefinitely.

Something I've noticed about both vegan/plant-based customers and the industry, is that no one is willing to change their eating habits.

Asian and African cuisine are far less reliant on meat (as a percent of their diet) to bring flavor to their food. However, I rarely see vegans driving adoption for Indian/Haitian/west-african food. Instead it is the same old efforts towards mastering the vegan beef patty/sausage and vegan pizza. Guess what, India has had an amazing mc Aloo Tikki & mcVeggie in McDonald's for 20 years and they taste better than any vegan burger that is readily available. Let alone native dishes that are far more aligned with vegan ingredients.

As long as our diets are reliant on meat and dairy as the sources of flavor and lynchpins of the cuisines, we won't see a perceptible change in net contributions to environmental degradation and climate change.

At the same time, the recycle campaigns of the 2000s have shown that expecting ground up action from the customer almost never works. There needs to be a production side once give to push sustainable solutions. Maybe we could start with. Ew balancing subsidies to push sustainable practises in the food industry. But food luck getting past that lobby.

> Asian and African cuisine are far less reliant on meat (as a percent of their diet) to bring flavor to their food. However, I rarely see vegans driving adoption for Indian/Haitian/west-african food. Instead it is the same old efforts towards mastering the vegan beef patty/sausage and vegan pizza. Guess what, India has had an amazing mc Aloo Tikki & mcVeggie in McDonald's for 20 years and they taste better than any vegan burger that is readily available. Let alone native dishes that are far more aligned with vegan ingredients.

I agree with this. It's odd when you think about it that many people expect cow, chicken, pig or cheese to be part of every meal they eat.

The alternative to meat shouldn't be Beyond burgers, it should be plants, vegetables, tofu, tempeh, setain etc. and a change in mindset about food.

There are plenty of vegans who don't regularly use meat substitutes. Imo, it seems like most of them are more directed to curious meat-eaters rather than vegans.

> However, I rarely see vegans driving adoption for Indian/Haitian/west-african food.

I really question if you actually know any/many vegans saying this. "Meat substitutes" are far more common among people who aren't very serious about it, are only just trying to shift their diet, or are only really doing it for dubious 'health' reasons.

Any vegan I've ever known who's been vegan for more than a couple years has a diet that consists almost exclusively of meals designed around vegetables, with maybe one or two things like you're talking about as nostalgia-pleasers.

That said, "alternative milks" are not like beyond burgers. Liquids that contain fat, protein, and sugar are almost universally called milks and have been for a very long time, and are very useful in daily use and for cooking.

Just because something resembles a meat or dairy product doesn't mean it exists solely to be a placating replacement. Sometimes it's just a convenient form factor. Like, a black bean patty is nothing like a beef patty. But you eat it the same way. Oh no they're copying meat!

If by "driving adoption" you mean being the cause of a shift to these things I dunno what you really expect. Vegans are a vanishing minority of all people in terms of "western" diets, they can't drive the market to the corner store.

I agree almost exactly with everything you said, except

> Vegans are a vanishing minority of all people in terms of "western" diets, they can't drive the market to the corner store.

I think Vegans (and memes about how they tell everyone) are shifting big-city cuisine more, and they're successful in mainstreaming the idea of no-animals. Even if vegan food isnt successful, they're making the idea of not needing meat products more mainstream (and i think milk is the real success story of this).

I dunno, I think health food fad diets have done far more to move that needle than actual vegans. The idea that meat is bad to eat because it's "bad for you" is pretty distinct to me from the moral arguments most vegans are interested in. I'd honestly expect the number of people out there who use soy milk instead of normal milk because they heard "fat is bad" or "lactose is bad" alone easily outweigh even loosely defined vegans.

(likewise, vegans frequently get blamed for labour issues involved in production of superfoods like quinoa but I'm pretty sure the vast majority of people eating those are doing so with no interest at all in completely eliminating animal food sources from their own diets, let alone from the entire culture)

Anecdotally,

> I rarely see vegans driving adoption for Indian/Haitian/west-african food.

As a vegan-ish non-indian american person, i am a huge advocate for more indian food. I LOVE indian food.

But not everyone is onboard. I see the issue more to do with culture and flavor than anything. Americans want american food not indian food (at least in part). Thats why impossible burgers are more popular than Aloo burgers.

On the flip side, i see tofu appearing in all sorts of dishes, even Tofu tacos and the like. This is because tofu is less imposing. You can make tofu whatever you want (like meat), which is not as true of more flavorful alternatives from eg. india. This makes it a better "gateway" alternative". Thats why alt-milk is getting popular now - its just milk, but made differently and now better. Everyone already knows and likes Almonds and Oats, so why be nervous about the change?

Not vegan/vegetarian, but I never really understood this either. I absolutely love Indian food, vegan or not. Whereas most “western” vegan foods I see don’t look overly appealing or seem to just want to emulate meat .

> hereas most “western” vegan foods I see ... seem to just want to emulate meat .

