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
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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!