The issue is animal agriculture, not almonds.

For example cow milk uses more water in absolute terms, and more water per calorie, than almond milk.

I'm not so sure. A quick Google search came up with wildly varying amounts of water to produce a gallon of almond milk, from 23 gallons of water to ~1600:

https://milkyplant.com/en-us/blogs/the-latest/environmental-...

https://www.theguardian.com/food/2018/sep/05/ditch-the-almon...

These were just two of the several sources I found, at each extreme. There was similar variation for cow milk.

Considering that it takes roughly 1 gallon of water to produce 1 almond, and that 23 almonds wouldn't fill even an 8oz cup, I'm guessing that the higher end of the spectrum is probably more accurate for almond milk.

It also looks like almond milk has half the calories per gallon of skim milk and 1/4 that of whole milk.

I think soy milk tastes better than almond milk

Were you raised on formula by chance?

Almond milk has always tasted terrible to me. And most western produced soy milk. Warm, freshly pressed soy milk is amazing, and the kind of minimally processed bottled stuff you get from chinese grocery stores is pretty good too.

Soy milk splits when mixed with coffee though, and doesn't really have a neutral enough taste, for that I find oat milk works great.

It's fun cause (sweetened) almond milk was considered a delicacy in Italy, and had been supplanted with shitty tasting almond milk in recent years, much like almond-tasting almonds have been replaced with tasteless ones.

I can't tell if it's a change in cultivar or transcontinental transport, but something bad happened with almonds in Europe.

Imported American almonds maybe?

I guess, but I'm not sure why California almonds shouldn't taste like almonds.

That 1611 liter figure looks like nonsense the second you dig into it, if the link even went anywhere. Random google result when you google the quote that responds to the source of the claim: https://talkveganto.me/en/facts/almond-milk-water-usage

A more reputable source would be https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks which lists almond milk as half the freshwater volume of dairy milk, and far better at every other metric (land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and eutrophication).

So you'd have to stretch things much farther than you did in your post for dairy milk to have an edge over almond milk. And even if you somehow did it, then dairy milk would have to then beat out soy milk which is even better than almond milk in all of these metrics, which it won't. If you care about environmental impact, dairy milk just isn't going to be in the cards. Let it take the L.

You're comparing whole oranges with orange slices. When comparing vegan food with animal protein, bother to take into account the entire package rather than one part. Animals are actually a much more energy intensive source of nutrition, and excellent for efficiency in terms of calories delivered. Our bodies process more nutrients from animal protein, while deriving nutrition from grains is a more recent evolution for us. You could easily feed entire villages with a couple of cows (as is done even today in many parts of the world). And this isn't including their value as milk producers and fertilizer generators.

On the other hand, almonds are a very niche crop, grown for a select few types of customers, but the sheer concentration of their agriculture in California - that too by a single farming billionaire family, the Resnicks - has caused the situation to become dire to such an extent never seen before in any other place.

<2% of input calories become beef calories. <4% of input protein becomes beef protein. Animal food products require an eye-watering amount more land than plant food products, even milk.

https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets

It is always more efficient to grow and eat plant protein directly like tofu. And even if it were true that you absorb fewer nutrients from something like tofu, then aren't you lucky, you get to eat more food.

While you are correct, you also have to consider the fact that cows are fed alfalfa, which is a crop that requires no fertilizer or pesticides and actually produces excess nitrogen fertilizer, which otherwise must be produced from natural gas. It also takes very little physical labor to harvest and store grasses and alfalfa compared to human food sources.

The only downside to alfalfa and feeding cows with it is the water usage, but for large parts of the country that aren't California and get decent rainfall, growing alfalfa takes no irrigation. You could maybe also consider the land area needed for it, but US cropland utilization has been dropping for decade after decade and isn't really a concern.

I eat alfalfa too, and sell some in my shop. But neither me or the cows eat only that: we like to diversify our intake to stay healthy and (global or local) logistic bring us a variety of other food/nutrients.

Sure some cows eat more alfalfa than me but most of them never taste a bit of that and only knows corn, soy and friends.

Some other superplants in the soy/quinoa category to consider: buckwheat and lupinus. Yummy.

    > but doesn't consume a lot of water

If the area around Sacramento is "hot-summer Mediterranean", wouldn't there be a lot of natural evaporation of this water, so you need to constantly replenish it to keep the fields flooded?

I recall reading that rice field flooding in those parts is also helping with recharging the aquifers somewhat, the depletion of which has been a major problem in the CA central valley. The rice fields hold the water for longer than if it just drained into the delta, giving some of it time to percolate down.