Greek Yogurt’s Dark Side
modernfarmer.com
modernfarmer.com
If we were to address this seriously we would have to ask: What do they do with the strained byproduct? The article doesn't seem to give any thought to the countries that already consume a lot of labneh.
My (Lebanese) grandmother used to make it by hanging a cloth above the sink, so her solution was merely down the drain.
edit: Woah! Sorry, I don't mean to imply that it isn't a problem. I mean to imply that many other countries may consume as much per capita as the US, but if lots of it is home-made, the waste problem might not be as visible, even if it is just as real.
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> one expert calls a “dead sea,”
The proper term for oxygen-deprived waters is actually "dead zone", to reduce confusion with the (merely very saline) Dead Sea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology)
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I found a paper that I think is much more interesting than the posted article:
Utilization of Labneh Whey Lactose Hydrolyzed Syrup in Baking and Confectionery, from the Pakistan Journal of Nutrition
Which is exactly what companies would do, on an industrial scale, if it weren't illegal. But in a sense what your grandmother does is wrong. Even if we assume that there is no inherent value to healthy oceans and rivers, it robs, in nickles and dimes, fisherman whose catches are affected by the acid in household wastewater. Your grandmother saves a few cents on proper disposal while costing other people a few cents to deal with the problem she created.
2. Acid whey is likely to be completely harmless in small amounts, and is certainly less of an issue than many things going down the drain like soap.
Acid whey is not a pollutant. It's something you don't want high concentrations of, but low concentrations can be literally harmless. And it doesn't build up over time.
Not everything is a tragedy of the commons.
Of course the whey is not the pollutant, it's the acids in it. Low concentrations of anything are harmless.
That is a true and useless statement. By the same token high concentrations of anything are harmful but nobody is going to call water a pollutant. The question is about why and how something is harmful and whether it builds up. First off, why are you saying the acid is the problem? From my reading, talking about decomposition sapping oxygen, it sounds like it's the sugar and the fact that it's a food. And food isn't a pollutant. You leave it alone, it rots, nobody is harmed unless you dump large amounts of it in one spot. Now let's contrast with an actual pollutant like smoke. A whole lot of people emitting small amounts of smoke does build up, and it lingers. It causes direct harmful effects.
If the problem is acidity, throw in some chemical base. But the main issue seems to be that's organic matter that ends up being consumed by bacteria
"The solution to pollution is dilution."!
"Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law."
It's reasonable to hold large commercial operations to stricter standards. I doubt that any homemade byproducts are disposed of "properly," but the impact of homemade Greek yogurt must be a tiny fraction of the commercial impact, and I don't think anyone is prepared to regulate what individuals do with milk after they buy it.
In my case, it's easy: All the 'stuff' from the kitchen or bathrooms flows through big, white plastic pipes to a concrete tank buried in my back yard. Out of the tank are some tube, tile, rock or whatever ways for the water to flow. Done. I never see the stuff again. The water from the tank adds water and plant nutrients to my backyard.
It's all the courtesy of some wonderful 'bugs': Once I had a sore on my foot, applied some Wal-Mart triple antibiotic cream, washed my socks, and a few days later way in the back of my backyard saw 'stuff' bubbling up, stuff I didn't want to see again! Sure: That Wal-Mart stuff was POWERFUL and sterilized my septic tank! Solution? Sure: There's a box, Rid-X or some such, can buy at the grocery store. The box has some dry beads with no odor. So, flush the beads and, presto, the septic tank is working again.
For milk, I've poured old, sour milk down the kitchen sink with no evidence of a problem.
Net, for a lot of disposal, not a problem.
The interests that fund these groups are rich NYC types who are modern day land barons, buying up defunct farmland and building vast landholdings. Things that make farm business difficult are good for these people.
I literally can't see how you found the article sensationalist. It's practically a textbook example of proper journalism.
To add more my family is of Greek and Turkish heritage, I live in NYC and make my own yoghurt (super easy)... I also strain a batch. The water that gets strained you can drink, in fact, its actually the same water that remains in yoghurt when you take a deep scoop and leave higher ground yoghurt relative to the remainder.
