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Comment by ReactiveJelly | Hacker News Reader

"As many look for dairy alternatives for ethical or health reasons, vegan cheeses have been on the rise."

And that's all they say about that. Nothing about animal rights, animal welfare, or government dairy subsidies. Legend has it that at one point the US government was paying 75% of the price of dairy.

I'm not sure how it is in the UK, but if you took that out here, vegan soymilk and dairy milk would cost the same. That bugs me. It's a free market except for isolationism, cronyism, and the need for "small farmers" to act as PR fronts. Occasionally there is a good regulation that does something useful.

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I think the argument goes that if you want dairy products to be available to everyone, and that the gov’t has a public health interest in that goal, then there has some minimum level of guaranteed demand or else dairy producers would collapse because they can’t really scale their production lock step with demand so the gov’t steps in to buy the excess and maybe finds a use for it.

So this is either a necessary evil to correct a weird market or insane gov’t subsidy depending on your perspective.

Dairy was a regional economic engine. Production in my neck of the woods (upstate ny) provided jobs in agriculture, processing and trucking, along with the downstream industries.

When laws changed and made the market national, huge producers were able to takeover the market and are in the process of putting everyone out of business. Yogurt in Trader Joe’s is shipped in from LA.

Consumer prices haven’t dropped. As big producers vertically integrate, prices are going up for many commodities.

> Yogurt in Trader Joe’s is shipped in from LA.

And Eugene, Oregon. TJ's French Village plain nonfat yogurt is Nancy's Yogurt from Springfield Creamery in Eugene (formerly in Springfield), run by the Kesey family.

https://nancysyogurt.com/our-creamery/

Both seem absurd 3,000+ away. As does the cup of Chobani I had at a hotel in Texas!

Under EU rules (the CAP, which uses a large part of the EU budget) basically every farm whether dairy or crop is subsidised. For many dairy farms in upland regions, crop farming isn't economically viable due to the terrain, so cows and sheep are farmed instead. Even then many farms are only viable due to the subsidies.

New Zealand farmers (who produce a lot of milk) have struggled with the level of subsidy the US and EU provide.

Im a New Zealander and it used to be a thing I’d read about and feel frustrated. However dairy farming trashes your land and waterways. Selling milk and milk powder is about the dumbest use of the land we could have come up with and it had caused massive harm.

The CAP is not just subsidies, it's regulation too - even under its arrangements, because of modern efficiency there is simply too much milk being produced at the European level. In some years, farmers are literally paid to throw it away.

This is because Europeans believe our agricultural peculiarities are worth protecting from the disruption of unbridled economic influences. Countries like France, Spain, or Italy, protect their milk so they can protect their cheese, so they can protect their recipes, so they can protect their food culture (and revenues) at large - a differentiator in the long term.

It's also a strategic play: if you're dependent on imports for your food, some foreign power has a lot of leverage over you in a trade war or worse, an actual war. So you spend money to keep production at home even though it might be more economically efficient to abandon those farms and import more of your food.

Some of the EU's subsidies go to "agricultural peculiarities" or small producers of niche traditional foods. That's fine, you're still propping up demand for the raw materials - that milk is just as good as any other if it comes to a crisis.

What is vegan cheese? Have folks reproduced milk proteins in the lab, or is it taste-and-texture replication?

Taste and texture 'similarity' using mostly nuts.

And lots of fat, often more than cheese.

And not a lot of similarity.

Why’s everything always nuts in vegan food? Surely there’s more options out there than nuts nuts nuts.

They're a really good source of protein, which is otherwise pretty scarce in fruit & veg. As cheese and milk are more or less defined by their proteins, nuts and legumes are pretty much the only viable alternatives.

I personally can't stand the stuff. The main selling point seems to be "it melts like cheese" but in my experience, it takes on a snotty texture. It'd probably help if I was a real vegan and didn't have alternatives...

It's typically made from seeds or nuts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vegan_cheese

So it's taste-and-texture replication. I don't even think it is aiming to perfectly replicate dairy cheese, as much as to be something that can be reasonably substituted for dairy cheese in the typical cases where it is used. It's analogous to how soy milk isn't meant to be indistinguishable from dairy milk but instead to be usable in place of dairy milk in coffee, cereal, etc.

> I don't even think it is aiming to perfectly replicate dairy cheese

It isn't, indeed. I've tried a whole bunch of different vegan cheeses, and while they sometimes call them "mozzarella", "camembert" or other dairy cheese names, they do not try to match the taste. It would be an obviously losing battle as the best they could do is to be as good, most probably and understandably falling short of that. They instead create new kinds of cheese-like products, sometimes taking inspiration from dary cheeses sometimes not, and the results are actually pretty good espectially considered how recent the art of vegan cheese is!

What I found out trying out more vegan food or vegan receipes is to stop looking at them as replacement of somehting and more like a novelty. Since I've done that everything taste much better to me because I'm trying the taste and not comparing it to anything.

> It's analogous to how soy milk isn't meant to be indistinguishable from dairy milk but instead to be usable in place of dairy milk in coffee, cereal, etc.

Unrelated, but why is it American's treat soy milk this way? American brands of soy milk are terrible, while Asian brands of soy milk can taste really good.

There actually is a company that has a microorganism-produced casein that's on the market and can be bought as vegan ice cream at Smitten in the Bay Area: https://www.perfectdayfoods.com/

Then there's the Real Vegan Cheese project in the East Bay, which isn't venture funded and therefor seems to be moving a bit more slowly: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/real-vegan-cheese#/

Vegan cheese is absolutely and totally vile

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