Almond trees get a bad rep. They use about the same water as many other trees. And we plant trees by the millions because, trees are a good idea. Oxygen and so forth.

The problem with almonds isn't so much that the trees require water (like anything else). It's that they're inevitably planted where water is a particular problem. Like, needing to pump and deplete groundwater.

On top of that, the water in per calorie out is not great.

IIUC, it takes more water to produce a single almond (~7 calories) than an orange (~45 calories).

You are hyper focusing on one metric which is short-sighted.

Almonds are a great source of protein. Oranges are negligible by comparison.

Almonds are a good source of vitamin E. Oranges contain none by comparison.

Almonds are high in healthy monounsaturated fats. Oranges contain none by comparison.

So now compare water per the above metrics and see where Almonds stand.

Almonds and Oranges are both unique and valuable in their own way.

Also, I don't think it's calories that we're really short on.

Then grow soy. Almonds might be better than oranges in this regard but soy is better than almonds, and better for the environment to grow.

It's not better for you. In Males it produces unhealthy levels of Estrogens and it is already overly prominent in food.

This is a silly meme. Plants contain phytoestrogen, which is not the same thing as estrogen. Ingestion of phytoestrogen actually seems to reduce the body's own natural estrogen production, which has the effect of reducing female fertility. Eating soy does not turn men into women, despite what insecure dudes on the internet may have told you. (Amusingly, despite all the hand-wringing about soy, I have never seen a similar campaign to decry milk, which actually does contain estrogen (although inert)).

Also, if soy did feminise the human body, transfeminine people would recommend eating nothing but soy to each other.

We do that, but we're joking.

I have always struggled to square this reality with the common recommendation from oncologists for women at high risk of breast cancer to eat less soy. Would a reduction in the bodies estrogen production increase the risk of breast cancer?

Two of the most ripped and jacked dudes I know are vegetarian or vegan. If you can't bulk on soy you should try lifting more bro.

This is common social media bro science but show me the human outcome data that corroborates this.

Do you have sources for that?

As I understand that was meat industry propaganda that found a new life on the internet. Early veggie burgers were made out of soybeans so the industry made up the "soy turns you into a woman" meme to discourage people from switching. Then it got picked up by conspiracy nuts and got amplified way past the original market.

Here you go.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7468963/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4270274/

They're also too prohibitively expensive to be a consistent source of nutrition for the majority of the world's population. It wouldn't matter a bit to you how many vitamins almonds contain if they never enter your body.

Ok, how do almonds compare to other protein rich crops like peanuts? I'll tell you, not well: https://www.nationalpeanutboard.org/content/1126/images/Wate...

A ag product should be priced to reflect their 'externalities', and that includes things like water use, but perhaps we should be subsidizing healthy stuff like produce over field corn and soybeans

What's unhealthy about soybeans?

Nothing, beans are ok, one of best sources of protein for plant-based diets.

Biggest problem with soy is that 77% is consumed by animal agriculture, which is causing much harm in the world (deforestation, pesticides/herbicides, runoff, biodiversity loss, co2 emissions, ...).

https://ourworldindata.org/soy

The overuse of soy in the food chain has lead to high estrogen levels in about 50% of the population.

Where is your source? Last time I looked an almond took roughly the same amount of water to grow as a tomato on a per calorie basis.

A roma tomato is ~11 calories. Plants yield ~30 on average. They grow for ~75 days and need 1 gallon per 5 days = 1/2 gallon per ~11 calories.

Almonds are closer to 1 gallon per ~6 calories - or almost 4 times worse.

It's almost as if there's reason almonds are expensive and tomatoes and oranges and lemons and limes aren't.

Almonds really aren't expensive on a per calorie basis. They are far cheaper than tomatoes. For example at Walmart as of today I can buy 2,240 calories of blue diamond almonds for $6.98. The cheapest Roma tomato is $0.44 per item, which is roughly 35 calories. I'd need to buy 64 tomatoes in that case, which would be a whopping $28.16. Something in your math does not add up.

From what I can gather a single tomato uses on average 3.3 gallons of water and a single almond is 1.1 gallons. That is 35 calories vs 7 calories. It comes out to 10 calories per gallon vs 6 calories per gallon which is not nearly as bad as your example. I'm not saying these numbers are 100% accurate, but I'm very skeptical it is 4 times as much water.

To be honest, the other problems are that almonds are more of a luxury food, rather than a major staple food item.

You could feed many more people with higher yielding trees, like apples or even citruses. But then again, the almond is such an integral part of the upper middle class suburbia which makes up so much of California that we literally have expression around it: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=almond%20mom

> more of a luxury food

I'd like your assistance in classifying other items, such as

1: upholstered furniture 2: refridgerator 3: wheat mixed with water, non-baked 4: bread

While you get a lot of downvotes, I think your comment does a good job showing why we ideally would price water at market price and let consumers decide what's luxury, what isn't and what it's worth to them. That said, pricing water at market price for agriculture is almost impossible due to existing water rights.

Also, almonds require transporting billions of bees around the countryside in order to pollinate them - which is not good for the bees.

We're not interested in accounting in units of water/tree, but water/foodstuff, where the denominator could be nuts, calories, or else some generalized nutrition index.

Well, I am pretty sure there's an upside to planting a tree. Especially in this age of deforestation. The water equation is pretty normal for almonds.

Its true, planting them in deserts (the central valley of california) is a bad idea. I only point out that there's nothing particularly bad about an almond tree vis-a-vis any other tree. Planted elsewhere, there would likely be no issue.

>I only point out that there's nothing particularly bad about an almond tree vis-a-vis any other tree.

Except the context is very important here. California is routinely struggling with water availability. Planting trees, of any kind, in a Californian desert in this environment and climate is stupid and self defeating, no matter how much profit it brings into some farming company's hands, and there's not really a reason to defend that. Plenty of places in the US have enough water to support massive tree planting efforts, and also cheaper labor than California and fewer environmental regulations to work through. There's zero reason to plant a tree in a Californian desert.

Never defended that by the way. Just defending the poor mis-maligned almond.

I think dates are pretty bad in Southern California too.