Yoghurt has a Ph level of around 4.5-5.0 making it low acidic (for comparison orange juice has a ph of 3.5). This article refers to it as acid whey and makes it sound as if its hydrochloric acid. In all honestly there are much more serious problems to the environment than yoghurt water. How about when excess or spoiled OJ is dumped in Florida? By default its ph is an order more acidic so the impact should be too...
Plus yogurt water is drinkable and is actually good for you (proof by induction).
The article specifically explains why acid whey is harmful to the environment - it's decomposition robs streams and rivers of oxygen and kills fish.
The point is that your personal experience making a small amount of yoghurt at home does not make you an expert when it comes to large scale production and the problems resulting from the waste produced.
"roughly" is a pretty general term when there is an order difference. The difference between 4.5 and 3 is pretty significant. Unless they actually tested the Ph and publish the number in the article they should not be making claims as "roughly".
>The point is that your personal experience making a small amount of yoghurt at home does not make you an expert when it comes to large scale production and the problems resulting from the waste produced.
>The article specifically explains why acid whey is harmful to the environment - it's decomposition robs streams and rivers of oxygen and kills fish.
yes that is evident.
my point was that there are much more harmful things going into rivers and oceans rather than yoghurt juice.
Suppose greek yogurt hadn't taken off in the US & remained a niche product for some health-freaks, then Dannon & Chobani would also throw it down the drain & we'd be none the wiser. The product has taken off in a way no one imagined. At the supermarkets, I see not just athletes but positively obese masses loading up on greek yogurt in some mistaken belief that it can compensate for their other excesses with soda pop & candy. Greek yogurt sells out even after they price it at $6! Clearly, we need an industrial solution to get rid of the byproduct, if we are going to manufacture the damn thing on an industrial scale.
=
Candy.
But I just googled '0% fat greek yogurt ingredients' and the top four brands (Fage, Total, Liberté and Chobani) contain only skimmed milk and bacterial cultures.
Same with the brand I use here in Catalonia.
I'm glad, for your sake, that I was wrong here.
I doubt you'd be okay with being mugged just because I also sold your shoes and organs.
Another problem with gelatin in your food is that it's empty filler, used only because having already killed the animal it's nearly free. You pay for yogurt and get worthless hoof squeezings.
And for the record, as radio4fan said, greek yoghurt doesn't contain gelatin anyway, at least in the UK (where I am).
Praying over it, or cleaning your plate, is irrelevant to the animal.
If you were being pragmatic you wouldn't have brought up the animal, just money.
But I'm not trying to change your mind here, just offering up an alternative perspective.
But you're postulating the murderer gets my organs.
That's insult to injury. If I was an animal I'd want you to choke on me, not eat your fill and use my remains for odd jobs.
In an effort to substitute something more nutritious and dense, I was considering trying the Greek yogurt breakfast approach for a few weeks based on some Cleveland Clinic advice I read about better breakfast habits--I don't have time to make omelettes in the morning.
I'm going to be buying this stuff at the grocery store. What am I looking for? I don't like overly sweetened stuff and usually don't like fruit/yogurt. I'm also looking for the real thing. Not any non-fat crap. May add my own granola if I find it too boring over time. I've seen some that comes with honey. Are there any good "common" brands I should look for beyond reading labels? Sounds like you've looked into this and I would appreciate your and anyone else's advice before I hit the store this weekend.
I just get the normal kind, I don't like low-fat or non-fat versions of pretty much anything. I get store brand granola for $2-3 a box to put on it, and will occasionally add a tiny bit of honey if I feel like something faintly sweetened.
- 1.1 cup of plain greek yogurt (brand doesn't matter for me, I just make sure that it has only milk and bacteria),
- 1 oz of granola (currently it's Pumpkin Flax Granola from Costco),
- 5 oz of fresh berries.
- 1 cup of milk or juice.
Get's me about 500 Cal with 30 g of protein. And I actually like this stuff. But I am big on yogurts, had it for breakfast every day for last 20 years.
