America’s largest milk producer files for bankruptcy

Really, just, not. You can spell it either way; if you're writing for (or as) an editor, or just for the affectation of knowing editor jargon, "lede"; if in conversational English, "lead".

(I write "lede" all the time, and it is totally an affectation).

One could be construed as “lead” as in the element/metal.

Therefore lede is a more clear and appropriate though somewhat less widely-understood word.

The effect of the market ordering is more interesting than I anticipated.

On one hand, this is encouraging decentralization of milk production. Which at first sounds neat.

But that probably isnt more efficient; the market is distorted.

That has not been my experience at all. Trader Joe's, for one, has sold full-fat Greek yogurt for at least ten years. It's in a blue and white container. Thicker than sour cream and will probably kill me at 50, but damn good!

Fage has a full fat variety that is stocked in just about every grocery store: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fage

I suggest checking "Nancy's" dairy line, made in Oregon.

Certain retailers stock only what sells in this highest volume which is usually the nonfat variety, costco for example.

I started making my own full fat greek yogurt, it's pretty easy.

I believe it's to keep the calorie under 150. Cabot is at 300 calories per serving, whereas the low-fat to 2% ones are typically around 120 calories.

It's saying plant-based milks are a less-sugary alternative. That doesn't imply that cow milk has added sugar, just that it has more sugar naturally than e.g. oat or soy milk

This is still prevalent in small Indian towns and villages. There is a stash of cows nearby and he chooses a cow, brings it to the residence, you provide your wide-container/pail and he milks the cow at your veranda. Milk is served at only one time - early morning.

You still need to boil the milk for several minutes to kill all bacteria.

I don't blame you for being suspicious about added sugar. It's an interesting exercise to look at the ingredients of "peanut butter" while grocery shopping in the United States.

[citation needed]

I've never seen this, or heard of it happening. (Except chocolate or strawberry milk.)

Yes, but try to stay specific to this situation. How is Walmart obligated to buy milk from one specific supplier forever?

You seem to want to go wide with this, but the question isn't a generic one; it's very particular to Walmart, milk, and the claim that Walmart is somehow supposed to buy from Dean Foods, or else they're acting immorally.

“Omnivore”, please.

Almond milk requires a lot of water to produce but it still take significantly less water to produce than cow milk. Even if you take into account the potential for meat (which is ridiculous because milling cows aren't typical steaks), the amount water used to sustain a cow (through drinking and watering plants) is huge.

If your options are cow vs almond and you want to choose the lesser of evils and only care about the negatives of the almond (water) it's still less evil than cow milk.

It’s as much milk as turkey bacon is bacon.

Food is labeled based on its culinary classification. Something can be culinarily milk without coming out of a teat.

Plant milks have been called milks for centuries at this point. It's probably okay.

“Milk” is used for many kinds of suspension liquids. Milk of Magnesia did not come from a magnesium cow.

Dates are great in moderation. Everything is. You can say the same thing about bananas or water melons or any melon.

Dates have potassium, fiber, and make anything taste great. But dates aren’t the end all fruit for all your nutrient needs. Nutrition facts and moderation is the key.

Maybe OP wanted the flavor from dates, as well as the sugar.

dates, like other fruit, contain sugar in proportion to dietary fiber which helps moderate intake by making you full. Yes, that effect is probably quite negligible in this application but it's certainly not a harmful rule of thumb to use whole fruits instead of refined sugar where sensible.

This is actually pretty bad disinformation considering the overwhelming scientific evidence indicating that eating fruit is great for your diet.

A major point is that most fruit isn't sweet enough to dramatically sweeten a product. Most people would over-sweeten their food significantly compared to using fruit. It is in fact difficult to over consume fruit from a sugar perspective, while it is comparatively trivial to over consume sugar from added refined sources.

Another benefit to fruit is that instead of being pure sugar like sugar, there are a wide variety of other more complex carbohydrates

I'll point out that fruit consumption is inversely correlated with obesity [0] while sugar consumption is positively correlated with it [1]

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5084020/

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23594708

Fruit and vegetable intake is also positively correlated with basically reduction in all cause mortality but specifically heart disease and cancer https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/46/3/1029/3039477

There is more to fruit than an overly reductive idea of "sugar + fiber" and there are a lot of compounds in there from vitamins and minerals to other things. The science is clearly showing us that fruit is much more healthy for us than refined sugar, because of a variety of things including how much less sugar there is in most fruit compared to foods with added refined sugars.

The only well studied and clinically developed diet for people with serious irritable bowel diseases, known as FODMAP[1] focuses exclusively on minimizing specific types of sugar and carbohydrates. For a severely compromised digestive system, table sugar is likely recommended over dates as a sweetener because they are likely to contain 'free fructose' which may be fine or even better for normal digestive systems since it has lower glycemic index than glucose, but it is found to be complicating for people with serious digestion problems. This goes to show dietary sugar is not metabolically simple or equivalent as commonly thought.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5952847/

I'm not saying this is the case, but some fruits and vegetables have fiber that is sweet. And potentially date could act as a better emulsifier than sugar. I know people use honey and syrup over sugar in some cases -- not for the sweetness, but for the properties.

I like to blend dates in my protein shake. I think -- just like if you added blue berries or strawberries -- it gives a distinct flavor to the drink.

I'm not sure if that's desired for the oat milk or not. I'd think people would want their milk to be somewhat plain.

Why would you assume drinking milk from a different order of mammal is good for you? And why would you assume that because we have been consuming an item for millennia that it is good for you?

Of all mammals, only humans drink milk into adolescence/adulthood. And only a few of them actually do it regularly.

The problem is that orthorexics are enacting punitive policies that make it harder to buy cheaper food that is perfectly fine to consume.

You could try free roaming chicken eggs if you do not prefer fish or mushrooms. The yolk contains quite some vitamin D.

See refurb's sibling comment and my reply. They have the actual source.

Ok, I admit, saying it gets destroyed was a poor choice of words. But from your article:

>> Although milk as it comes from the cow is a poor source of vitamin D, fortified milk is considered an excellent source, especially because of its calcium content. Other foods considered good dietary sources of vitamin D are relatively rare but do include fatty fish, eggs and liver. Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin.

As for the "destroyed" part of my comment, I meant that both it and vitamin A are fat soluble. So when you "skim" the milk, you lose lots of the vitamins. You lose so much, that vitamin A has to be re-added. Again from your article:

>> As skim and lower fat milks became popular, the reduction of vitamin A levels with fat reduction became an issue since whole milk was considered a good source of vitamin A.

TL;DR - I should've said vitamin A but got lazy/greedy. Vitamin D, while subject to the same problem as vitamin A, is added as refurb explains.

Plants lack nerves or a central nervous system or the ability to directly react to their circumstances, at somepoint you have to draw a line somewhere and most draw the line there. Regardless, if you really believe that plants feel pain, you're killing a lot more of them by raising animals for dairy and meat.

I'm definitely not a farmer, but it is my understanding that for a cow to keep giving milk, it needs to give birth once a year. You cannot keep all those calves around, so they go to the slaughterhouse. That means that in an indirect way, the production of cow milk forces calves to be slaughtered.

It depends on where you place things on the moral scale.

For example for the cow to lactate, it needs to be inseminated. Every 4 years I think. When the calf is born it's taken away from the mother. Does a cow mother suffer emotionally from having their baby taken away?

Cows are sociable animals so a single cow would probably feel lonely?

I don't have the answers. It seems like research uncovers more and more human-like emotions associated to animals so it doesn't seem completely out of question. Humans also have a tendency to objectify things so they can shut off empathy.