Like an estimated two-thirds of the world’s population, I don’t 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 didn’t have to ask—or pay extra—for a milk alternative. Since 2022, the once Oakland-based, now Nestlé-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, aren’t just good for the lactose intolerant: They’re 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 milk—four 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, they’re often more expensive. Walk into any Starbucks, and you’ll likely pay around 70 cents extra for nondairy options.
. Dairy’s affordability edge, explains María Mascaraque, an analyst at market research firm Euromonitor International, relies on the industry’s ability to produce “at larger volumes, which drives down the cost per carton.” American demand for milk alternatives, though expected to grow by 10 percent a year through 2030, can’t beat those economies of scale. (Globally, alt-milks aren’t new on the scene—coconut milk is even mentioned in the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata, which is thousands of years old.)
What else contributes to cow milk’s dominance? Dairy farmers are “political favorites,” says Daniel Sumner, a University of California, Davis, agricultural economist. In addition to support like the “Dairy Checkoff,” a joint government-industry program to promote milk products (including the “Got Milk?” campaign), they’ve 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 guidelines—and why it has featured content, such as a 2013 article by then–Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, trumpeting the dairy industry as “leading the way in sustainable innovation.”
But the USDA doesn’t directly support plant-based milk. It does subsidize some alt-milk ingredients—soybean 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 “strategy for growth is advertisement and promotion and publicity,” which isn’t 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. “Market-level conditions allow us to move more quickly” than other companies, a spokesperson for the coffee giant told me, but didn’t say if or when the price drop would happen elsewhere.
In the United States, meanwhile, it’s 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 “price isn’t the main thing” for their buyers—as long as enough privileged consumers will pay up, alt-milk can fill a premium niche. But it’s going to take a bigger market than that to make real progress in curbing emissions from food.
It’s a similar issue to why gluten became a fad diet, once the public zeitgeist got the idea that some people can’t digest gluten properly people started thinking that maybe no one should eat gluten and the hucksters followed suit.
Do not believe any scammer who tries to tell you that milk is somehow not healthy or that the dairy industry is some kind of scam trying to poison America.
Why would the people pointing out how unhealthy milk is be the ones that are the scammers? What would they have to gain from it? Why is milk promoted so very hard as a “health” drink? Not enough people seem to ask themselves this.
The same reason why people try to tell you that vaccines are bullshit but if you buy their essential oils you’ll live forever. People try to discredit the mainstream and proven treatment in favor of quackery that they happen to sell at an inflated price.
Milk is “vaccines” in this situation. People are telling us milk is bullshit, but if we buy into veganism, we’ll live forever. While the Mayo Clinic reminds people that plant based milks are just generally not as healthy as dairy milk. Soymilk comes close if it is both fortified and unsweetened, but it’s still second-best. Good enough for someone who is already a vegan, but definitely not good enough for someone to stop drinking milk if they already do.
Yeah, but what are they going to sell? Also, I don’t think milk as a health drink is really all that mainstream any more, or becoming increasingly less so over time. I think people are still sputtering along on what they might have been told ages ago, or what they were told by the dairy council.
Cum
Militant Veganism involves the desire to convince people to stop eating animal products at all costs. Just look at nutritionstudies.org. When you have a bunch “plant-based nutrition” sites that disagree with the Mayo Clinic and various cancer research organizations, it definitely gets problematic.
Per the Mayo Clinic: “it’s tough to beat dairy milk for balanced nutrition”. That’s why. With a few caveats (which I cover below), it is one of the most perfectly balanced foods a human can consume.
Here’s a question I don’t think enough people seem to ask. When cancer patients are encouraged to drink milk, and study after study fails to find a strong correlative or causal link between milk and cancer, why are so many vegan sites claiming it causes or worsens cancer. If I were a cancer patient, should I be trusting nutritionstudies.org and some vegan redditors/lemmings more than, say, Cancer Research UK? Or the Australia Cancer Council?
The problem is that “why does EVERYONE say this is so healthy?!?” is similar to “there’s no evidence of this person committing a crime, so it must be a massive cover-up”… Or maybe EVERYONE says it is so healthy because it is so healthy.
Not saying it’s a magical wonderdrink. Drinking calories is still an obesity risk. And people with lactose intolerance need to be careful or have a lactase enzyme with their milk. Of course the dairy industry wants you to drink 5000 glasses of milk per day. So don’t listen to them, and equally don’t listen to the militant vegans. Listen to medical and nutrition experts who don’t have some sort of agenda.
It isn’t healthy in the same way candy bars with added vitamins aren’t healthy: it’s a bunch of sugar and fat you don’t need with some protein and calcium somewhere in there.
But maybe you want it anyways, because it’s yummy.