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Comment by jelliclesfarm | Hacker News Reader

If someone is looking to switch for sustainablity reasons, they shouldn’t be buying liquid non dairy almond either. You must need a handful of almonds to make your own almond milk. It’s wasteful in so many ways..from processing to transporting to the water content and all the middle men charges in the supply chain.

Soak almonds. Peel. Purée with water..strain. Or don’t. Fresh almond milk.

I realize many people won’t have the time to do it. And that’s ok. But I just want to put this out there because it’s so easy and there is no special process or ingredient. And it’s cheaper and more sustainable. And lesser carbon and fossil fuel foot print.

Plus pistachios make a great nut milk too.

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I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, economies of scale mean that the efficiency of mass production should be far, far higher than a bunch of people individually making their own at home, especially when the alt-milk you’re making has a short shelf life. On the other, the logistical challenges of packaging, preserving, and distributing mass-produced groceries produces a lot of waste.

Here in Taiwan, most mom-and-pop (i.e., non-chain) breakfast shops will make their own soy milk by the vat every morning. You can swing by with an empty jug and fill it up at less than a dollar (US) a liter. Most of that money goes to labor, as the beans and sugar required to make a liter of soy milk cost less than 10¢. This is, to me, the ideally sustainable solution: micro-mass production, so to speak.

(Of course, very few people actually do it this way anymore, as most people here prefer the convenience of disposable cups and straws. But that’s another question for another time.)

Store bought almond milk also has additives that may not be good for you. Emulsifiers, thickeners, starches, preservatives, etc. For people with sensitive digestion, it may be safer to make it at home.

Elmhurst1925.com

No additives. I swear by this brand.

Almond milk is still way more sustainable than cow milk. Maybe not as much as homemade but still an improvement.

Is it? I would expect the variance in the sustainability to be quite high, with the most sustainable (pasture fed) dairy farms being much better than the average almond milk producer. That’s just an intuition though.

Also assuming we’re talking per gram of protein and fat here. Cup for cup almond milk might be more sustainable but there’s far more nutrition in a cup of cow milk.

An almond tree lasts for decades while a dairy cow has a considerably short life during which time she is abused by the Ag system and releases methane, poop, consumes a lot of inputs and a lot of water and labour and fossil fuel and electricity and refrigeration. It costs a dairy farmer more to produce a gallon of milk than it costs the consumer to buy it. It’s an industry entirely supported by subsidies. So it’s not profitable either. Many dairy farms are shuttered and farmers are committing suicide in America. And many more older farmers end up severely depressed as they question the only way of life they know and it is increasingly becoming hollow and meaningless. It’s beyond unsustainable. It’s abusive to everyone on that supply chain.

”An almond tree lasts for decades while a dairy cow has a considerably short life”

That doesn’t matter, sustainability-wise. What matters is that the cycle gets closed, not its duration. Insects typically live shorter than mammals, but eating them instead of cows and pigs is a net win.

”and a lot of water”

California produces about 80% of the world’s almonds, and each nut requires 12 liters of water that do not get replenished.

”It’s beyond unsustainable.”

Not that different from almonds.

It’s easy for me to push my intuitions in either direction. I’ve been contemplating a YouTube channel that compares actual diets along all of these axes and shows real numbers. All I tend to see is hand waving, or very gross comparisons of single metrics (like co2) at the commodity level.

The heuristic “plants are generally more sustainable” reads true to me. But “pick the better kingdom” seems like such a low bar to clear. I’d like to head towards actual understanding of embodied energy, cruelty, etc per unit of useful nutrition in specific meal plans.

Nut bags (no giggling please!) are also super useful for getting the final mouthfeel correct. I usually do oat milk and keep it on hand for my tea.

I'm told making oat milk is similarly simple. That one is tempting because the ingredients are so cheap.

> I'm told making oat milk is similarly simple.

The oat milk you get in a latte only tastes the way it does because it has oil and emulsifiers in it. If you just stick oats in a soy milk maker it's not going to come out the same way.

Commercial oat milk tends to have far more protein than almond milk too. Almond milk has almost none. Soy has the most.

(Although homemade almond milk would seem to have a lot more than boxed. 1.5 cups of almonds to 3 cups water is 7g protein per cup. Close to soy milk. Whereas commercial almond milk has more like 1g per serving)

What about hemp milk? I haven’t tried it yet.

I can only assume that it’s not ok to grow hemp in every state(USA)

I’ve seen hemp milk also in the middle range of protein, ~3-4g per cup, similar to oat milks.

Yes, I did a cooking course in Thailand and they showed us how to make coconut milk by hand - it really was amazing how quickly the water went unctuous, creamy and thick as you massaged grated Coconut into water. Best coconut milk I've ever had without a doubt.

The other part is you will also have almonds to use for other purposes, like eating them raw or finding a recipe to make roasted almonds with spices you like or...

The almond meal can be used as a flour after its oven dried.

I also use it as a body scrub. It’s too abrasive for a face scrub.

I wonder if pigs or chickens would eat them...why waste?

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