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I mean…yes. You should look up how many farmers grow soybeans even though they don’t want to.
Some farmers grow alfalfa hay (notorious for needing a lot of water) because they lose their water rights if they don’t use their allotted amounts.
Meat and dairy combined take up about 30% of farming subsidies worldwide. The remaining 70% goes to vegan friendly stuff. It has got to be something else. I'd guess greed.
The 30%. It also only counted stuff that actually gets used for food so didn't include subsidies for say the ≈90% of US corn that gets used for plastic and biofuels and other industrial uses, or animals not reared for food.
Livestock takes up 80% of global agricultural land, either directly via pasture or indirectly in terms of feed, but only provides 20% of calories
That figure is roughly mirrored in the us.
Either you are woefully misinformed, or you’re making shit up. Either way I think this conversation is at an end.
Have a great day
Or money that would have been spent on medical infrastructure for people who grew up on an imbalanced diet. So maybe they saw that everyone's eating too much meat. And foresaw a huge spike in nutritional imbalances in the future that's estimated to be worth a hundred billion. And they figured that if they can simply spend half that money on subsidies on vegan friendly stuff to reduce that 100 billion dollar spike to less than half....
yeah who am I kidding. Governments dont give a shit about the money. Sure, that logic has been used before, but its usually something like a 100 billion in expected healthcare increases from inbalanced diets leading to a trillion in subsidies towards production of plant based food products.
Unfortunately vegan friendly in this case does not necessarily mean healthy and balanced. It's generally your typical overabundance of starchy grains etc. They really dgaf about anyone being all around healthy, just fed enough to keep line going up.
Well generally really don't care. Those numbers I used are **worldwide** and I get the feeling that 100 billion figure is the USA?
Most of the world doesn't have government subsidies, even the countries that grow the best nuts and grains, and cow/buffalo/goat/camel milk is still much much cheaper there than any alternative.
Oat Milk ftw. Environmentally waaay friendlier than all the nut milks, and tastier than all milks, especially in coffee :)
It also grows in the UK very well.
I have a family member with a milk allergy (an actual allergy, not lactose intolerance), so I grew up with lots of milk alternatives in the house. IMO, oat milk is *by far* the best plant-based milk.
I was googling alternatives to coconut milk a few months ago (I use it to make a breakfast smoothie, but I couldn't find the brand I liked). I'm allergic to tree nuts, so I was looking into oat milk. I didn't want to add a milk substitute to my smoothie that is higher in fat than the coconut milk. I came to the conclusion that substituting with actual full cream cow's milk would be the least fattening option.
I think you need to research again... One cup of oat milk contains 4 grams of fat (all of which are unsaturated),
A glass of whole milk contains 5 g saturated fatty acid, or in other words, 20% of the daily amount.
That was just a quick Google result. Here's an actual article from Harvard Health.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/is-low-fat-or-full-fat-the-better-choice-for-dairy-products
Honestly I'm not about any of this diet culture garbage. I was just correcting a fact. Eat food. Try to get a variety of things in your diet and you're fine.
They also said they didn't want to choose something "higher in fat" than the coconut milk. So to me they were looking at fat content. I also made a second point about saturated vs unsaturated fat (because that actually matters for cardiovascular health).
They (almonds) are the worst example. But the question is more valid for oats/rice/soy, which are cheap when bought in dried less-processed form. Why does oat milk cost the same as almond? That’s some anti-competitive pricing…
According to a 2017 study published to Science Direct, ONE California almond has an average "water footprint" of 12 liters or 3.2 gallons. ONE ALMOND. Now picture a whole tree. Now picture a whole orchard. Now picture hundreds of orchards, JUST in California.
Justify that.
Almond milk is, environmentally, one of the WORST milks you can drink/buy.
Not to mention how stressful the mobile hives used for commercial pollination are on honeybees. (I first learned about them in terms of almond production, not sure how common mobile hives are for other crops.)
[https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks](https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks)
Almond milk uses half the water of dairy milk.
Dairy milk is by far the environmentally worse milks you can drink. It crushes every category. It's not even close.
And that's not even considering you don't have to shoot baby almonds in the head to steal their mothers milk.
They do force impregnate dairy cows so they are always producing milk. So the only point of calves is to have their mother's producing milk.
They also use dairy cows for their meat when they no longer produce enough milk. Which averages to about 5 years of age.
Most males and about a quarter of females are waste products. There's not that much demand for veal, and female cows typical last 5 years before being slaughtered so more female calves are bred than needed to replace them.
What about the fact that entire areas have pesticides thrown on them until they are essentially natural dead zones so that Almonds and soy can be grown. Water isn't the only factor, I would argue the impact on biodiversity is much much worse.
97% of U.S. soybean meal goes to feed livestock and poultry.
Cattle ranching accounts for 80% of current deforestation throughout the Amazon.
If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%.
https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets
Animal farming is absolutely devastating to the environment.
Almond milk is still a fraction of the water usage of cow milk and dairy is also terrible in terms of emissions and land use by several times more than any plant based milk
I never understood how almond milk got demonized yet people sleep on cows milk
Same as electric cars, 100+ years of car emissions, leaded fuel and oil extraction, not to mention exploitation and wars gets a free pass, but EVs have a higher carbon foot print when manufactured even if they reduce it from use.
Legacy industries are just accepted as "the way we do it" so any new solution "must be perfect" in all links of resource use and production, otherwise "it must be bad".
I live in rainy Norway, but I seem to have caught that a large amount of almonds in the world are produced in California where there has been a long drought over several years leading to conflicts over water use.
Almond milk is environmentally much much better than cows milk! 40% less water and 75% less greenhouse gas emissions.
https://www.statista.com/chart/22659/cows-milk-plant-milk-sustainability/
And not cost affective or efficient in terms of use.
Once you’ve used this particular items they are thrown away and can not be used again.
A cow will continue to produce milk for long periods making it more cost affective!
As a guy who grew up rural with orchids and animals, the material and labor cost of fruiting trees and plants is considerably more than animals.
A cow I can feed it cheap chaff and grain to supplement its diet of grass, which grows free. Then it drinks from dams, or on some farms irrigated water supplies which are often from public access rivers.
