665
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
665 points (88.2% liked)
politics
19146 readers
3098 users here now
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Because most plant juice tastes like shit and has the wrong mouth-feel for most things we use cow milk for. Its not rocket surgery.
I'm not vegan or even vegetarian, so I feel pretty impartial on this. My partner uses oat milk for their coffee, and over the years I just got used to using it straight, or in cereals, etc. Now I greatly prefer it. It's just "milk" for me now.
Never thought it would happen, but getting cow milk when I'm out feels off - that mouth-feel you mention; just doesn't sit right anymore. It really is an acquired taste.
Right there with you. I've been living the plant milk life for years at this point and cow milk just tastes so... water-y for lack of a better explanation.
Have you considered heavy cream? /s
My wife says she can "taste the cow" in the milk, in the same way she could "taste the goat" in goat milk before moving to plant based milks.
I know exactly what she means though, it's a weird aftertaste that tastes 'wild' in the same way you can differentiate wild game from beef or pork.
However, it seems only people who have been off cow milk for a while can identify this element.
Yeah! That's the perfect way to put it, thank you. It's like a foreign extra flavour - a certain cowiness that I didn't notice growing up. Cow milk used to taste like "default milk," where everything else was a variation on that normal base. But now it's one of the "other" milks, because I taste it so infrequently.
Spot on. People are out here trying to play like almond, oat, soy and every other milk substitute is exactly the same as dairy based milk, it's not and will not ever be, they're different products
Also pretending that people swapping from dairy to alternate milks will somehow impact the looming climate crisis is also pretty disingenuous
If we all went vegan we'd reduce food based emissions by 70%, which is 15% of the entire planets GHG emissions. Not to mention recovering 75% of farm land.
It really is a no brainer if you want to make a difference. And if I, "a rural New Zealander who grew up on a dairy farm who said he'd never eat a vegetarian meal in his life" can convert to veganism based on the logic of it, surely anyone could.
there is no reason to think farmland would be "recovered" or converted to any less- environmentally destructive use.
I doubt it.
I'm going to use your sound logical deductions and reasoning skills to reply to your comment in kind, ready?
Yeah? Well I doubt THAT.
you can doubt whether i doubt something but i am the authority on whether i doubt something so self-reporting my doubt is the strongest evidence that can be gathered in support of the claim.
a claim made without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. i've presented exactly as much evedince as the claim to which i was responding.
If you see how much crops we need to grow and fresh water we need to feed a cow, you'd see how inefficient meat is.
70% of all the crops we grow is to feed our livestock.
Meaning for 1/3 on our plate, we use more than double the resources than the other 2/3 combined.
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 don't believe the methodology used to calculate emissions from animal agriculture is appropriate: every examination i've 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 can't or won't eat. there may be some reduction but i don't believe it can be anywhere near 70%
Do you have any sources on hand? It's hard to google for this stuff without running into sites by PETA etc, which are too biased for my taste.
i don't know of any broad surveys across crop categories but i'm 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 it's called "soy cake" or "soy meal".
elsewhere in this thread i mentioned cottonseed.
I've 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 "industrial waste". Why are you knowingly spreading misinformation?
not only can we do that: we DO that. but there frankly isn't enough human use for that, so it would be wasted if we didn't feed it to animals.
If the rest of the plant would be wasted, it would be more economical to just grow another plant that's 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
It's not grown in such quantities because it's essential but simply because there's demand for the extra protein from factory farms right now.
soybeans are grown for nutrient fixation in rotation with corn. they're more of a soil crop than an oil crop.
https://www.veterinariadigital.com/en/articulos/importance-of-corn-in-animal-production/
"We need animal agriculture because we need to grow the feed plants to grow more feed plants for animal agriculture"
We've come full circle.
this can be true while, at the same time, soybean oil's byproduct is soy meal that would be wasted if it weren't fed to animals.
I've already addressed that argument above.
saying "i've already addressed it" is a rhetorical trick to avoid admitting it's true.
this phrase never appears in your source or anywhere else in this thread. what are you quoting?
It's your argument put in another way
no, it's a strawman of my argument.
if you don't know what crop rotation is, you don't belong in any discussion about agriculture.
But then humans can also eat that soy meal to get their proteins. It's 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 weren't 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.
i think that's a hard sell for most people and i frankly just don't see it happening. do you have a plan to make that happen?
Well, if the first step happens (people going vegan), then other protein sources will be automatically in demand. A huge chunk of protein powder nowadays is whey, that can be easily substituted by soy, because of the sufficient amino acid profile of soy.
this is what I'm looking for a plan to accomplish.
https://phys.org/news/2021-01-yeast-cow.html
If this hits market, I'll be all for it.
Calm down Chidi...
How did the man not die from starvation?
You have to grow the feed for cows, give them water, and cows emit significant greenhouse gasses.
Almond trees use way less water and actively reduce CO2 during growth.
Well, dairy takes more.