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.
I canāt speak to health, but hereās some thoughts on the ecological reason.
All the studies (that I have found at least) look at global carbon emissions and land use in production of milk. This is an important distinction.
The US, for example, is the #2 milk producer in the world (arguably #1 if weāre only talking about cow milk). Itās also the #1 beef producer in the world. The USās livestock methane footprint is barely a blip on the Global Warming Radar (6% of total methane from all sources). There are even ways to reduce the carbon footprint of cow milk further, but itās important to note we are very much in the range where we could easily take action to fund offsets and make the dairy industry 100% carbon neutral in the US. You may not be from the US, and thatās not the point. The point is that a lot of European countries that consume milk are in the same boat, and countries that are not as efficient as that could be with some regulatory changes and technological improvements.
Flip-side. As others have said, alt-milks are a lot less āultra-transformedā than you might think. Itās like calling chicken broth āultra-transformedā. You could make your own oatmilk or almond milk. Itās not hard or āweirdā. Theyāre just oats and water, or nuts and water.
Actually, found this quote about the health of milk. āif weāre looking at like the nutrient density versus cost, cowās milk is always going to winā. TO BE CLEAR, the expert in this article is saying āplant-based milk is just fineā, and she agrees that some plant-based milks are comparable to cow milk if less balanced. She has a long explanation of āyou really need to know what you plan to get out of milkā, pointing out that most plant milks are too low in protein, but that it doesnāt matter if youāre just using it to remove acidity from your coffeeā¦ but that for a vegan theyāre just fine.
6% of all methane is not a blip, are you kidding? There isnāt one single easily solvable source of methane worldwide. There are many smaller sources and most of the larger sources are hard to replace.
Offsets are a scam, and offsetting would require more subsidies or make cowās milk more expensive. Instead of offsetting something that we can easily replace with something less polluting, we can offset the things that are much harder to replace.
Is it though? I live in the Netherlands, and in Europe we have really high milk subsidies. As far as I can tell we have essentially no soy milk subsidies. We have the third highest milk consumption as well, with a long history of production and plenty opportunity for efficient production ar scale.
Despite that, home brand skim milk is ā¬0.99/L with a cheaper brand available at ā¬0.85/L versus ā¬0.89/L for home brand (fortified and unsweetened) soy milk.
No, Iām not kidding. Methane is a moderate contributor, and we are one of the lowest contributors per-calorie, per person, whatever. Also, it would arguably be cheaper to just go carbon neutral with current cattle (which the cattle industry intends to do within 20-30 years) than to retrofit our entire grocery economy and re-educate (force) people away from it. Finally, itās STILL a band-aid. USās methane impact is only 20-30% higher than pre-colonial days (due to reduced populations of naturally-occuring animals like buffalo), and a mass-culling of cattle will be āhelping outā by us merely having a lower-than-natural methane impact.
In your words āare you kidding?ā. But Iām going to explain instead of being shocked. Carbon gasses are a closed system. If I buy a large area of non-arable dead land, keep cows in part of it and coerce a forest out of the other part of, Iāve created a carbon neutral arrangement. Hell, much less natural, I merely need to fund a carbon-sequestering operation to the same amount as the gas production and Iāve fully become carbon neutral. Genuinely carbon neutral. We could hypothetically go full coal if we could find a way to sequester an equal amount of emissions (but unlike meat, that would be a disgusting waste of money and the coal companies have no intention to do it. The meat industry absolutely wants to go carbon neutral, so that vegans can stop trying to make eco claims about them.
I canāt speak for the Netherlands, so maybe you have it differentā¦ In the US, dairy subsidies are generally a bit of a scam but so are most of their detractors. A large percent of farmers never see a penny (or sometimes have to pay in, see next paragraph). The price you see a gallon of milk on the shelf for is likely not going to go up much (if at all) if those subsidies go away. Executive bonuses will be cut.
The biggest scam of them Iām aware of in the US is the feed subsidy that makes up most of the complaints about dairy being subsidized. The fund is paid for in a large part by fees/taxes paid by farms on their meat/dairy production (people often miss that many farm subsidies are actually paid by farm-specific taxes), but only a few large cattle operations see any of themā¦ and many of those large cattle operations have loopholes to themselves avoid the feed subsidy taxes.
Nice. I canāt get either for less than twice that in the US.
the cost is massively subsidized for the benefit of large ag businesses in small states
So we should cut off our nose to spite our face? My point is true in a vacuum, not just true subsidized. That a small number of large corrupt businesses fuck the little guys is not a good reason to kill them all.
As you admit, those subsidies benefit large ag businesses, who then sell their products for the same price that mom-and-pops farms do, pocketing the margins.
The piece that was left out is much of those subsidies are paid in taxes and fees that are charged toā¦ the same industry. Ask any small-town cow or dairy farmer how he/she feels about feed subsidies. That particular subsidy is taxed to the farmer (almost like they do with alcohol) on the first-sale of the cattle/milk. It is one of the largest big ag subsidies, and it is used to punish meat and dairy farmersā¦ and they still can afford to bring milk to your fridge at these prices.
So hereās a deal for you. We both go after big ag together for a less corrupt world. The side-effect is that the cost of dairy might go down.