You're looking at the wrong stuff. Most vegans don't eat that stuff its for recent converts and people who don't know how to eat. Most vegans make meals that aren't "we had meat and potatos and substituted fake meat" they're meals meant to be filling and nutritious without meat. They just use other better proteins. Silly example, but a ham sandwich vs a peanut butter sandwich. PB is way better than "ham sub" but still protein filled.

I have noticed that very few of the products launched are actual ingredients in food. They sort of are the food. With tofu, there are a gazillion ways to cook and prepare it. With these other foods there is one way, and then you serve it differently.

I have a tendency to always come back to tofu, tempeh and seitan. They are extremely versatile, and at least the first two feel "healthy". Soy mince makes me extremely full and leaves me feeling bloated all day. Sure, I eat it sometimes (it is probably the only one of the more modern products In regularly eat), but it is never my preferred food.

So why aren't we demanding incentives? Let's make policy which causes plant-based diets to be the path of least resistance for most people. We do this for plenty of other things.

We need to get rid of all meat and dairy subsidies asap. If the price of milk and meat reflected their social costs then consumption would drop pretty quickly

One aspect of environmental impact that may be overlooked here is the use of refrigeration. Some milk requires refrigeration depending on its processing and packaging. There are also cultural norms in play; Americans often believe that milk of any kind must always be kept cold, and American supermarkets often have completely open refrigerated shelving, which I have to imagine is very wasteful.

Photo of what I'm referring to: https://www.newhope.com/sites/newhope360.com/files/styles/ar...

This table hides a lot of important information.

If you look at calories and sugar, you could think that oat milk is equivalent to cow milk.

First calorie measurement is imprecise at best, and then, there's how what you eat influences your metabolism.

These two articles might help you make up your own mind:

- Death of the calorie - https://www.economist.com/1843/2019/02/28/death-of-the-calor...

- Oatly: The New Coke - https://every.to/almanack/oatly-the-new-coke-821556

The second articles claims about sugar in Oatly (really oat milk in general, they mostly all use a similar enzyme treatment) are rather misleading.

"GI is a measure of how much of a negative response your body has to certain sugars" is a gross mischaracteriztion, but even if you take it at face value, it's not useful to compare the GI of the component sugars in oat vs. dairy milk alone (maltose vs. lactose). Let alone represent oat milk as being pure maltose in a comparison to Coke, a product with no fibre, protein or fat or micronutrients.

Very useful resource, but I wonder if emissions (kg) takes into account methane emissions from cows, which tend to have a stronger warming effect than CO2. There are conversions from methane to equivalent CO2, so hopefully that's there already.

In case anyone else got confused about how lactose-free milk somehow managed to have exactly the same macronutritional profile as ordinary milk, it turns out to be because "lactose-free" really means "we added lactase so the lactose is pre-digested", not "we removed the lactose". The sugar is all still there, just in simpler forms.

Would have been interested to see Pea Milk.

https://www.ripplefoods.com/healthy-environment/

Which, for obvious reasons, is not usually marketed as "Pea Milk".

We chose the unsweetened Ripple as the milk of choice for our children once they moved past formula. The nutrition profile is excellent and lacks what I would consider negative carbohydrates [1]. The only thing I could find negative about the product was that it contains sunflower oils, which ingested in mass quantities can cause GI irritation and other negative side effects. An of course, they lack an organic variety.

[1] https://www.instacart.com/products/3313587-ripple-pea-milk-n...

I was surprised that human milk has so little saturated fat, but it seems the table is wrong? The source linked shows 4g of sat fat per 200g of milk.

Where is the oat milk getting it's extra calories? Using the usual 9kcals per gram fat and 4kcals per gram protein and gram carbohydrates, I get the expected 120ish amount for cow milk but only 71kcal for oat milk (listed at 100kcals). I guess the table is missing non-sugar carbohydrates?

>I guess the table is missing non-sugar carbohydrates?

"Fiber" came to mind when reading your pondering.

was going to comment the same. non-sugar carbohydrates are an incredibly important consideration.

The water usage metric is a joke. Do you think dairy cows in Normandy or England lack any water, or that anyone is impacted by said water usage? Just visit there, you'll see what I mean.

The carbon metric is also a joke, for a different reason: cows raised on mostly grass can have a negative impact. Cattle fed corn is another story, but the problem here is not the cows or the milk but industrial agriculture.

Next we have land usage. I just came back from a hike in the mountain. Saw plenty of cows munching on ski slopes, they make excellent cheese. What kind of food could be produced there instead? Certainly not rice or almonds or whatever.

Finally the nutriments is all dependent on what you make of fats. Ansel Keyes and his followers have been claiming saturated fat was bad for your heart, in the mean time France has the highest butter consumption in the world by far and we also happen to have among the best heart health numbers (and no, it's not red wine).

I think you're engaging in some wishful thinking with grass-fed carbon-negative cows. The climate impact is from methane they produce from digestion, regardless of the food source.

Any sources on the cow carbon footprint? This is an interesting point and I'd like to get some detail so I can judge for myself.

