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Comment by goodroot | Hacker News Reader

Kicked dairy about a decade ago. I'm grateful for oat milk.

Also, one of the very, very many examples of strong, necessary, and useful collaboration between Canada and the United States.

Happy Fourth of July, neighbours down south. I'm eager to be buds again.

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I'm not big into vegetarian substitutes but oatmilk is legitimately delicious. It's good for lattes, cereal, whatever. I guess maybe not good for baking?

Yup. I don't normally eat vegan but, if I'm drinking a latte, it's gonna be oatmilk.

The thing that gets me is that the price of oat milk is so completely divorced from what it cost to produce. It's absolutely wild that oat milk, made with one of the cheapest bulk grains, is as expensive as almond milk, made with an expensive nut.

You can easily make it yourself.

Almondmilk is mostly water and thickeners. A typical 32-oz carton uses around 12 almonds. You can tell by the protein content of all of these altmilks how cheap they actually are to make.

The only exception is soymilk which does actually have a lot of protein and also has a really long tradition. People have been making soymilk for over 2,000 years. American grocery store soymilk is quite different but you can actually go to an Asian grocery store and still find soymilk that has a single ingredient.

> grocery store soymilk is quite different

Here in Europe we can fin the single ingredients soy milk if you look down the shelf: the cheapest brand and groceries have no additives while the fanciest ones are full of thickeners and various sugars. I recommend the store’ brand from Carrefour, Lidl and Leclerc.

I will say the quality of single-ingredient soymilk varies greatly. There's definitely a skill involved. I try a lot of soymilks and the best soymilk I've ever had and the worst have both been single-ingredient

For baking: depends on the recipe. In one recipe of a sort of muffin style bread that uses egg to rise (no baking powder, yeast, etc), oat milk makes it not rise properly and you get dense bricks instead. Other recipes have been fine. YMMV.

(Though, I quite like the non-homogenized full fat milk with bits of thick cream floating on top too. Oat milk, while pretty good, got nothing on that. Perfect on the porridge for breakfast.)

I am a bit surprised that oat milk is as popular as it is, given that, nutritionally, it's a very poor substitute for dairy as it's mostly just more sugar and carbs with very little protein.

In terms of non-dairy milk, soy milk is basically the only one that gets close to the nutritional value of dairy (and a lot of the fear mongering about endocrine effects of soy are just wrong). Even almond milk usually only has a teeny amount of actual almonds in it, as it's primarily just added water and sugar.

> and a lot of the fear mongering about endocrine effects of soy are just wrong

Farmed cow's milk contains enough oestrogens, progestogens, etc. that academics have argued (e.g. in the 00s) over the extent to which cow milk consumption affects human health. The macho crowd seem to think that it's implicitly obvious that the juice of a bean is more feminising than the mammary secretions of calved female mammals, from a lineage selectively bred to have massive udders. I don't understand this, but I do find it very funny. (From a distance. I like having teeth.)

That said, if there were a significant and obvious effect on humans from dairy (or substitutes), academics probably wouldn't have argued about it for so long.

> The macho crowd seem to think that it's implicitly obvious that the juice of a bean is more feminising

I’m not sure that’s true. But they’ve heard that soy milk has phytoestrogens in it, and that Asians tend to be smaller than Americans. From there it’s just math: 1+1 = 11

The problem is not that milk is a mammary secretion. After all, boys and girls both drink mother’s milk!

The problem is dairy practices that keep cows pregnant for 9 months out of the year, every year, and milk them for 10-11 months out of the year, every year. !!

When you operate a dairy on a more natural rhythm you don’t get the elevated pregnancy hormones in the milk.

This is one of the reasons why goat milk is healthier, because they don’t do the same to goats.

Source: I’m a farmer

I drink milk because a) I prefer flat whites to espressos and b) to make my cornflakes wet. In both cases I prefer oat milk and in neither cases do I care about nutrition. I’m guessing that’s the reason.

Makes sense. For me it was less about the health aspects of nutrition than the fact that I just feel a lot less sated when I drink protein-devoid plant milks. Corn flakes with oat milk is basically a big bowl of sugar with a little bit of oil and some vitamins sprayed on - it's not like it's a ton better with cow's milk but I'm not craving a "second breakfast" an hour later like I do if I have a breakfast that's primarily only carbs.

Soy milk actually has as much protein as dairy and less sugar. It has even more protein if you get the traditional kind. You can often find soymilk with a single ingredient at an Asian grocery store.

Soy milk is wildly superior to oat milk - I say as a vegan attempting to hit my nutrition targets. Oat milk is essentially flavoured water

I'd even say it's superior to cow milk altogether.

Not if it causes contact allergies with your mouth, as soy milk does for me. Same with coconut milk. I have to stick to oat, almond or animal milk. (Goat milk tastes pretty good too by the way.)

And non-homogenized full fat milk is delicious.

I drank cow’s milk for taste, not for health or nutritional reasons. It’s the same for oat milk.

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