Also, I don't really care about fat levels. 0% fat is Ok for me as long as they don't substitute it with some crap.
(I'm only justifying my own habits, mind you -- when I'm not eating it with dinner, I have a giant dollop of sour cherry jam that's going in.)
If you were to put a small dollop of jam on 1 cup of yogurt, then that'd be comparable to putting 150 actual raspberries in, at which point you'd definitely have more raspberries than yogurt to the point of hilarity/incredulity.
My grandmother had a seizure and was rushed to the hospital. I happened to be in the area and went to see her. When I got there, she was conscious but catatonic. I said hello to her, but she stared straight ahead, unresponsive. Her blood sugar had dropped really low, so the nurse brought in a cup of orange juice. She drank about half of it - maybe 4 oz. The nurse put the cup down, and a few seconds later my grandmother turned, looked at me, and said, "Hi Nick, what are you doing here?" I'm not trying to exaggerate, but it was like someone flipped a switch. I was amazed at how fast the sugar absorbed into her bloodstream. So I guess the point of my story is that you shouldn't underestimate the power of the sugar in an 8 oz. glass of orange juice.
[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-204_162-673229.html
[2] http://healthland.time.com/2009/08/07/calorie-counter-fruit-...
When I discovered real, nonsweetened yogurt, I was mad that I'd been missing out all these years. There's so damn much of the sugared crap in the yogurt aisle that I never even realized that it didn't taste like that normally.
I had no idea that the obesity epidemic could be solved by taking away soda pop and candy! Surely some nutritionist here is wondering, "why didn't I think of that?!"
But, you do bring up a good point - what does the rest of the world do with their excess acidic whey? Is it produced anywhere else in the world at industrial scales?
Modern Farmer is doing some interesting work in the intersection between farming and how we're re-conceptualizing food in the last decade.
It presents the issue as if it's a sudden surprise problem, when in fact there are established markets for whey and whey derivatives. The global market for whey protein is worth $3.8bn. To call whey (even relatively poor quality whey) "waste" is ludicrous - it's a byproduct with an established commercial value. Acid whey requires more processing than sweet whey, but it's an established and well-understood problem for the dairy industry.
The problem for the yoghurt producer is simply that liquid whey is right at the bottom of the value chain - it requires a great deal of processing to become $8/kg whey protein concentrate or $12/kg whey protein isolate. Yoghurt manufacturers may be extremely keen to move up the value chain and extract more profit from their whey byproducts, but there's no great market failure occurring here.
milk produced by cows -> sell to cheese factory
whey the factory returned back -> feed to pigs, chicken, turkey
In particular, as anyone in the U.S. who reads food labels knows, whey is a very common ingredient in processed foods. So what's the problem? A partial answer:
> The concept is roughly modeled on the success that cheese-makers have had selling products derived from their own byproduct — sweet whey. Sweet whey is more valuable and easier to handle than acid whey, as it has a lot more protein, and is easier to dry because it isn’t as acidic as Greek yogurt whey. Cheese-makers have developed a lucrative business selling whey protein for use in body-building supplements and as a food ingredient. And Greek yogurt makers are eager to follow suit.
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EDIT: Another comment.
> Rejman’s workers take the shipments and try to find uses for the whey: mix it with silage to feed to the farm’s 3,300 cows; ....
Wouldn't most adult cattle be lactose-intolerant? (As human adults were until that wacky lactase-persistence mutation hit parts of Europe & Africa.) Adding whey to feed for adult cattle sounds to me like a good way to make cattle sick. OTOH, surely farmers would have figured this out.
Can anyone explain this?
It's also going to be a relatively small proportion of the feed.
It’s also sort of like feeding your cows candy bars — they like it, but shouldn’t eat too much or it upsets their digestive system.The problem with liquids like this that use up oxygen when you dump them in water is that they use up all the oxygen when you dump them in the pond. Dump them in a place with plenty of water and they find all the oxygen they need and happily degrade without killing all your fish.