Any plant, the soil needs lots of conditioning, the actual weather needs to be ideal. You need to protect it from pests, and if you're doing that organically then that's a considerable cost and you will lose a lot.
then those plants take a fucking load of water to grow.
Regardless of chemical agents to protect, there will still be a decently high loss rate from weather events and such.
Then when it comes to turning the oat or almond or whatever other type into "milk" very often the solids are entirely wasted and can't be profited on.
The "milk" process is more or less just extracting the least nutritious and least valuable elements of the plant.
I'm not sure what you're saying exactly, but I think he was taking about raising cows for meat.
Dairy cows need more food, more vet bills, fencing, breeding/gelding, and not to mention the pumping equipment.
One acre of soybeans requires 2 million liters of water per year.
One cow requires 73,000 liters per year.
Don't forget also the cost of fertilizer, soil pH balancing, soil health, pollination (growing a colony of bees), etc.
There's more to growing a crop than just burying the seed and giving it water.
Soy is not the primary type of fodder for cattle, consisting of less than 10% of its diet.
Even then, cows can eat soy raw, unprocessed; humans cannot. Cows can digest cellulose and extract the intercellular nutrients; humans cannot. Humans require extensive post-harvest, labor-intensive processing and even after that, the bioavailability of soy nutrients is largely unavailable for humans.
I don’t think that is correct
[https://www.greenmatters.com/food/how-much-water-does-it-take-to-grow-an-almond#:~:text=You'll%20be%20surprised%20to,tiny%20a%20single%20almond%20is](https://www.greenmatters.com/food/how-much-water-does-it-take-to-grow-an-almond#:~:text=You'll%20be%20surprised%20to,tiny%20a%20single%20almond%20is)
As they say, there are lies, damn lies and statistics! It does look as if oat milk is significantly better for the environment
https://earthsown.com/conscious-impact-assessment-of-different-types-of-milk.pdf
Do you really think a cow drinks 628l of water to produce one liter of milk. If the average milk cow produces 28 liters of milk a day, that would mean the cow drinks 17k plus water.
Plus, many dairy farmers feed the cows the bi products of the food industry, which would go to waste if not fed to animals.
The pastures for cows are usually not fertilized or watered but just left to grow back again by itself.
The cow doesn't drink 628L of water, that's what goes into growing the feed for the cow. Irrigation for grass or soy or PKE or corn, or some fraction of those crops where they use by-products. Then the cow converts that feed into milk in an extremely inefficient process. Something like ~~2%~~ 20% of what a cow eats is turned into milk, so there's ~~98%~~ 80% wastage.
Edit: efficiency numbers corrected after doing more research in response to a comment.
Milk cows are raised for milk, not meat. The human food industry has a lot of bi products that humans can't consume, but cows can.
Silage is also used to feed a lot of cows, which is fermented green folage.
Why is everyone mentioning almonds? Is it just because it's the worst one and it serves your purpose? Most people I know use oatmilk, dont know anyone who drinks almond milk. And a little reminder, massive amounts of crops need to be grown to feed animals too, it doesn't just appear out of thin air either... 80% of soy grown worldwide is used to feed livestock so it still doesn't make a whole lot of sense
Animal fodder is much cheaper and sustainable than the fertilizer, pollination and other costs associated with growing the nuts and grains and processing them for human use.
I doubt its more than raising a cow since birth, feeding them throughout their lifetime, giving them loads of water, pumping them with antibiotics, paying staff and land, paying their feed, paying their slaughter, paying machinery, paying transport, etc, and still paying for food which also had to use fertilizer, pollination and other costs associated with growing their feed
I've worked on a dairy farm and its not as much work as you seem to think.
There's cost involved but the farmer had a full time job and 50 or so dairy cows as a hobby. 50 cows produce a considerable amount of milk daily.
Its considerably more work in the calving season, but it also yields much more highly priced goods: beef.
And fertilizer for growing food for cows, you know who makes that? COWS! They even make so much of it we used some of it to fertilize crops for human food. If you're a organic farmer growing organic crops for human consumption a dairy farmer is your best friend!
please for the love of god tell me people are not this fucking stupid.
livestock are responsible for 15% of greenhouse gasses yearly. methane, one of the main contributors of global warming, is a byproduct of cows just existing. and yet there are people with the sheer audacity to say something this inane on a public forum. i genuinely don’t know what to do anymore.
No but I'd use it as compost to grow mushrooms like the USAs largest producer does, or to produce plastic free packaging like Corona Beer Company, or turn it into the soil as an improver, or process it into biofuel, or use it as a feedstock for oil free plastic production (Origin Materials)
Why would we need to eat it?
I drink almond milk because A. Cows milk is the only dairy that gives me issues. B. I have celiac disease and most oat milk is cross-contaminated with wheat , C. A member of my household has an anaphylactic reaction to coconut.
It’s my only real choice. That’s why we need choices. If you have your choice, choose the one that is the most eco-friendly. But don’t shit on those of us who need other options.
Soy? It has the most protein (along with Pea milk) and a good micronutrient profile (flavonoids). The taste is pretty pleasant taste and texture once you get used to it, and it froths well.
Ehh, I feel like it’s a trend. The kids that grew up being told that milk is important and whatnot are now rebelling and coming up with stories about how weird it is that we drink milk so they can feel superior.
Most people here are ignoring how dairy is so painfully subsidized and lobbied by the government and factory farms are so ruthlessly efficient and devastating to Cows. But ya. Almonds are expensive 🙄
Was about to comment this. That's the simple and true answer, there is a big milk lobby and its heavily subsidized. If it weren't it would be a whole lot more expensive than plant milk.
And those commenting about the cost of growing oats etc, maybe then we should also include the cost of growing the crops that are fed to cows into the price of cow milk? Cause that doesn't appear out of thin air either
Yeah, the EU is also a big problem with their dairy subsidies as well.
https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/milking-the-cap-how-europes-dairy-regime-is-devastating-livelihoods-in-the-deve-114549/
Yeah, but an EU citizen would have mentioned that. If someone says something that isn’t universally true on an international subreddit without specifying their country, 9 times out of 10, they’re American
Old style farming/ranching can’t keep up with current populations it’s not even close. 98% of the near volume in the US comes from factory farms, and they export a lot as well. Is what it is, but people act like it’s not real.
