Milk, cheese and ice cream without the cow has entered the marketplace
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Fast forward some decades and now I find myself using oat or some nut milk in cereal and liking it. I try to lean vegan when I can to avoid inflammatory side affects. The funny thing is that now if I do indulge in dairy milk I go for whole again as if I was 11 years old.
In the other hand there are small quantities of non-skim milk in supermarkets so some people must be using it.
WATER, SUGAR, COCONUT OIL, CORN SYRUP, SUNFLOWER OIL, PECANS, NON-ANIMAL WHEY PROTEIN, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% MALTODEXTRIN, ...
I like the ones that are made out of oats, water, maybe a little salt.
90% of the oat milks on the market here in Aus, and 100% of the ones marked as “Barista Style” contain oil, usually sunflower.
I don’t think it needs it. It’s delicious ‘straight’.
The mere fact that Asian cultures consider western dairy use to be extreme does not say that much, the same is said in many western cultures about some aspects of Asian food cultures. Fortunately we live in a time when people in east and west can partake in varied food cultures so we get to have cheese fondue one day, char siu the next and gravlax (cured salmon) the day after.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum#/media/Fi...
See eg
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10749030/
> Consumption of oat milk for 5 weeks lowers serum cholesterol and LDL cholesterol in free-living men with moderate hypercholesterolemia
If you decide to like the stuff anyway you might as well make it at home instead of paying some greenwashing company far too much for watered-down porridge. Oat 'milk' is ~10% oats, ~3% fat (rape seed oil works fine with its neutral taste) and some salt for taste. You can make the stuff in a blender, just take some oats - breakfast type works fine - and blend it with the other ingredients. The main thing to watch out for is that you run the blender in short bursts since running it for a longer time produces too much heat in the mixture which leads to a slimy unappetising result. So, short bursts until the oats have been shredded to the desired (small) size. Use immediately or store for later use, you'll have to shake it just like you have to do with the commercial variety. Taste-wise there is not much difference, you can make it taste any way you want.
Convenience is a killer though :)
Posted elsewhere as well but we used cold water and very short bursts for blending with our vitamix, and still get sliminess. Any ideas?
I guarantee if you give it a few weeks it will become normal and enjoyable. It's like giving up sugar in tea or coffee, you soon find it normal and the old flavour slightly less desirable.
If I'm making a smoothie I use soy for the protein, but find it a little tool "plant" for other stuff.
Plant-milk brand Oatly has been told not to repeat some of its adverts, after complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) were upheld.
The ads, which used the slogan "Need help talking to dad about milk?", made unsubstantiated environmental claims, the ASA found.
I'm aware of the ongoing debate around the true environmental impact of milk alternatives to milk. My family were also dairy farmers until the late 90s when it became economically unviable in the UK without moving to an intensive barn kept model they refused to transition to. So I'm also aware of the economic impact on farmers over the last 30 years.
Very fond memories of going to watch the cows being milked with my grandfather.
Dietary choices are a personal thing, all the new options are only good for that (not withstanding misleading advertising).
I have some bad news about oat milk with regards to that as well.
https://www.jeffnobbs.com/posts/is-oatly-healthy
> A 12-ounce glass of oat milk (the amount in a medium latte) has about the same blood sugar impact as a 12-ounce can of Coke.
Please do be careful. I am not saying Oatly is necessarily worse than milk for you or even bad at all but this was a boring long existing brand taken over by a savvy CEO that turned the marketing up to eleven (gearing up towards an ipo) -- we would all obviously like milk alternatives that are both healthier and have lower carbon footprints and that desire is being exploited to the hilt.
When it comes to just flavor profile I'm not surprised there would be some disruption (good use-case for ice cream, a junk food), but there's no real sub for the animal protein (if you care about that). And in terms of calcium content the products are just fortified, so you're paying a premium for what might as well be a supplement.
I've tried a few yogurt alts that tasted alright, and the nutritional content seemed satisfactory fitting into my diet (though nothing for good for kefir yet). Of course I'm not keen to spend more on plants than I would for an animal product, and one wonders how green something can be when it includes coconut transported via cargo ships and highly refined ingredients.
His reply is good, especially this bit:
> Of course I'm not keen to spend more on plants than I would for an animal product, and one wonders how green something can be when it includes coconut transported via cargo ships and highly refined ingredients.
Further down thread I discuss Oatly and their misleading marketing claims. A healthy amount of skepticism towards magical new solutions is very much in order.
The methane thing is not true and has been debunked as I understand it.
> The most cut and dry benefit to alternatives is far and away animal welfare.
That is... very difficult to debate as it simply depends on where you are getting your milk from. It is certainly possible to produce milk with perfectly happy cows, if that is the main concern could just advocate and insist on that directly.
I think the issue is the way you phrased the question. The use of the word "imaginary" is dismissive. You are asking sensible questions and I agree scepticism is important for new things. But careful use of language so as not to dismiss people is also important so as not to alienate people during an important debate.
It's similar with how you replied to my comment with "please do be careful", you may mean it but it can come off as condescending.
Note that he wrote the word fake. It is a hypothetical fake milk. There was no dismissiveness intended.
> It's similar with how you replied to my comment with "please do be careful", you may mean it but it can come off as condescending.
I do in fact mean it. The whole point is that Oatly and other milk alternatives present themselves as healthier but simply replace one set of disadvantages with another and hide it in the fine print.
