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Plant Milk Is Better For Us and the Climate. So Why Do We Subsidize Dairy?
(www.motherjones.com)
this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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politics
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How is it better for us? Most plant milks have no protein in them or a fraction of the protein of real milk. Not to mention plant milk often doesn’t taste great. Oat milk is the only one I find acceptable and even then I don’t prefer it to real milk.
Also, there are other dairy products like yogurt and cheese that you need real milk for.
We get most of our protein from sources other than milk. Humans are the only animal that continues to drink milk past weaning and the only animal that drinks milk from another animal and only a minority does it...
So... how does the majority of humans survive without drinking milk?
objectively false
Just because you were breast-fed until past middle school, doesn't mean it's true for the rest of us.
every predator which preys on mammals will eat the mammaries of lactating prey. why wouldn't they?! it's packed full of nutrients.
I guess that the soy yogurt I had for breakfast and the vegan mozzarella that I had on my lasagna for dinner last night were all just in my imagination.
Not everyone is able to handle soy, there is no solution for every person.
As an avid consumer of yogurt, what you consumed isn't yogurt.
More people are intolerant of dairy than soy...
You know that’s one of those really neat things about the world we live in.
Roughly about 65% of the world has lactose malabsorption. However the United States has one of the highest concentrations of people who aren’t lactose intolerant, with only roughly 35% of the population having lactose malabsorption.
Has to do with the genetic mutation that allowed people to drink milk much longer was in most of the ancestors who founded the US and those who came to the US eventually got the gene in some fashion mixed into their DNA.
So that’s resulted in the US being this hyper concentration of people who can drink milk that’s not really found anywhere else. Russia, some European countries, and some related African nations that were once occupied by those European nations have less lactose intolerant folks as well, but not as low as the US has.
The various parts of DNA code are thought to have developed in Europe but the US served to combine a lot of it and cheap milk from way back helped ensure that the hit of protein helped direct evolutionary processes to heavily favor that combination that allowed for longer ability to drink milk.
I get what you're talking about but AFAIK lactose intolerance isn't common in the middle east.
Considering yogurt was just a made up word at some point, I have no problem with words evolving over time like literally every other word in our language.
Yogurt is about the end-product. It's like calling only some things bread because they have extra ingredients or don't use the same grains that ancient societies used to make the original bread.
Wait till they learn how long we've used the term "peanut butter"
Not being able to handle soy?
Is baked chicken too spicy for you? Hahahaha 😂😂
I bet you can’t even throw a baseball, dude just puts it on the ground and walks home to his couch.
There's soy allergy, with a prevalence of about 0,3%. Lactose intolerance is at 5%-90%, depending on the region.
you don't need breast milk for yoghurt and cheese.
I make both myself, my soy yoghurt tastes very similar to Greek yoghurt and works very well in curries etc. It's not just the flavour, it's fermented.
My blue and white cheeses are awesome, I serve them to people who thank me for buying them "real" cheese (something I would never do lmao). Again they're properly cultured, you just need to mix protein and fat sources in similar ratios to the target cheese. you can even use peas as the base for surprisingly tasty but weirdly green cheese.
Can you recommend any resources for the yoghurt and cheese that you make yourself?
So the yoghurt just start by making your own soy milk. Any old recipe will do, store bought is generally too low protein to set. You can set it with gelling agents lile tapioca starch but I'm not really into cooking that way personally.
So make your milk, add a yoghurt culture (unfortunately starting one it's unlikely you'll be able to find vegan culture. I just started with the dregs of a neighbour's Greek yoghurt. Probs gonna be excommunicated for that. Whatever you do keep a separe culture healthy so you don't have to buy more), pop it somewhere warm (low temp oven, ~30 degrees iirc), leave it for 12 hours.
Your first results will be all over the shop, you'll need to find an amount of water for the soybeans you get that doesn't basically just make silken tofu. That'll depend on specifically how mature they are etc so you'll have to experiment with your local source. It'll taste very tofu-y till you add salt (since it basically is sour tofu). Enjoy!
Cheeses umm: cashewbert is an EU store with vegan cultures, no ethical quandary there. This lady is a good place to start https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxMAl_LiSUU
Umm if using coconut oil use the descented stuff. soap makers often have food safe descented for sale. Otherwise it'll taste like coconut. I prefer macadamia oil.
for new styles start by looking at protein and fat ratios for the animal milk version and copying them. I hate to plug reddit but the vegan cheese making sub there is great.
As with all ferments cleanliness! cleanliness! cleanliness!
Dairy milk is gross. I stopped drinking it nearly 15 years ago. I wasn't vegan or vegetarian at the time. It just tasted awful. I still would eat cheese than, but as a drink, dairy milk is plain awful. It's also terribly inefficient. It's not shelf stable. It has a short lifespan. It requires a lot of water and energy per cup than many others.
Do plant-based milks taste exactly like milk? No. But they don't have to.
And how is it better for us? Considering a majority of the world can't digest it is a big sign as to why plant based is better. Soy isn't the only option. There's almond, pea, banana, cashew and coconut to name a few.
Ultra-pasteurized milk has a remarkable shelf life, even when unrefrigerated.
Your argument becomes a non-sequitur when extended to people who are lactose tolerant. The mere existence or ubiquity of lactose intolerance does not entail that milk is bad for the lactose tolerant. Perhaps plant substitutes to cow milk are better for even the lactose tolerant, but lactose intolerance is completely irrelevant to the minority of us such as myself who produce sufficient enzymes to digest lactose without any difficulty whatsoever.
Sorry, didn't realize the world revolves around the extreme minority when discussing what's good for the human race as a whole.
You're right. How could anyone ever make any argument against anecdotal case by case stories. Obviously the entire collected data on human nutrition is useless as a whole because it doesn't apply to small percentages of the population. Oh silly me and not understanding that general concepts aren't important.
I mean, you have to realize that this is strictly subjective, no? One could just as easily say that oat milk is gross and plain awful. I'd disagree - I think it's great - but "it's icky" is not a useful argument, speaking as someone who mostly buys oat milk nowadays.
So is saying "It's subsidized because it tastes better!" which is the argument people on here are using instead of the real reason which is politics.
I mean take it in context to who I replied to.