Milk, cream, cheese (most of what milk ends up as), and butter, are all delicious, despite the corrupting economic and political arrangements. Is the quantity consumed appropriate? The US diet is demanding.
The article sort of glosses over the input required to grow plant-based milk products effectively at scale, and the fact they don’t constantly produce like cows, the ways the crops can be destroyed and what’s required to protect them. A byproduct of dairy farming is manure, often used to fertilize vegetable crops, but the nitrogen fixation used in synthetic fertilizers requires a lot of energy input as well.
The article doesn’t really differentiate what alt-milks are being grown at scale or factor in locations where this is possible. Certainly oats, soy, and coconut are grown at scale (palm plantations are their own environmental disaster). Nut-milk from almonds or nutsedge aren’t really mentioned. The “insanely less resource intensive” is basically because plants don’t output constantly like cows, so they are absolutely less resource intensive simply because they only produce once a season all at once.
Milk, cream, cheese (most of what milk ends up as), and butter, are all delicious, despite the corrupting economic and political arrangements. Is the quantity consumed appropriate? The US diet is demanding.
The article sort of glosses over the input required to grow plant-based milk products effectively at scale, and the fact they don’t constantly produce like cows, the ways the crops can be destroyed and what’s required to protect them. A byproduct of dairy farming is manure, often used to fertilize vegetable crops, but the nitrogen fixation used in synthetic fertilizers requires a lot of energy input as well.
They are being effectively grown at scale and are still insanely less resource intensive.
The article doesn’t really differentiate what alt-milks are being grown at scale or factor in locations where this is possible. Certainly oats, soy, and coconut are grown at scale (palm plantations are their own environmental disaster). Nut-milk from almonds or nutsedge aren’t really mentioned. The “insanely less resource intensive” is basically because plants don’t output constantly like cows, so they are absolutely less resource intensive simply because they only produce once a season all at once.