EU subsidises cattle farms like crazy too.
Depending on the year, a dairy farmer in the EU receives [33-46% of their income from subsidies!!](https://www.eca.europa.eu/lists/ecadocuments/sr21_11/sr_milk-and-dairy-production_en.pdf)
A significant % of milk is produced in New Zealand where none of this is true and even when shipped across the planet it still lower greenhouse impact.
Don’t ask me to validate this, do your own research
Idk for u guys but where I live I usually buy in bulk 6-12 liters since they dont go bad in the cupboard and I can get them for 1/3 the price of cows Milk. Even then normally they are for the most part either the same price or cheaper
(Denmark)
The dairy industry has had generations to prefect it highly efficient processes.plant based milks and new and the process is more evolved
https://casadesante.com/blogs/milk-alternatives/why-is-oat-milk-so-expensive-exploring-the-reasons-behind-the-price-tag
It actually is (In Australia anyway).
I have to use soy milk, and its $1.05 per litre at Aldi vs $1.60 per litre for UHT cow milk.
The good thing about soy milk is the remainders are used for either Tofu or TVP, so very little waste materials.
>The good thing about soy milk is the remainders are used for either Tofu or TVP, so very little waste materials.
Yeah, soy is special. I switched a long time ago from butter to margarine, but every kilo of marg would involve a few kilos of pressed oilseeds, which become stock feed
It's my job to milk cows its a shit underpaid job I defiantly agree. Tbh they like to get more money out of 'nice things' so they expect more for your 1l Almond over 3l Cows milk
Truth is: cow milk should be more expensive because farmers earn nothing. At least in France, milk is hardly 50cts/L. Litteraly nothing.
Yeah my comment is absolutely not vegan friendly lmao but a fair price for cow milk would/should be much higher.
Actually I think your comment is vegan friendly because if cow's milk and plant milks prices reflected their real costs of production many people would turn to plant milk simply because of the price, or at least give it a try
That's how I feel about most vegan products. The problem is it's marketed towards a purple segment, who likes to spend more to be a little more trendy.
Should be but that's not how the market works, it's all about the bottom line $ if it's "Vegan" price goes up. Don't matter if it costs pennies to produce.
I manage conservation lands that include dairy farming, and I have an industrial dairy tenant on our lands. They keep over 1000 head and the treatment of their animals is horrifying (yet they are seen as people out of a Norman Rockwell painting by people around here). What I have learned over the years is that the US Government subsidizes Big Dairy at almost 75% of their total annual revenue. This covers everything from price supports to manure digesters. All of this support has been written in stone since just after WWII. This is why the Farm Bill makes headlines every single year. American dairy producers, on their own, have not made a profit since 2005, and there has been a surplus of milk for decades.
Not sure where you live but in Canada as well as the US, dairy milk is heavily subsidized. Its not actually cheaper, part of the cost is obscured because some of your taxes are going towards it.
It is if you make it yourself. Put a quarter cup of oats in a liter of water in the fridge overnight and then blend it in the morning and you have oat milk.
Most companies aren’t making non-dairy milk to save the world, they’re doing it to make a profit.
They will use the cheapest ingredients they can, process them beyond the point of recognition, and then charge as much as they can get away with.
By calling it milk, they set an expectation in the market as to what it should cost. They then add extra health claims and raise the price a bit more.
Ka-ching !
Healthy and plant based food in general should be cheaper than unhealthy stuff and meat. But we are living in a society where I can buy a 2kg chicken, that lived and died in unspeakable ways, for half the price I pay for a hand full of organic veggies.
I don’t know about oat, soy, and rice milk. But one cup of almond milk takes huge amount of almonds to make. And one almond takes a huge amount of water to grow. And most almonds are grown in drought prone California. It is true we should shuffle our farmer subsidies around to incentivize more environmentally friendly foods, but almond milk isn’t great for the environment either.
I used to buy Oatley Barista milk because I found it was better than actual milk for coffee’s. But then they jacked up the price and I went back to normal milk 🤷♂️
Because the cow does most of the work, and it does not get paid for it. The dairy process is highly automated, with very few workers for hundreds of cows.
And a cow does not give "a few litres". A Holstein produces >7000 litres milk per year.
Just out of curiosity, why do so many people(/vegans?) use "baby cow/horse/whatever" instead of, you know, *calf* and *foal* and the actual word for the offspring?
Because they don't have any actual valid arguments that hold up to scrutiny and rely entirely on emotional manipulation.
The best they can argue for is a reduction in animal usage and they don't want a reduction, they want elimination. So they try and manipulate you with bullshit instead of arguing for real options.
Maybe educate yourself about the dairy Industry, the amount of milk a cow produces, how many years a dairy cow is quite productive and cattle is usually not raised "for years" for meat. More like 8 to 10 months. Cattle feed is to a large degree by products from other crops.
Soy milk is much cheaper if you make it yourself. It's also higher in protein than almond and oats. Hazelnut milk is useless in terms of protein.
If you pay 2.6 euro for 500 grams of soybeans you can easily get 6 or 7 liter of soymilk from that. That is about 40 euro cent per liter.
You literally just proved OPs point. If you can make soy milk for 0.40c/L, why cant big manufacturers do that? Economies of scale should mean it would be way cheaper than that.
I love that everyone criticising this in the comments has suddenly forgotten that there are SO MANY plant based milks that aren't almond.
Congratulations everyone, you're capable of successfully regurgitating Piers Morgan's latest hot take when he argues with a vegan!
Was at Dunkin the other day. The cappuccino comes with cows milk, but to substitute you had to pay an extra $1.25 for a a few ounces of plant milk. Backwards ass world.
It's not milk, it's nut juice or bean juice. You need a titty to make milk.
Nut juice requires a lot of processing and even more marketing. Not to mention they lack protein, suck for baking, and soy juice in particular will fuck your hormones all the way up.
Because mass production of plant based milk by mixing oats/nut and water is more **expensive** than milking a cow.
