So instead of letting the mother cow nurse her calf for the first few months and then start taking her milk for our use, the more "modern" practice is to separate the calf immediately.
Which means if you are drinking milk, you are drinking it from seriously depressed cows.
I wonder how this contributes to our culture's growing mood of depression?
see i.e. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jun/29/mums-ask...
or just google dairy cows separate from calves
There’s a ton of mushrooms and fabaceae, very cheap nutritious and as much delicious if you learn to cook them well (like meat). My favorite is Tempeh which combine both! And quite cheap if you make it yourself.
They usually prep it in advance, so it’s rare to find one that has an actually vegan dish they don’t custom make even if it says tofu.
There's many "educational farms" to show kids live farms animals and sometimes pick the eggs and milk a cow. I'm very confused about them: it's good to let urban kids see-smell-touch real farms animals. However they have nothing in common with modern farming, even the not-inhumane ones.
BUT telling a 6yo toddler "look that cute cow, this is where your morning milk is from" will engrave it deep in the way they see farming. One day or another they will learn about factory farming but what you learn at 16yo doesn't "engrave" as easy and deep as at 6. I mean yes you quickly understand that education farms are not the reality but it require a big mental shift to overcome the feeling that the milk you drink in the morning is from an inhumane famr, especially when everyone around keeps doing it (I don't blame them, it's cheap, easy, convenient, traditional, delicious, practical...).
Some schools or parents brings their child in real farms which is a bit better, but it still doesn't depict the reality for 99% of consumption (think gelatin candies, croissants, cakes, ice creams...).
For the courageous -- DONT SHOW THAT TO YOUR TODDLER (yet) -- 8 hours of pigs in a typical/normal gas chamber that probably will end up in soap/jelly/bacon. : https://www.farmtransparency.org/videos?id=hg8cyu393v
You also get to see how the wild world works, and most fish would prefer to be taken by a skilled spear fisherman than have their face mauled off by a squid, at least as far as I could tell.
Unfortunately we live in a world with 9 billion people on it, which means we don't have the room to grow and harvest all our own food. In my opinion, that's the issue. Sourcing all our food "ethically" is basically not possible.
I'd much prefer to be producing and hunting my own food.
Maybe you see a normal farm and get to know the animals then see an actual factory where it is industrialized...
You could go vegan.
My guess is that we are seeing something along the lines of EVs. Instead of making these healthier alternatives mainstream, they are being sold as a status symbol for the rich and making them unaffordable to the common man.
Here waiting for my chinese oat milk.
Here in Singapore, where soy milk has been around for decades, soy milk in both fresh and UHT forms tend to be much cheaper than dairy.
Also, soy milk's been around for decades in the US too! I drank a lot as a kid. My mom would keep these little single-serving cartons in her purse for us, like juicebox-sized.
Plantmilks are firstorder product.
This means that clinate impact of most plantmilks are higher than milks, excepting oat and ryemilk.
On a cost note - : making oat milk is literally just blending some oats and let them soak a day or 2, filter the water and done, perhaps do that if cost is an issue?
On a sidenote, if you drink soy, almond or worse ricemilk you're actually doing something worse for the climate/environment
If milk is a byproduct of producing meat that can be sold for money, this means milk subsidizes the price of meat. Even if the effect is small, this is almost certainly enough to make it worse for the environment than e.g. soy milk, as the difference between raising cattle and growing soy is orders of magnitudes.
What do you mean "feasible"? It's profitable to sell something for more than it costs to make. If the only companies that offer Oat milk for sale price it at $4 a gallon, that's the price you have to pay to get it.
Meanwhile there are laws around the pricing of Milk, and in my neck of the woods that includes a MINIMUM price.
People wave their hands like "the market" is magic. As long as some consumers are willing to pay $4 a gallon for oat milk, companies will not reduce the price, and plenty of people are willing to pay MORE for oat milk than for cow milk.
If you wonder why nobody starts a company that undercuts the $4 oat milk, the simple answer is that the second you are done spending $1 million on a factory to make cheap oat milk, the producers already in the market drop their price and your business fails. This is why Google Fiber for example struggled. There is no technical reason prices are high. There's just no competition because the current producers are so massive and have such giant war chests that they can just kill your brand new competitive business, and soon your business will be dead and they can slowly ratchet up prices again.
There's also the fact that homemade oat milk is trivial to produce, results in a great product, and is cheaper than even that mythical competitive industry would produce.
In what way? Data seems to suggest otherwise but maybe I'm misunderstanding
Not enough scale because little demand compared to regular milk.
You already got the oat. Got a blender? Grind those little flakes with water and a spoon of your favorite oil. Et voilà !
Pro tips:
- filter for extra smoothness but no need if you intent to mix with whole oat flakes
- 1h in the fridge and mix again for double extra smoothness
- pinch of salt or cinnamon or cacao… yummi
- bored of oat? Check your supermarket shelf for other ideas. (Soy need to be cooked then blend then filter).
What you mentioned does probably play a role as well, with much more $/revenue being spent on marketing for non-animal milk than cow milk. None of the big milk players are trying to present themselves as a hip startup like Oatly is. Wouldn't be surprised if the latter was even VC backed.
But again, good ole' communist subsidies are the number one cause.
Same with eggs, they don’t exist in a vacuum. To get eggs you have to have chickens, and to have chickens you must grind male chicks alive as they hatch because they don’t produce eggs. And hens aren’t supposed make eggs year round but we make them anyway with artificial lights etc, which drastically shortens their lifespan.
I kept a flock of 25-30 hens on my property for a few years. Other than moulting they produce eggs ease round. The production slows drastically in the dark winter months for the older hens (1 for 3 days, say) but some continue to produce nearly daily (I think the cycle is something like 26-28 hours). The only time we had artificial light for them was on days when it was so cold we kept their coop door shut and turned on the interior light.
Bit of a leap there.
Other places use male chickens for meat, despite them being sub-optimal.
I think the grinding of male chicks is an interesting case because it's actually pretty low on the suffering and distress spectrum, but high on the visceral reaction scale
And nothing requires they be ground alive versus e.g. introduced into a nitrogen atmosphere and then minced. (Or simply neutered, raised and sold as capon.)
They’re not gonna feed the milk that their mothers are producing for them, because that would mean less milk to sell and less milk for people to consume.
And so why keep the calves in the milking side of the facility when you can move them to the fattening side for meat/leather or to get them to age so you can forcibly impregnate them every year for their milk, depending on their gender.