I don't know which mountains you were hiking, but the cows in the alps remain there because they get huge subsidies[1] to do so (beyond the subsidies all agriculture gets). The argument being that it's useful and traditional and there's no way to compete under such difficult circumstances.

Anyway, I couldn't find any numbers, but I expect it makes up a small percentage of overall milk production, even in countries like Austria or Switzerland, which have a lot of mountainous area. If we exclusively produces milk that way, it'd be a luxury good.

Again, I haven't looked up the numbers for Normandy or England, but I expect it's similar to Northern Germany, where you do see cows in pastures (which is lovely, I love cows, they seem very happy), but a) most of them are fed additional grains, b) during the winter you'll see much fewer and c) for every cow you see there, there must be a dozen being kept in a stable year-round. Source: cow farmers in the family.

[1] e.g. https://www.bluehendesoesterreich.at/bauernlexikon/bergbauer...

It's just an example of how land use is the wrong metric.

> a) most of them are fed additional grains,

Yes, but there is a difference between feeding them additional grain and feeding them exclusively grain.

Raw milk (y/n?) and A1 vs A2 milk are the true debates currently ongoing on the milk world:

https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/a1-vs-a2-milk

Very interesting. I've stopped drinking milk after moving to Northern Europe. In retrospect, the different type of casein probably played a role in this.

It is a pitty though that the only plant-based milk that comes close to the macronutrients profile of dairy milk comes from soy.

Not sure how true this is, but I've read that unfermented soy is not very healthy and in traditional societies that consume soy in high quantities they consume it usually after a fermenting process.

This doesn’t sound right; in cultures where they eat a lot of soy, some is fermented (eg soy sauce), some isn’t (eg tofu).

I don’t believe the current literature points toward soy being unhealthy in any scientifically proven ways.

Fermented soy is going to be healthier, just like any fermented food is healthier than its unfermented counterpart. Kimchi is healthier than cabbage, etc

Interesting. I imagine it'd be pretty hard to get enough dairy farmers to switch the breed of their herd, but since many cows are artificially inseminated I wonder if we could see genetic engineering to turn regular breed cows into A2 cows without changing other aspects of the breed.

>Raw milk (y/n?)

You really don't want this, it can have lots of nasty bacteria (including bovine TB)

Whats the actual quantified likelihood of this?

I don’t drink animal milks, but if I did I would drink the one that had a lower probability of infection. https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2012/02/cdc-raw-milk-much-mor...

Raw milk forgoes one of humanity's most important inventions: pasteurization.

Raw dairy products are 150-times more likely to cause disease than pasteurized products [0].

Pasteurization has prevented much suffering and death. It is among the most important technologies of human progress: farming, animal domestication, writing, crop rotation, democracy, pasteurization, vaccines, refrigeration, antibiotics, internal combustion engines, electronics, and the Internet.

[0] https://doi.org/10.3201%2Feid1803.111370

I’ve been trying Not Milk recently and I’m pretty impressed. Its slightly sweeter than milk, but it seems to work fine with cooking.

It's too bad the alternative milk manufacturers don't seem to care much about packaging waste and energy expended due to transportation. They're all single use plastics or unrecyclable tetrapaks.

There's a milk I can buy near me that's made locally and comes in an exchangeable glass bottle. That milk just happens to come from a cow.

I assume you're talking about things like this?

https://productxplorer.tetrapak.com/packaging/package/tetra-...

That's basically all I've ever seen. Cardboard + plastic spout. From what I can tell, they are recyclable.

https://earth911.com/home-garden/recycling-mystery-milk-and-...

And also this:

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/costofliving/we-answer-your-burning...

I love milk bags. I can dump them in the fridge drawer and they take up hardly any space, they don't weigh ten pounds each like 4L jugs, when empty they have a volume of zero, unlike 4L jugs, and they are way easier to pour. The only downside is they are not recyclable, but it's such a small volume of plastic I don't think it really matters.

WestSoy is one major soymilk producer that uses Tetrapak. In stores like Sprouts and Trader Joe's it's often the only soymilk available. Tetrapak is nice in that it doesn't need to be refrigerated until you open it, but it's made of paper with a layer of foil underneath it cannot be recycled.

Tetrapak can be recycled, though depending on where you live it may or may not actually be recycled. It's certainly more involved than recycling, say, glass.

What do you think of bags of milk as sold in parts of Canada? If you google "canada milk bag" you will see what I'm talking about.

It's still a single-use plastic, but is a pretty small amount. I wonder how the energy and water consumption for milk bags vs cleaning and sterilizing and refilling glass bottles compare?

I'm interested why it isn't viable to make an alternative milk powder you can mix with water.

I imagine a large part of the cost of alt-milk is transporting that extra water weight and space.

It might not be possible for a consumer to properly emulsify the mixture without special equipment.

why push for alternatives? only to create more products to sell you, i really hate this western mentality, no wonder asia is becoming the dominant civilization

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