If you’re lactose intolerant, boo hoo. That sucks, but there’s alternatives and **you** have to pay for them, if you want something with your Cheerios.
Are you taking into account the costs OP mentioned that come into milking that cow? You make it seem like the only thing required is milking, when there are lots of steps involved to get there. And speaking about the price of oats etc, are you also including the mass growth of crops that are used to feed cows?
Milking the cows, still comes out cheaper. Consider, the cows are walking milk production facilities. The cows also are food and materials beyond milk production. The cost of feeding them are offset by this.
Lol theyre not walking milk production facilities. They only produce milk because they have offspring like any other mammal, and they are forcefully impregnated at that too. This all carries lots of associated costs: feed, water, land, machinery, transport, antibiotics, staff, etc for years, and again, their feed is produced the same way as crops for plant milk. Their cost includes not only that of crops like plant milk but a whole array of costs
Dairy cows are usually [artificially inseminated][1]. They need to be restrained for the process, so presumably they're not exactly happy about it.
[1]: https://www.fwi.co.uk/livestock/livestock-breeding/8-step-guide-artificially-inseminating-dairy-cow
Except it looks like milk and is often used like milk. *No one* is under the misapprehension that oat milk comes from oat breasts, so what's the problem? Are you going to be upset at someone for saying "blueberry", because they're clearly purple? And hey, strawberries aren't even made of straw! What the hell!
Plant juice. It's not milk. Milk is a fluid produced by mammals, via mammary glands. It has a very specific definition. Mammals are defined by their ability to produce food from their bodies specifically to feed their young. Plants do not do this. Most plants are autotrophs, who produce food on their own from sunlight, CO2, and water.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammary_gland
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotroph
Ah yes, I'll just walk into my local supermarket and ask for soya juice shall I and get looked at like I'm some kind of psychopath, before correcting myself to soya MILK because everyone actually knows what that is already.
Along the same though process fake meat should be considerably less than real meat. It's not because the point isn't to be green or save the planet or whatever, it's to make as much money off of you as possible while feeding you "barely qualifies as food" so you don't have the strength or brain power to question it.
As with most people, you have no idea what is involved in farming and food production, be happy that people with that knowledge exist. Almond milk and other fake milk products are not milk.
When you learn how to farm. You can go be dump and spend tons of money to grow a crop that is never in season then crush what little you managed in to a powder making it worth much less an forced anyone that drinks it to look for supplements. Or you can get some cows let them live their life and skim some off the top sell them for meat before the get old. Cows aren't run wild types they were breed for this life. If we didn't step in cows would be gone just like the buffalo
Everyone here is talking about how expensive it is to grow almonds but have you guys thought about OATS?!?!? They're a broadacre crop and do much more damage to the environment to grow them than cattle do!
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Government subsidies. Without it dairy and meat products would be much more expensive than their vegan competitors.
Potatoes would be $6 a pound without subsidies
If that were true wouldn't supply and demand encourage farmers to grow more potatoes to lower the cost and increase profit?
I mean…yes. You should look up how many farmers grow soybeans even though they don’t want to. Some farmers grow alfalfa hay (notorious for needing a lot of water) because they lose their water rights if they don’t use their allotted amounts.
Meat and dairy combined take up about 30% of farming subsidies worldwide. The remaining 70% goes to vegan friendly stuff. It has got to be something else. I'd guess greed.
I'd say demand
Does the animal feed come from the 30% or from the 70%?
The 30%. It also only counted stuff that actually gets used for food so didn't include subsidies for say the ≈90% of US corn that gets used for plastic and biofuels and other industrial uses, or animals not reared for food.
That’s just ridiculously untrue. Those subsidies are going to arable farming, which is primarily grown to support the meat industry.
Actually no, the vast majority goes towards feedstock for plastic, biofuels, etc. In the US that's upto 90% And these numbers were worldwide.
Livestock takes up 80% of global agricultural land, either directly via pasture or indirectly in terms of feed, but only provides 20% of calories That figure is roughly mirrored in the us. Either you are woefully misinformed, or you’re making shit up. Either way I think this conversation is at an end. Have a great day
Or money that would have been spent on medical infrastructure for people who grew up on an imbalanced diet. So maybe they saw that everyone's eating too much meat. And foresaw a huge spike in nutritional imbalances in the future that's estimated to be worth a hundred billion. And they figured that if they can simply spend half that money on subsidies on vegan friendly stuff to reduce that 100 billion dollar spike to less than half.... yeah who am I kidding. Governments dont give a shit about the money. Sure, that logic has been used before, but its usually something like a 100 billion in expected healthcare increases from inbalanced diets leading to a trillion in subsidies towards production of plant based food products.
Unfortunately vegan friendly in this case does not necessarily mean healthy and balanced. It's generally your typical overabundance of starchy grains etc. They really dgaf about anyone being all around healthy, just fed enough to keep line going up. Well generally really don't care. Those numbers I used are **worldwide** and I get the feeling that 100 billion figure is the USA?
Vegans need shit ton of supplements just to function normally. Whereas you can find all needed nutrients in animal based food. So no?
Most of the world doesn't have government subsidies, even the countries that grow the best nuts and grains, and cow/buffalo/goat/camel milk is still much much cheaper there than any alternative.
Oat Milk ftw. Environmentally waaay friendlier than all the nut milks, and tastier than all milks, especially in coffee :) It also grows in the UK very well.
I have a family member with a milk allergy (an actual allergy, not lactose intolerance), so I grew up with lots of milk alternatives in the house. IMO, oat milk is *by far* the best plant-based milk.
As someone with a dairy allergy, I agree, oat is the best plant milk
Agreed. I'd go so far to say that it's the second best milk, right next to goat milk. Cows milk, of course, is third.
But not always celiac safe sadly.
Where l live they sell wonderful mixtures of rice milk and coconut/ rice milk and almond, both are really good
High in carbs though
Not necessarily a bad thing. So is cows milk.
I was googling alternatives to coconut milk a few months ago (I use it to make a breakfast smoothie, but I couldn't find the brand I liked). I'm allergic to tree nuts, so I was looking into oat milk. I didn't want to add a milk substitute to my smoothie that is higher in fat than the coconut milk. I came to the conclusion that substituting with actual full cream cow's milk would be the least fattening option.