I will try to take your advice to heart but I do think folks just don't want to hear bad news anymore and shoot the messenger. I guess that in itself is part of the marketing trickery. :/
Anyway sorry if I am a bummer.
I see no difficulty in it. Alternatives give you 100% confidence of not having animal products in the production chain. The only thing to quibble is the degree to which animals might be harmed in commercial agriculture, which supplies the overwhelming majority of product in North America. Opinionated vegans and consumers in general have a different threshold and definition though (after all bleeding heart vegans would posit that even the "good" sources are harmful in some capacity).
Personally I don't think dairy cows have it that bad, and I'm pro-slaughter. But it's still clear that abstaining from those products gives you far more confidence about animal welfare.
> The methane thing is not true and has been debunked as I understand it.
It's true. The only carbon-neutral cow rearing is in the context of allowing cows to migrate to fertilize different lands. This is not the case in commercial agriculture.
Source: Land Lantbruk #5 2023-01-27 pp 20-21 (lantbruk.se - farmer's weekly in Sweden)
Methane emissions are also very important as pointed out by another commentor
Since you got 3 big industries to fight against:
* farmers that rely on cows
* milk brands that have deep pockets and has the government involved beyond regulation
* non-animal diary companies (probably the least hostile one)
Dairy-free faux-dairy products should market themselves for what they are instead of lying.
Hell, cows aren’t magic. Even “real milk” is just a collection of sugars, proteins, etc. If there’s no difference between the two then what’s the distinction?
4 : milk from a cow or other domestic animal (such as a goat)
also : food (such as ice cream, cheese, or yogurt) made primarily of or from milk
--------------
Dairy specifically means and implies a cow (or similar domestic animal) as the origin of the food product. Where it comes from is just as important as what it is, if not more.
Thus I reiterate: You can't have dairy with no cow.
Again, nobody is confused by terms like "coconut milk" or "almond milk".
The comments I replied to were discussing the likelihood of this stuff sharing the same floor area with dairy products.
We know much more about biology than we used to. Incomparably more. But what we know is still very little.
Replacing foods consumed for thousands of years with foods dreamed up in a lab is a fool's errand. We've already seen continual (and ONGOING) health disasters from industrialized foods.
On top of that, there's likely already a lot wrong even with "scientifically"-enhanced modern agriculture that's not processed (animal feed, monocultured crops, pesticide use, topsoil depletion etc. etc.)
We need to stop what we're doing and actually work with the ecologies we have to produce enough food for everyone. I suspect this latest push has a lot more to do with big capital players wanting to centralize food production and remove the dependencies on unpredictable inputs (animals) than any wide-eyed dream about saving the planet.
This is that. Dairy cows can’t “scale” to meet a population like ours that keeps growing. They’re enormously inefficient. Agriculture has always been an exercise in optimising to feed growing populations, like when farmers grafted different variations of plant/fruit together to create hybrids. At the time you’d have easily described that as creating a Frankenstein monster. Today we’re just using more advanced tools.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/us-population...
Bonus: the topsoil comes back. We stop polluting watersheds with pesticides. We have a healthier diet.
Seeking efficiency in the food supply is exactly the problem destroying the environment, human health, and will eventually lead to a systems collapse and famine.
It feels like real dairy is being listed as a necessary casualty to technological/industrial progress at scale and the solutions, such as those that you're introducing, disrupt this sort of progress and its intended benefits. This sort of frustrates me (the theoretical demise of real dairy). I'm picky about my dairy selection as is, but I don't find any comfort in fake dairy (I'm not referring plant, or oat, or nut milk per se, rather lab grown ingredients and anything else that is fermented, stabilized, etc.). I have my own gripes with the dairy industry, but the mere thought of synthetic alternatives becoming the norm irritates me.
How all of this is made to become appealing only upsets me further. I want to get off of this ride!
And then fruit and other juices, and even pulps and flours.
Agriculture is a major cause of environmental destruction and these technologies could reduce it's footprint very dramatically.
I don't prefer it over butter although this is largely a matter of taste, but more importantly IMO, even if it was touted as a healthy alternative to butter in the 70s-80s, today margarine has been shown not to really be better after all. It's not used much anymore by people less than 50 or so, in France.
I think modern margarine is probably better as it doesn't contain much transfats anymore, but in France the damage to its reputation has been done already.
I live in Belgium though and people still use margarine here, but as far as I can't tell it's mostly because they just call everything "butter" and don't know the difference between margarine or butter.
Movie theater butter has absolutely won over real butter in its niche. Pam and its contemporaries are also wildly popular over butter for pan cooking.
All things considered fake butter has got to be one of the most successful vegan alternatives since non-vegans will choose it over butter.
https://www.jeffnobbs.com/posts/death-by-vegetable-oil-what-...
I mean biotech technologies that are essentially artificial milk glands, producing something very close to 'real' milk, without cows.
Why grow a whole cow when we just want what the milk glands secrete, why grow a whole tree when we just want orange juice? Etc.
Lactaid is the primary brand, but there are plenty of store brands as well. Iirc, it’s created by treating regular enzymes to regular milk that break lactose down into simpler sugars.
It comes with maybe a 25-50% markup. Taste wise, it is a bit sweeter than regular milk, but otherwise indistinguishable. Oddly, it also lasts much longer than regular milk before going bad.