Like an estimated two-thirds of the worldās population, I donāt digest lactose well, which makes the occasional latte an especially pricey proposition. So it was a pleasant surprise when, shortly after moving to San Francisco, I ordered a drink at Blue Bottle Coffee and didnāt have to askāor pay extraāfor a milk alternative. Since 2022, the once Oakland-based, now NestlĆ©-owned cafe chain has defaulted to oat milk, both to cut carbon emissions and because lots of its affluent-tending customers were already choosing it as their go-to.
Plant-based milks, a multibillion-dollar global market, arenāt just good for the lactose intolerant: Theyāre also better for the climate. Dairy cows belch a lot of methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide; they contribute at least 7 percent of US methane output, the equivalent emissions of 10 million cars. Cattle need a lot of room to graze, too: Plant-based milks use about a tenth as much land to produce the same quantity of milk. And it takes almost a thousand gallons of water to manufacture a gallon of dairy milkāfour times the water cost of alt-milk from oats or soy.
But if climate concerns push us toward the alt-milk aisle, dairy still has price on its side. Even though plant-based milks are generally much less resource-intensive, theyāre often more expensive. Walk into any Starbucks, and youāll likely pay around 70 cents extra for nondairy options.
. Dairyās affordability edge, explains MarĆa Mascaraque, an analyst at market research firm Euromonitor International, relies on the industryās ability to produce āat larger volumes, which drives down the cost per carton.ā American demand for milk alternatives, though expected to grow by 10 percent a year through 2030, canāt beat those economies of scale. (Globally, alt-milks arenāt new on the sceneācoconut milk is even mentioned in the Sanskrit epic MahÄbhÄrata, which is thousands of years old.)
What else contributes to cow milkās dominance? Dairy farmers are āpolitical favorites,ā says Daniel Sumner, a University of California, Davis, agricultural economist. In addition to support like the āDairy Checkoff,ā a joint government-industry program to promote milk products (including the āGot Milk?ā campaign), theyāve long raked in direct subsidies currently worth around $1 billion a year.
Big Milk fights hard to maintain those benefits, spending more than $7 million a year on lobbying. That might help explain why the US Department of Agriculture has talked around the climate virtues of meat and dairy alternatives, refusing to factor sustainability into its dietary guidelinesāand why it has featured content, such as a 2013 article by thenāAgriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, trumpeting the dairy industry as āleading the way in sustainable innovation.ā
But the USDA doesnāt directly support plant-based milk. It does subsidize some alt-milk ingredientsāsoybean producers, like dairy, net close to $1 billion a year on average, but that crop largely goes to feeding meat- and dairy-producing livestock and extracting oil. A 2021 report by industry analysts Mintec Limited and Frost Procurement Adventurer also notes that, while the inputs for dairy (such as cattle feed) for dairy are a little more expensive than typical plant-milk ingredients, plant alternatives face higher manufacturing costs. Alt-milk makers, Sumner says, may also have thinner profit margins: Their āstrategy for growth is advertisement and promotion and publicity,ā which isnāt cheap.
Starbucks, though, does benefit from economies of scale. In Europe, the company is slowly dropping premiums for alt-milks, a move it attributes to wanting to lower corporate emissions. āMarket-level conditions allow us to move more quicklyā than other companies, a spokesperson for the coffee giant told me, but didnāt say if or when the price drop would happen elsewhere.
In the United States, meanwhile, itās a waiting game to see whether the government or corporations drive down alt-milk costs. Currently, Sumner says, plant-based milk producers operate under an assumption that āprice isnāt the main thingā for their buyersāas long as enough privileged consumers will pay up, alt-milk can fill a premium niche. But itās going to take a bigger market than that to make real progress in curbing emissions from food.
Why? Because all the animal herders will still produce lots of meat at a loss and then just burn everything no one wants to eat?
i donāt believe the methodology used to calculate emissions from animal agriculture is appropriate: every examination iāve done has attributed emissions to animals that are actually conservation, like feeding cattle cottonseed and then attributing the impacts of cotton grown for textiles to cattle.
But then you doubt the number and not the general effect of reducing carbon emissions by switching to a plant-based diet, right? Because it is pretty obvious, that growing plants and then feeding those plants to animals is way more inefficient than eating the plants without extra steps.
a lot of what is fed to animals are parts of plants that people canāt or wonāt eat. there may be some reduction but i donāt believe it can be anywhere near 70%
Do you have any sources on hand? Itās hard to google for this stuff without running into sites by PETA etc, which are too biased for my taste.
i donāt know of any broad surveys across crop categories but iām pretty familiar with soy
https://ourworldindata.org/soy
you can see that 17% of all soybeans becomes oil. but a soybean is only about 20% oil altogether. in order to extract that much oil, we must press about 85% of the global crop of soybeans. the vast majority if the soy fed to livestock is the industrial waste from that process. you can see in that chart itās called āsoy cakeā or āsoy mealā.
elsewhere in this thread i mentioned cottonseed.
Iāve already told you that we can produce plant-based meat or soy protein for other uses from that, which you conceded, and you still call it āindustrial wasteā. Why are you knowingly spreading misinformation?
not only can we do that: we DO that. but there frankly isnāt enough human use for that, so it would be wasted if we didnāt feed it to animals.
If the rest of the plant would be wasted, it would be more economical to just grow another plant thatās more efficient for oil production (canola, sunflower), not soybeans which are incidentally the crop highest in protein.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/area-per-tonne-oil
Itās not grown in such quantities because itās essential but simply because thereās demand for the extra protein from factory farms right now.
i am doing no such thing. iām simply pointing out your lies.
But then humans can also eat that soy meal to get their proteins. Itās pretty tasty, I eat it regularly.
people do eat soy meal but they eat very little of the amount produced. if the vast majority of it werenāt fed to livestock it would just be waste.
We are talking about a switch to a predominantly vegan diet. People need to get the protein they got from meat from somewhere else.