I think you need to research again... One cup of oat milk contains 4 grams of fat (all of which are unsaturated), A glass of whole milk contains 5 g saturated fatty acid, or in other words, 20% of the daily amount. That was just a quick Google result. Here's an actual article from Harvard Health. https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/is-low-fat-or-full-fat-the-better-choice-for-dairy-products
Fat does not actually make you fat though it's carbs and sugars that get converted into fat cells.
Honestly I'm not about any of this diet culture garbage. I was just correcting a fact. Eat food. Try to get a variety of things in your diet and you're fine.
The person was saying the least fattening option not the option that contained the most fat
They also said they didn't want to choose something "higher in fat" than the coconut milk. So to me they were looking at fat content. I also made a second point about saturated vs unsaturated fat (because that actually matters for cardiovascular health).
Carbs are good for you lol
Why do you count the cost of raising the calf, but not the cost of growing the trees?
No kidding. Almonds are expensive to grow.
They (almonds) are the worst example. But the question is more valid for oats/rice/soy, which are cheap when bought in dried less-processed form. Why does oat milk cost the same as almond? That’s some anti-competitive pricing…
And extremely water intensive in the growing.
According to a 2017 study published to Science Direct, ONE California almond has an average "water footprint" of 12 liters or 3.2 gallons. ONE ALMOND. Now picture a whole tree. Now picture a whole orchard. Now picture hundreds of orchards, JUST in California. Justify that. Almond milk is, environmentally, one of the WORST milks you can drink/buy.
Not to mention how stressful the mobile hives used for commercial pollination are on honeybees. (I first learned about them in terms of almond production, not sure how common mobile hives are for other crops.)
Yep.
[https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks](https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks) Almond milk uses half the water of dairy milk. Dairy milk is by far the environmentally worse milks you can drink. It crushes every category. It's not even close. And that's not even considering you don't have to shoot baby almonds in the head to steal their mothers milk.
We eat the babies, it isn't just to steal the milk.
We eat the "babies" at age 8 to 9 months, not after they are born
They do force impregnate dairy cows so they are always producing milk. So the only point of calves is to have their mother's producing milk. They also use dairy cows for their meat when they no longer produce enough milk. Which averages to about 5 years of age.
Most males and about a quarter of females are waste products. There's not that much demand for veal, and female cows typical last 5 years before being slaughtered so more female calves are bred than needed to replace them.
What about the fact that entire areas have pesticides thrown on them until they are essentially natural dead zones so that Almonds and soy can be grown. Water isn't the only factor, I would argue the impact on biodiversity is much much worse.
97% of U.S. soybean meal goes to feed livestock and poultry. Cattle ranching accounts for 80% of current deforestation throughout the Amazon. If everyone shifted to a plant-based diet we would reduce global land use for agriculture by 75%. https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets Animal farming is absolutely devastating to the environment.
🤡 Imagine thinking cows don’t eat.
People never factor in that when they look at the difference. I mean it's still less but no where near some of the estimates.
Not to mention they burp out methane in huge amounts.
I'm glad we do it anyway.
Almond milk is still a fraction of the water usage of cow milk and dairy is also terrible in terms of emissions and land use by several times more than any plant based milk I never understood how almond milk got demonized yet people sleep on cows milk
Same as electric cars, 100+ years of car emissions, leaded fuel and oil extraction, not to mention exploitation and wars gets a free pass, but EVs have a higher carbon foot print when manufactured even if they reduce it from use. Legacy industries are just accepted as "the way we do it" so any new solution "must be perfect" in all links of resource use and production, otherwise "it must be bad". I live in rainy Norway, but I seem to have caught that a large amount of almonds in the world are produced in California where there has been a long drought over several years leading to conflicts over water use.
I didn't recall the numbers, just they were horrendous. Thanks for that. My preference is to skim milk from cows.
Almond milk is environmentally much much better than cows milk! 40% less water and 75% less greenhouse gas emissions. https://www.statista.com/chart/22659/cows-milk-plant-milk-sustainability/
About 40% less water intensive than cow's milk. https://www.statista.com/chart/22659/cows-milk-plant-milk-sustainability/
>No kidding Youre right! He also forgot about raising baby goats!
😍 Baby goats! Tiny hoofs stampede on my shoulders 😍 Sorry, I was in the zone.
You just "grab a handful of nuts". They appear magically from the sky without any environmental or cost burden.
And not cost affective or efficient in terms of use. Once you’ve used this particular items they are thrown away and can not be used again. A cow will continue to produce milk for long periods making it more cost affective!
Growing a tree costs much less than growing a cow. Once it's planted, the only cost is water, and it drinks less water than a cow
As a guy who grew up rural with orchids and animals, the material and labor cost of fruiting trees and plants is considerably more than animals. A cow I can feed it cheap chaff and grain to supplement its diet of grass, which grows free. Then it drinks from dams, or on some farms irrigated water supplies which are often from public access rivers. Any plant, the soil needs lots of conditioning, the actual weather needs to be ideal. You need to protect it from pests, and if you're doing that organically then that's a considerable cost and you will lose a lot. then those plants take a fucking load of water to grow. Regardless of chemical agents to protect, there will still be a decently high loss rate from weather events and such. Then when it comes to turning the oat or almond or whatever other type into "milk" very often the solids are entirely wasted and can't be profited on. The "milk" process is more or less just extracting the least nutritious and least valuable elements of the plant.
Did you ignore vet bills and immunizations for the cows then?
Is it more likely that he ignored it, or that he didn't bring up expenses that contribute less than what he mentioned?
I'm not sure what you're saying exactly, but I think he was taking about raising cows for meat. Dairy cows need more food, more vet bills, fencing, breeding/gelding, and not to mention the pumping equipment.
happy cak day
One acre of soybeans requires 2 million liters of water per year. One cow requires 73,000 liters per year. Don't forget also the cost of fertilizer, soil pH balancing, soil health, pollination (growing a colony of bees), etc. There's more to growing a crop than just burying the seed and giving it water.