Back in my Environmental Engineer days, I worked on a study of Ethylene Glycol (the stuff they use do de-ice airplanes), and how it affected the local wetlands. The worry wasn't that it would get into the waterways. There's no stopping that if you spray thousands of gallons of it onto a runway. The worry was that those local waterways wouldn't disperse it fast enough for it to harmlessly degrade into weetabix and rainbows (or whatever similarly neutral stuff it turns into when you add water and oxygen to it) before it affected the critters in the pond.
So it seems like a nice solution to this, that definitely won't fly if you tell anybody with an easy sense of environmental outrage and a disinclination to read a chemistry book, would be to load up a big boat full of it, steam well out to sea, and open the cork.
Replace water with acidic whey and throw some baking soda in to produce CO2 to leaven dough. You'll get more tasty biscuit with proteins and minerals. You'll probably need to remove lactose, tho.
Gives it a wonderful tangy flavour.
In ancient Indian records, the combination of yogurt and honey is called "the food of the gods".[17] Persian traditions hold that "Abraham owed his fecundity and longevity to the regular ingestion of yogurt".[18]
The oldest writings mentioning yogurt are attributed to Pliny the Elder, who remarked that certain "barbarous nations" knew how "to thicken the milk into a substance with an agreeable acidity".[19] The use of yogurt by medieval Turks is recorded in the books Diwan Lughat al-Turk by Mahmud Kashgari and Kutadgu Bilig by Yusuf Has Hajib written in the 11th century.[20][21] Both texts mention the word "yogurt" in different sections and describe its use by nomadic Turks.[20][21] The earliest yogurts were probably spontaneously fermented by wild bacteria in goat skin bags.[22]
In the 90s they had so much of this stuff and it was really expensive to store and not much could be done with it, by then they discovered it could be used to coat the glass exterior of entire skyscrapers to reduce glare, and to make solar panels, and many other things. I always think of this story when I hear about byproduct management problems, and hope they'll find a commercial solution - they just might invent something new and awesome out of necessity.
The topic of fermentation is super interesting. I can throng lay recommend to everyone o read Sandor Katz's "Art of Fermentation". It's a great work about the history, culture and basic workings of fermentation.
Afaik, it was indeed invented in order to find a use for this by-product.
It tastes "a bit weird, but pretty good" (that's also their slogan, and it's quite accurate IMO :) )
The most interesting use of it though is in sports drinks. They've managed to make the whey taste ok and still keep the drink healthy. I'm sure we will see this elsewhere.
Here is a white paper describing a fermentation process (pretty standard ethanol production, from the looks of it). http://nzic.org.nz/ChemProcesses/dairy/3H.pdf
And here is an excellent USDA review looking at a lot of the different solutions to this whey surplus: http://www.rurdev.usda.gov/rbs/pub/RR214.pdf
The water treatment industry is very aware of 'biologic oxygen demand' (BOD). Basically, yes, decomposing some whey in a lake will consume some oxygen from the lake. Consume too much oxygen and then will kill the fish. Sure. But that doesn't make the whey "toxic". Indeed, lots of things go into the streams, rivers, and lakes that consume oxygen. If don't consume too much oxygen, then likely fine. No problem (at least about oxygen). And, of course, what consumes the whey is biologic activity that might make the water better for plants, fish, etc.
Sure, go to a big city sewage processing plant. What do they do? Sure, bubble air through the dark liquid! Or, they follow the recipe, "Add air and stir."!
Net, the article looks like traditional newsie stuff -- claim the sky is falling and get eyeballs and ad revenue. Smelly bait for the ad hook. Make people feel guilty from their 'sins' of their consumption of thick yogurt and what they pour down their drains. Deliberate, confused, nonsense guilt trip. Bummer.
For over 20 years, I've poured lots of stuff down my kitchen drain. Too old, sour milk has been a common item. Much worse, when I feed canned cat food to my kitty cats, they often don't eat all of it, and, being smart little kitty cats, don't eat it at all after it becomes old and dry. So, then I have to clean out such food dishes for them. To do this I soak the dishes overnight in water with detergent, rinse the dishes, and flush the rest.
