Almonds also consume 15% of California's water. But California produces 80% of the world's almonds. We're talking about an order of magnitude difference in water consumption, almonds are far more efficient and beef is both far more wasteful and far more common.
Animal agriculture is wildly inefficient and honestly it's not surprising because you have to keep living moving animals around for it.
California agricultural water is so fucking cheap, you can buy foreign land, start a farm, grow a bunch of grass, and ship it over to your country.
And that's cheaper than just growing grass locally.
That's insane
Most problems California has are the same: Systems that were initially designed and built a hundred or more years ago to support a state of like a hundred people, and an utter refusal to update those agreements because it would slightly inconvenience some really wealthy farms.
Growing Almonds and Alfalfa in California would be fine if they paid market rates for the water, and would therefore be more conscientious about using it and not wasting it, and that would dramatically improve the water situation of California and upstream places.
But it's way cheaper to pay for people to run absurd narratives on Fox News to make it a culture war issue so that you never have to care.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aux22FHTFXQ
The situation is so fucked up. It's a war of the rich against the richer. Wealthy farm corporations all have lobbying groups, and instead of lobbying for a more free market distribution of water, where they could have all they want as long as they pay for it, they run political campaigns to ensure California never reforms it's water rights system and continues to die of thirst while giving away 90% of it's water for rates decided 100 years ago. All the political agitation about water in California is over an absolute minuscule fraction of the water distribution, because actually fixing the problem would mean these farms paying market rates for water, which they do not currently do.
A microcosm of the US problem basically.
No one wants to be reminded that their 4 oz burger they had for lunch used 460 gallons of water to produce.
Not exactly the same, but can I interest you in a caramel-waffle-oat-milk latte?
The name "almond milk" has been used since at least the 1500s.
While almond milk is an incomplete substitute for bovine mammary secretions, it is so much closer than candy corn that it has been used as a substitute for the last 800 or so years, and shared the "milk"-ness in the name before we had an English language:
The word “milk” has been used since around 1200 AD to refer to plant juices.
This makes this use of the word older than English people spelling the thing chickens lay as "eggs" rather than "eyren": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ5znvym68k
The Romans called lettuce "lactūca", derived from lac (“milk”), because of the milky fluid in its stalks: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lettuce
Similar examples abound.
For example, I grew up in the UK, where a standard Christmas seasonal food is the "mince pie", which is filled with "mincemeat". While this can be (and traditionally was) done with meat derivatives, in practice those sold in my lifetime have been almost entirely vegetarian. The etymology being when "meat" was the broad concept of food in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincemeat
Further examples of this: today we speak of the "flesh" and "skin" of an apple.
Personally, I don't like almond milk. But denying that something which got "milk" in its name due to it's use as a milk-like-thing, before our language evolved from cross-breeding medieval German with medieval French, to argue against someone who said "Insofar as it is used for milk", is a very small nit to be picking.
Candy corn in my coffee wouldn't taste anywhere near as good