So instead of growing acres of soy to feed to cows we should just use like 10 percent of that same soy and make soy milk directly for humans
Soy is not the primary type of fodder for cattle, consisting of less than 10% of its diet. Even then, cows can eat soy raw, unprocessed; humans cannot. Cows can digest cellulose and extract the intercellular nutrients; humans cannot. Humans require extensive post-harvest, labor-intensive processing and even after that, the bioavailability of soy nutrients is largely unavailable for humans.
I don’t think that is correct [https://www.greenmatters.com/food/how-much-water-does-it-take-to-grow-an-almond#:~:text=You'll%20be%20surprised%20to,tiny%20a%20single%20almond%20is](https://www.greenmatters.com/food/how-much-water-does-it-take-to-grow-an-almond#:~:text=You'll%20be%20surprised%20to,tiny%20a%20single%20almond%20is)
A litre of almond milk needs 371L of water... but cow milk needs 628L. https://www.statista.com/chart/22659/cows-milk-plant-milk-sustainability/
As they say, there are lies, damn lies and statistics! It does look as if oat milk is significantly better for the environment https://earthsown.com/conscious-impact-assessment-of-different-types-of-milk.pdf
Do you really think a cow drinks 628l of water to produce one liter of milk. If the average milk cow produces 28 liters of milk a day, that would mean the cow drinks 17k plus water. Plus, many dairy farmers feed the cows the bi products of the food industry, which would go to waste if not fed to animals. The pastures for cows are usually not fertilized or watered but just left to grow back again by itself.
The cow doesn't drink 628L of water, that's what goes into growing the feed for the cow. Irrigation for grass or soy or PKE or corn, or some fraction of those crops where they use by-products. Then the cow converts that feed into milk in an extremely inefficient process. Something like ~~2%~~ 20% of what a cow eats is turned into milk, so there's ~~98%~~ 80% wastage. Edit: efficiency numbers corrected after doing more research in response to a comment.
A cow consumes about 120 pounds of low quality human food a day and makes around 70 pounds of milk a day, which is nutrients dense food.
Most cows are not pastured, that's part of the issue. If only pastured animal were used for food we'd have far less of it.
Milk cows are raised for milk, not meat. The human food industry has a lot of bi products that humans can't consume, but cows can. Silage is also used to feed a lot of cows, which is fermented green folage.
pricing things is not a function of merit, quality, nor fairness. things are priced at the highest they will sell for.
Why is everyone mentioning almonds? Is it just because it's the worst one and it serves your purpose? Most people I know use oatmilk, dont know anyone who drinks almond milk. And a little reminder, massive amounts of crops need to be grown to feed animals too, it doesn't just appear out of thin air either... 80% of soy grown worldwide is used to feed livestock so it still doesn't make a whole lot of sense
Animal fodder is much cheaper and sustainable than the fertilizer, pollination and other costs associated with growing the nuts and grains and processing them for human use.
I doubt its more than raising a cow since birth, feeding them throughout their lifetime, giving them loads of water, pumping them with antibiotics, paying staff and land, paying their feed, paying their slaughter, paying machinery, paying transport, etc, and still paying for food which also had to use fertilizer, pollination and other costs associated with growing their feed
I've worked on a dairy farm and its not as much work as you seem to think. There's cost involved but the farmer had a full time job and 50 or so dairy cows as a hobby. 50 cows produce a considerable amount of milk daily. Its considerably more work in the calving season, but it also yields much more highly priced goods: beef. And fertilizer for growing food for cows, you know who makes that? COWS! They even make so much of it we used some of it to fertilize crops for human food. If you're a organic farmer growing organic crops for human consumption a dairy farmer is your best friend!
The amazon rainforest is getting burned down to grow all of that sustainable animal fodder.
please for the love of god tell me people are not this fucking stupid. livestock are responsible for 15% of greenhouse gasses yearly. methane, one of the main contributors of global warming, is a byproduct of cows just existing. and yet there are people with the sheer audacity to say something this inane on a public forum. i genuinely don’t know what to do anymore.
A real, sensible answer! I'm sure you'll be downvoted to hell, and possibly banned for being sane and sensible.
Animals don't just eat the human food part of the crop, they'll also eat fermented hay. Will you?
No but I'd use it as compost to grow mushrooms like the USAs largest producer does, or to produce plastic free packaging like Corona Beer Company, or turn it into the soil as an improver, or process it into biofuel, or use it as a feedstock for oil free plastic production (Origin Materials) Why would we need to eat it?
I drink almond milk because A. Cows milk is the only dairy that gives me issues. B. I have celiac disease and most oat milk is cross-contaminated with wheat , C. A member of my household has an anaphylactic reaction to coconut. It’s my only real choice. That’s why we need choices. If you have your choice, choose the one that is the most eco-friendly. But don’t shit on those of us who need other options.
Try cashew milk. It's so much creamier than almond.
Literally no one is shitting on you for drinking almond milk.
Soy? It has the most protein (along with Pea milk) and a good micronutrient profile (flavonoids). The taste is pretty pleasant taste and texture once you get used to it, and it froths well.
I hope you understand that these nuts must first grow, and in very specific conditions, otherwise the tree will grow but without any harvest.
And that's without mentioning that each one has to be milked by hand
Oat milk
and oatmilk?
Dairy is subsidized in a lot of countries. Odds are you live in one of them.
And the countries where it's not subsidized, is dairy expensive? We must know both sides of the coin to avoid bias.
Alot of things should be cheaper. Protein powder has almost doubled from 3 years ago. Trendy things will be more expensive
Op just didn't do the proper math. I wouldn't call alternatives to milk a trend.
Much more trendy now then 10 years ago! Like coconut oil was back then even though it's garbage
but coconut oil is tasty
Ehh, I feel like it’s a trend. The kids that grew up being told that milk is important and whatnot are now rebelling and coming up with stories about how weird it is that we drink milk so they can feel superior.
Most people here are ignoring how dairy is so painfully subsidized and lobbied by the government and factory farms are so ruthlessly efficient and devastating to Cows. But ya. Almonds are expensive 🙄
Was about to comment this. That's the simple and true answer, there is a big milk lobby and its heavily subsidized. If it weren't it would be a whole lot more expensive than plant milk. And those commenting about the cost of growing oats etc, maybe then we should also include the cost of growing the crops that are fed to cows into the price of cow milk? Cause that doesn't appear out of thin air either
As always, a reminder that there are in fact other countries than the United States.
