This makes me want to drink water.
I had to look up eutrophication so here’s some info on it for anyone else that’s wondering what that means.
“Eutrophication is the process by which an entire body of water, or parts of it, becomes progressively enriched with minerals and nutrients, particularly nitrogen and phosphorus.”
Cows and Agriculture runoff are HUGE eutrophication sources- I live near the Twin cities and if you look at the confluence of the Minnesota river (which runs through lots of farmland) and the Mississippi (which runs through less) you can see a literal line in the water where they come together because there’s so much sediment and debris from runoff in the Minnesota.
In case anyone needs to hear it: If you drink plant milk then this chart says you should feel good about yourself! You don’t have to super-duper optimize to two decimal places by forcing yourself to drink a plant milk you don’t like. Good work :)
I recommend saving this chart for the next time somebody tells you almond milk is bad for the environment 😆
Well, it’s #2 on freshwater usage so it’s not like it’s exactly perfect.
Usually saying almond milk is bad for the environment is used as a reason to keep drinking cow milk
“It tastes awful” is a way better excuse
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Gonna ride that sweet cheese train to our demise
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I like a nice wenseleydale with raspberry.
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Yeah I’m like 75% vegetarian but I will give up cheese over my dead, lifeless body.
Why is dairy milk still the cheapest?
Heavy subsidies for our most cruel products?
Honestly, mistreated cows don’t produce much milk.
That’s a simple truth that many people refuse to internalize. There are externalities around the process that are not good, but the actual treatment of the cows themselves is not one of them.
No, the real reason why dairy is so relatively cheap is because modern cow breeds are able to produce gallons of milk per day. Up to 12.5 gallons per day from the best producers, but usually 6-8 gallons.
By the time a calf is a month old and ready to start weaning to solid food, they’re consuming about 3 gallons per day. If you do the simple math, you see that even while a cow is nursing, they still need to be milked or else they will be in pain from the milk fullness.
Cows can then continue producing milk for another 9 months before they naturally stop.
All that said, there is still some cruelty here. Just not in the milking process itself.
Calves are usually allowed to wean naturally, but after that, the males are either sold to auction, or sent to pasture for a bit under a year to grow to adult size for slaughter. The ones sold at auction actually have a pretty good life, they live as stud bulls and could live for quite a long time. Could. Some farms swap out bulls every 5-6 years, either through trading bulls, or sending the old bull off to slaughter.
The females are kept by the dairy farmer to be turned into the next generation of milk cow,
It’s theoretically possible to get 10 years of production out of a milk cow, but usually farmers will send them off to slaughter after 5-6. It’s the reason why they don’t keep their bulls more than 5-6 years, you have to rotate the breeding stock to prevent inbreeding.
The other source of cruelty is veal. Most veal in the US is going to be Red Veal, a grass fed calf slaughtered at around 22-26 weeks. That’s at roughly 700lbs on the hoof.
I said most. The sad truth is there’s a product called Bob Veal, that’s claves slaughtered within days of birth. And then there’s cage veal, which is explicitly banned in half a dozen states and frowned on in two dozen more. Cage veal is often a form of White Veal, where the calf is artificially prevented from ever really eating solid foods. They are often fed a fortified milk formula for their short (20 week) lives.
Veal is not as popular as it used to be, mostly because kids started learning that it was made from baby cows. Red Veal is still pretty popular, but if you have the pasture for that, you might as well just leave the cow to grow for another couple months to increase the sale weight. Almost every dairy farm in the US with excess male calves lets them grow to adulthood before slaughter. Or sells them to people who do, it’s much the same thing.
There’s one more thing that’s drastically reducing veal production worldwide, there’s a widespread tech called gender selected breeding. You get a bull to mount a mechanical harvester (which is super easy to do, they’re horny bastards) and then you run the sperm through a process that removes the male producing sperm. It’s something like 95% effective at ensuring a female birth when used to inseminate a cow.
How is all of that less cruel than just drinking some bean juice?
For most of human history, bean juice wasn’t available. Also cheese, a nutrient rich food that can last years if properly stored. Tofu is good, but it can’t last more than a few months.
That’s still a reason why milk and cheese are popular, they kept our ancestors alive, and continue to be good sources of nutrition today.
You didn’t seem to acknowledge my question.
Our ancestors also did rape, pillage and enslave, we wouldn’t be where we are without that. Should we keep doing cruel things because of that?
Now we are in 2023, there is the option of purchasing products with much less suffering in the civilized world.
I realize now that in my edit and re-edit I lost the thread.
Basically the reply was that cruelty was never the point (except for rich people, like hereditary nobility. They often revel in needless cruelty) the point was survival.
That’s less an issue to the modern Western world, but is still an issue in a bunch of areas.
Remember that we’re less than a century into even being able to have semi widespread veganism.
