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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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That number, like all world population numbers is heavily skewed by just how many people are in China. The mutation that causes adults to continue to produce the enzyme to digest lactose is less common among those of Asian descent.
...and there are medieval European recipes that call for almond milk, and tofu is made from soy milk and there are written sources referencing it roughly a thousand years old. You're right, none of these are really new on the scene, aside from maybe oat milk.
I feel like your first paragraph completely ignored this aspect. You squeeze milk out of a cow. Nut and bean milks require grinding the stuff up with a lot of water, mixing it thoroughly, then squeezing the wet pulp through a fine filter (for small batches something like a cheesecloth) to separate the milk from the pulp.
Commercial oat milk requires further processing, because just pulping, mixing with water and straining oats does not produce anything appetizing at all.
That's not a bad assumption on their part - people who are deeply concerned with the emissions involved in producing their food tend to be richer, in no small part because poor folks are going to put price first, because they have to think about how food fits into their budget more.
Also cheese - you can't make cheese from plant milks. Well, you can try, but that's basically how you make tofu, and performing a similar process on other plant milks creates something closer to tofu than cheese.
Further processing? You mean a tiny amount of added sweetener. That's all that really needs to be added to oat milk.
Plant cheeses are entirely doable, there's an entire industry of nut-based artisan cheeses. Plants can be fermented as easily as dairy, the only things they're missing is the highly addictive opioids, osteoporosis (dairy = bone loss), heart disease, and possibly even things like endometriosis and autoimmune diseases.
I mean, many recipes for home creation also include adding amylase to help keep it from having that slimy texture, and potentially either adding nut milk or adding pulverized nuts to the oats to add some creaminess, and also sweetening it.
You can make plant-based cheese analogs, but they are never so simple as "take milk, add coagulant, stir, separate curd from whey, press curd", which is the basic process for cheese (and for soy milk produces tofu and for many plant milks produces something analogous to tofu).
Casomorphins occur in milk at 200-500 nanograms per liter. For comparison, the most powerful opioid we use (fentanyl) has a standard effective dose of 1000-2000 nanograms per kilogram weight of the patient, and that's 100 times more powerful than morphine. So, if the opioids occurring in milk were as powerful as fentanyl you would need to drink 2-5 liters per kilogram of weight to achieve a dose, which is such a volume compared to, you know, the size of the human digestive tract as to be absurd (especially when you consider that the opioid peptides naturally occurring in milk are not remotely as powerful as fentanyl).
It does have a higher concentration in cheese, mostly because going from milk->cheese is about a 10:1 ratio by weight, but not all the casomorphins from the milk make it into the curd (some are left in the whey), and not all the casomorphins in the curd survive the process (brining, aging, etc as appropriate for the cheese in question). So at the very highest, if you started from the high end of casomorphins in milk, managed to capture all the casomorphins in the curd, lost none of them in processing, and casomorphins were as powerful as fentanyl you'd only have to eat... 20% of your body weight in cheese to achieve a dose.
There aren't a lot of drugs that do anything meaningful to an adult human in the quantities that casomorphins are present in milk given the amounts of dairy humans typically consume. We're talking a scale where the things to compare it to in terms of dose are things like LSD microdosing and botulinum poisoning.
In other words, there's a reason we don't use a dairy-rich diet as a replacement for methadone and it's not that the pharmaceutical industry can't patent dairy.
Do you have any good, reputable studies on this one? Because most studies out there I've seen suggest either no effect or exactly the opposite. By comparison, plant milks tend not to be as high in calcium.
Hey, just so you know, that whole lactose intolerance is just hundreds of years of the west drinking milk a lot.
And you can make cheese without milk. Obviously with a different process but Gouda is one of the cheeses that is already replicated very well.
Oat milk does not need much processing btw. You can make really good tasting oatmilk at home.
Like any genetic trait, frequency of lactose tolerance is entirely about selection pressures on your ancestors. Being able to tolerate milk to use it to supplement the diet was more important for survival in Europe and Africa than elsewhere historically. The more your ancestors needed to lean on milk for calories, the more likely the ones who couldn't didn't make it, the more common that mutation is in later generations. Same reason why sickle cell is much more common in black folks - having the sickle cell trait also confers a degree of malaria resistance and malaria is historically a bigger pressure on African populations than on many other regions.
If you're really careful about how long it's in the water, how much it's been blended, and/or you add some amylase to make it less slimy, maybe some nuts to make it creamier, and probably sweeten it a bit. It's still more involved than "blend nuts with water, pour in filter, press", which in turn is more involved than "pull on nipple."
I'm explicitly not hating on plant milks here, but they aren't a fill in in all applications and for basically any case where the chemical or physical properties of milk are relevant in which case they often need some extra steps involved and even that is assuming the flavor is OK (which depends on the context they are being used in). For example, I find that coconut milk works really well in a lot of dishes from or inspired by food from east Asia or India, but I wouldn't try having it over a bowl of cereal, and I suspect it wouldn't work great in coffee or tea either (though I haven't tried and I find almond milk is pretty OK in coffee but definitely not as good as actual dairy in a strong black tea).