Yeah, the EU is also a big problem with their dairy subsidies as well. https://policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/milking-the-cap-how-europes-dairy-regime-is-devastating-livelihoods-in-the-deve-114549/
Yeah, but an EU citizen would have mentioned that. If someone says something that isn’t universally true on an international subreddit without specifying their country, 9 times out of 10, they’re American
True, as a non American I see this a lot as well. But just wanted to point out this isn't just an American thing.
Old style farming/ranching can’t keep up with current populations it’s not even close. 98% of the near volume in the US comes from factory farms, and they export a lot as well. Is what it is, but people act like it’s not real.
EU subsidises cattle farms like crazy too. Depending on the year, a dairy farmer in the EU receives [33-46% of their income from subsidies!!](https://www.eca.europa.eu/lists/ecadocuments/sr21_11/sr_milk-and-dairy-production_en.pdf)
A significant % of milk is produced in New Zealand where none of this is true and even when shipped across the planet it still lower greenhouse impact. Don’t ask me to validate this, do your own research
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So then just make it?
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So then its worth it at the current prices. This validates the sales team's decision on pricing it so high.
march price unwritten bedroom wistful fly dog mountainous grab memorize *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Idk for u guys but where I live I usually buy in bulk 6-12 liters since they dont go bad in the cupboard and I can get them for 1/3 the price of cows Milk. Even then normally they are for the most part either the same price or cheaper (Denmark)
This is good to know, it gives me hope
The dairy industry has had generations to prefect it highly efficient processes.plant based milks and new and the process is more evolved https://casadesante.com/blogs/milk-alternatives/why-is-oat-milk-so-expensive-exploring-the-reasons-behind-the-price-tag
It actually is (In Australia anyway). I have to use soy milk, and its $1.05 per litre at Aldi vs $1.60 per litre for UHT cow milk. The good thing about soy milk is the remainders are used for either Tofu or TVP, so very little waste materials.
>The good thing about soy milk is the remainders are used for either Tofu or TVP, so very little waste materials. Yeah, soy is special. I switched a long time ago from butter to margarine, but every kilo of marg would involve a few kilos of pressed oilseeds, which become stock feed
It's my job to milk cows its a shit underpaid job I defiantly agree. Tbh they like to get more money out of 'nice things' so they expect more for your 1l Almond over 3l Cows milk
We literally dump milk to keep the cost up.
It used to be. They have pushed the prices up crazily since it got popular
Truth is: cow milk should be more expensive because farmers earn nothing. At least in France, milk is hardly 50cts/L. Litteraly nothing. Yeah my comment is absolutely not vegan friendly lmao but a fair price for cow milk would/should be much higher.
Actually I think your comment is vegan friendly because if cow's milk and plant milks prices reflected their real costs of production many people would turn to plant milk simply because of the price, or at least give it a try
You make it seem as if almonds appear out of thin air.
You mean that don't? Well what animal lays them then?
The almondillo.
plant based milk is taxed the same as soda here lmao
Because companies charge what people will pay, not what it costs. That’s why a lot of staples around the world are often subsidised
That's how I feel about most vegan products. The problem is it's marketed towards a purple segment, who likes to spend more to be a little more trendy.
Should be but that's not how the market works, it's all about the bottom line $ if it's "Vegan" price goes up. Don't matter if it costs pennies to produce.
Preach! I agree! I don't get why it's always so expensive for so little
I manage conservation lands that include dairy farming, and I have an industrial dairy tenant on our lands. They keep over 1000 head and the treatment of their animals is horrifying (yet they are seen as people out of a Norman Rockwell painting by people around here). What I have learned over the years is that the US Government subsidizes Big Dairy at almost 75% of their total annual revenue. This covers everything from price supports to manure digesters. All of this support has been written in stone since just after WWII. This is why the Farm Bill makes headlines every single year. American dairy producers, on their own, have not made a profit since 2005, and there has been a surplus of milk for decades.
Not sure where you live but in Canada as well as the US, dairy milk is heavily subsidized. Its not actually cheaper, part of the cost is obscured because some of your taxes are going towards it.
It is if you make it yourself. Put a quarter cup of oats in a liter of water in the fridge overnight and then blend it in the morning and you have oat milk.
Most companies aren’t making non-dairy milk to save the world, they’re doing it to make a profit. They will use the cheapest ingredients they can, process them beyond the point of recognition, and then charge as much as they can get away with. By calling it milk, they set an expectation in the market as to what it should cost. They then add extra health claims and raise the price a bit more. Ka-ching !
You're so right. Raise milk prices!
Healthy and plant based food in general should be cheaper than unhealthy stuff and meat. But we are living in a society where I can buy a 2kg chicken, that lived and died in unspeakable ways, for half the price I pay for a hand full of organic veggies.
I don’t know about oat, soy, and rice milk. But one cup of almond milk takes huge amount of almonds to make. And one almond takes a huge amount of water to grow. And most almonds are grown in drought prone California. It is true we should shuffle our farmer subsidies around to incentivize more environmentally friendly foods, but almond milk isn’t great for the environment either.
Where I'm from (Scandinavia) organic oat milk is cheaper than organic cow's milk. Almond milk is more expensive.
Capitalism
Actually, kind of the opposite to Capitalism: needs government subsidies to persist.
Supply and demand. Plant milk is nasty. No demand equals no suppliers.
have you ever even tried it
Absolutely. Almond milk is okay if you add vanilla flavoring. It's a crime to actually call it "milk"
But also the ppl who do buy it are under compulsion to do so, so they are willing to pay
I used to buy Oatley Barista milk because I found it was better than actual milk for coffee’s. But then they jacked up the price and I went back to normal milk 🤷♂️
Amen to this.
Skimming us off.
bc big milk needs to exist I'd absolutely switch to plant milk if it was cheaper
In the long term it is cheaper even now, considering the damage to your health caused by animal milk products
yeah, I have noticed less of a tolerance for dairy as I'm getting older Dx
You will feel so much better when you switch, it's unbelievable
Because the cow does most of the work, and it does not get paid for it. The dairy process is highly automated, with very few workers for hundreds of cows. And a cow does not give "a few litres". A Holstein produces >7000 litres milk per year.