For thousands of years, vegetarianism either came with a serious risk of nutritional deficiency, or was supplemented with milk and cheese.
So rejoice that it’s even possible to remove animal products from your diet now. Just know that it’s still not possible for the entire world.
Until it is, dairy farmers will continue to mitigate and harms that they can, because a happy cow is a productive cow.
Thanks for the write up! Do you work in the dairy industry?
Nope, I just live out in the boonies.
I did have a friend in high school whose family owned a dairy farm. I helped with the milking a few times… But it was mostly an excuse to go over to his place to get stoned, and I’ve not actually talked to my high school friends in over 20 years.
So yeah, most of the write up was a few google searches, but I did sort of know the basics to know what to search for.
These kids today, having a problem with little tortured baby cow, I tell ya.
Actually, yes. That’s the main reason why veal is not popular anymore.
Really, it was never popular among the poor and even middle class, it was a rich person thing, and still is.
The most cruel food practices were invented by people catering to the rich. That’s how it’s always been.
Heavy subsidiaries in combination with supermarket chains being “great negotiators”
So overall soy is really the best, and almond is a close 2nd.
Almond is really unsustainable climate wise. Nearly all of it is grown in California almost exclusively using aquifer water which is rapidly depleting.
Combine that with wildfires and the correct answer is oats. (Soy is also great)
The problem with soy is knowing where it comes from. Apparently a fair amount is farmed in deforested parts of the Amazon. I’m in the UK and tend to favour oat as the production is local. If you know the provenance of your soy, though - it’s good.
In the US at least you can be pretty confident that it comes from somewhere within the country, since it exports ~$28bn and imports only $0.4bn worth of soybeans. In the rest of the world though that’s definitely an important consideration.
Data: https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/soybeansMost soy from the Amazon is apparently sold to China as livestock feed
Ironically, the vast majority of soy production goes to livestock
In the US at least you can be pretty confident that it comes from somewhere within the country, since it exports ~$28bn and imports only $0.4bn worth of soybeans. In the rest of the world though that’s definitely an important consideration.
Data: https://oec.world/en/profile/hs/soybeansdeleted by creator
Soy milk is actually pretty big in China among consumers as well; it’s a drink you can find in almost every street stand that sells drinks.
Almost like the market is higher and if everyone switched, the market would swing production towards the alternatives and you’ll never actually escape the problem because it’s rooted in outdated technology.
It’s per liter.
Okay and? Per liter doesn’t negate the fact that the industries founded using milk are by and far more profitable, more prone to industrialized methods because of their profit margins, and are rooted in long term development from the past and never modernized. Like a per liter doesn’t change a thing when the nuance of the issue still exists. If the alternatives were taken over by the companies that currently run the milk industry and flowed all their development and money into that industry, it would be just as volatile. Literally forest for the trees.
You really had to just make shit up to go to bat for Big Milk, didn’t you?
Wow.
Not to mention the emissions after consumption.
The main counterarguments I’m aware of are “I prefer cow milk” and the health benefits of animal protein.
Why is the eutrophication so high for dairy? I’d think pesticide use would drive up the value on plant-based products. Cows don’t need fertilized grass/hay. Is it from the cow excrement? Wouldn’t excrement be too valuable as a fertilizer and for producing methane power to just let it all run off into streams etc.?
A few things to consider. A minority of cows are free range grass fed, a very small minority are 100% grass fed and free range to an extent that matters, even in the case of 100% grass fed there might be fertilizers used. And make no mistake, cows on open pastures are not a good way to feed the human population from an environmental stand point, probably worse than factory farms honestly. Fields are terrible at sequestering carbon and lack a lot of the biodiversity of the forests most of them historically replaced.
In New Zealand HUGE amounts of fertiliser are used to boost the amount of grass grown and thus cows per unit area. Some ends in groundwater and a lot can end up in streams and rivers too.
Cows are given antibiotics to prevent diseases (and to promote muscle growth, although doing so is now banned in the EU and China). They shit out a large fraction of the antibiotics, and these kill soil microbes (and make the survivors antibiotic-resistant, which is absolutely great news for public health). Without soil microbes to process them, the organic matter in litter does not stay in soil and instead gets respired into the atmosphere (accelerating global warming) or washed into lakes and rivers (causing eutrophication).
Wouldn’t excrement be too valuable as a fertilizer and for producing methane power to just let it all run off into streams etc.?
A lot of it is sold off but the cows aren’t always spending time where it can be collected. When they are out in the pasture the crap just stays where it falls and it will inevitably get picked up by rainwater.
I also wouldn’t be surprised if this is including the manure that is being used as fertilizer as well. Because when it rains that manure isn’t just going to stay on the field. There’s one road in my area where, whenever it rains, you can watch a crap river flow down the road because of the sheer amount of manure running off the nearby field.