And I'm 'destroying the 100% all-natural, pure, pristine, precious, sensitive, delicate planet'? I don't think so! Instead all the 'stuff' from the kitchen and bathrooms goes through big, white plastic pipes to a big concrete tank sunk in my backyard. The tank has some 'bugs' that reduce essentially everything into clear water, some methane gas, and a tiny quantity of solids. The gas floats off; the water goes into the drain field in my backyard; and the solids accumulate. The tank has been working fine for over 20 years without cleaning. For the water, the backyard loves it. Net, no worries. So, I'm not destroying the planet! And I'm not guilty.
Since 2002, feta has been a protected designation of origin product in the European Union. According to the relevant EU legislation, only those cheeses produced in a traditional way in some areas of Greece (mainland and the island of Lesbos), and made from sheep milk, or from a mixture of sheep and goats’ milk (up to 30%) of the same area, may bear the name "feta".
And yogurt is a combination, once you add the sugar etc that is in the finished product.
What is your point anyway? How does being, or not being, a combination make any difference anyway?
Over here there's a syrupy-like product called Calpis. It's slightly acidic yet milky and sweet. As far as I remember, it is made at least partly from this byproduct. Of course it's a small step to the solution.
Another ten cents, if it is largely water based, what about letting the water evaporate? Or does the acid go with it?
I apologize for the unrelated thoughts.
Really, all of the solutions the come up with will work. None of really have a real scaling issue, but they do require capital and have lag-time, which apparently were not sufficiently considered.
The problem here isn't that 'oh, there's a river of this "toxic" waste that we don't know what to deal with'. The problem is 'oh, we've tripled our production without having a solid plan on waste disposal, and we don't want to pay more to truck this stuff to further farms'.
??? Nuclear power produces less waste than any other energy source on earth - including solar and wind. And coal produces more nuclear waste (by volume, not intensity) than nuclear power does.
It's actually a bigger problem than whey - there's no market to absorbe the waste output.
Say what??? That makes no sense. Do you really believe that, or did you typo?
Yes, nuclear power does need a heat dump, but the waste heat has only a local effect on the water in the close vicinity.
You understand that it doesn't really consume the water right (except for a small amount that evaporates)? It just dumps heat in it, then sends it downstream, which isn't great for fish, but it's not terrible either - the effects are minimal, and local only, by the time the water flows a bit downstream it has cooled off back to the normal temperature.
And you can use sea water, the salt doesn't effect the cooling ability, but I don't think there are any plants near coastlines.
They could run it through reverse osmosis, which is already commonly done in industrial scale. This would not get rid of the all the water, but just take it down 90% would be enough.
Half a million gallons is roughly 2 million liters, or 2 million kilograms of water. Assume air temperature of 20 degrees. To boil off the water, its going to take 4 kilojoules per kilogram per degree celcius.... so thats 640 GJ already. Ignore heat of vaporization.
Incident solar radiation at like ... 1000W per m^2. 12 hours -> 43200 seconds per day, so 1 m^2 receives 44MJ is a day... which means you need about 15000m^2 of surface area to evaporate off a day's worth of production in a day. Optimistically.
The 1000W solar radiation is also for the sun directly overhead without clouds, which obviously can't happen for 12 hours a day. I've found a source saying Bangkok gets something like 20MJ/m^2/day, and higher latitudes presumably have less. With those figures we're at 200000m^2 of evaporation area, and it's still optimistic (what about rain?).
The main thing you need is low humidity, and/or lots of wind.
Shipping whey makes more sense. It's heavy, but not as dirty or smelly or gloopy.
Yogurt (which is what the whey is the result of straining) is not just water and sugar, it contains a number of other things -- notably, lactic acid.
Whey protein is usually processed from whey that is a byproduct of cheesemaking; as the article notes, the acid whey from making Greek yogurt is much more acidic, and has much lower protein concentration; while it is probably possible to extract whey protein from it it is a much poorer source of it than the whey from cheesemaking (and given the apparently huge supply and the rather visible market for whey to supply the supplement, etc., industry, I suspect if it were even marginally economically viable for that use, we wouldn't have articles like the one here.)
Hell, you could market it as a miracle supplement.