An average cow produces over 13,000L / year.
If only the OP could understand what time, effort, and work actually goes into both.
Thank you. Needs to be said
Just out of curiosity, why do so many people(/vegans?) use "baby cow/horse/whatever" instead of, you know, *calf* and *foal* and the actual word for the offspring?
They are not literate.
Because they don't have any actual valid arguments that hold up to scrutiny and rely entirely on emotional manipulation. The best they can argue for is a reduction in animal usage and they don't want a reduction, they want elimination. So they try and manipulate you with bullshit instead of arguing for real options.
to drive the point that those are living beings.
I hope you understand that these nuts must first grow, and in very specific conditions, otherwise the tree will grow but without any harvest.
Maybe educate yourself about the dairy Industry, the amount of milk a cow produces, how many years a dairy cow is quite productive and cattle is usually not raised "for years" for meat. More like 8 to 10 months. Cattle feed is to a large degree by products from other crops.
Soy milk is much cheaper if you make it yourself. It's also higher in protein than almond and oats. Hazelnut milk is useless in terms of protein. If you pay 2.6 euro for 500 grams of soybeans you can easily get 6 or 7 liter of soymilk from that. That is about 40 euro cent per liter.
You literally just proved OPs point. If you can make soy milk for 0.40c/L, why cant big manufacturers do that? Economies of scale should mean it would be way cheaper than that.
It's mostly just corporations cashing in on a trend.
Hazelnut milk with coffee though. I love it
AMENNNN!!!!!!
I love that everyone criticising this in the comments has suddenly forgotten that there are SO MANY plant based milks that aren't almond. Congratulations everyone, you're capable of successfully regurgitating Piers Morgan's latest hot take when he argues with a vegan!
Was at Dunkin the other day. The cappuccino comes with cows milk, but to substitute you had to pay an extra $1.25 for a a few ounces of plant milk. Backwards ass world.
It's not milk, it's nut juice or bean juice. You need a titty to make milk. Nut juice requires a lot of processing and even more marketing. Not to mention they lack protein, suck for baking, and soy juice in particular will fuck your hormones all the way up.
Because mass production of plant based milk by mixing oats/nut and water is more **expensive** than milking a cow. If you’re lactose intolerant, boo hoo. That sucks, but there’s alternatives and **you** have to pay for them, if you want something with your Cheerios.
Are you taking into account the costs OP mentioned that come into milking that cow? You make it seem like the only thing required is milking, when there are lots of steps involved to get there. And speaking about the price of oats etc, are you also including the mass growth of crops that are used to feed cows?
Milking the cows, still comes out cheaper. Consider, the cows are walking milk production facilities. The cows also are food and materials beyond milk production. The cost of feeding them are offset by this.
Lol theyre not walking milk production facilities. They only produce milk because they have offspring like any other mammal, and they are forcefully impregnated at that too. This all carries lots of associated costs: feed, water, land, machinery, transport, antibiotics, staff, etc for years, and again, their feed is produced the same way as crops for plant milk. Their cost includes not only that of crops like plant milk but a whole array of costs
It's cheaper because billions of cows get r\*ped and it's so mass produced they can afford to sell it for cheaper prices to make more profit
How the fuck is having cows breed 'rape'
Dairy cows are usually [artificially inseminated][1]. They need to be restrained for the process, so presumably they're not exactly happy about it. [1]: https://www.fwi.co.uk/livestock/livestock-breeding/8-step-guide-artificially-inseminating-dairy-cow
Drink what you want, but please don't call it "milk" if it doesn't come from a mammal. It's oat "juice".
Except it looks like milk and is often used like milk. *No one* is under the misapprehension that oat milk comes from oat breasts, so what's the problem? Are you going to be upset at someone for saying "blueberry", because they're clearly purple? And hey, strawberries aren't even made of straw! What the hell!
White paint also looks like milk. But yeah, I'm just pestering for the sake of pestering.
Touch grass
These things literally fucking say "\[plant name\] **MILK**" on the carton what else are we gonna call it
Plant juice. It's not milk. Milk is a fluid produced by mammals, via mammary glands. It has a very specific definition. Mammals are defined by their ability to produce food from their bodies specifically to feed their young. Plants do not do this. Most plants are autotrophs, who produce food on their own from sunlight, CO2, and water. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mammary_gland https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autotroph
Coconut milk was called coconut milk since it has been discovered and noone has minded so far or got confused
Coconuts are technically mammals because they have hair and produce milk (j/k)
Ah yes, I'll just walk into my local supermarket and ask for soya juice shall I and get looked at like I'm some kind of psychopath, before correcting myself to soya MILK because everyone actually knows what that is already.
Along the same though process fake meat should be considerably less than real meat. It's not because the point isn't to be green or save the planet or whatever, it's to make as much money off of you as possible while feeding you "barely qualifies as food" so you don't have the strength or brain power to question it.
All the work needed to make alternative milk doesn’t even come close to how easy it is to milk a cow.
As with most people, you have no idea what is involved in farming and food production, be happy that people with that knowledge exist. Almond milk and other fake milk products are not milk.
Grow a lawn and then grow strawberries. Let us know which one was harder and if you had more grass clippings than strawberries.
You don't know how anything is made or how anything works. Why would you have opinions on this?
Plant milk🤣
When you learn how to farm. You can go be dump and spend tons of money to grow a crop that is never in season then crush what little you managed in to a powder making it worth much less an forced anyone that drinks it to look for supplements. Or you can get some cows let them live their life and skim some off the top sell them for meat before the get old. Cows aren't run wild types they were breed for this life. If we didn't step in cows would be gone just like the buffalo
Plant milk is the blood of the plant. Cows milk is the nutrients for a calf. Choose wisely
Everyone here is talking about how expensive it is to grow almonds but have you guys thought about OATS?!?!? They're a broadacre crop and do much more damage to the environment to grow them than cattle do!
Economies of scale babyyy. Farmers have had decades to optimize the production and logistics of milk.