For those of you who have switched to plant based milk alternatives, what do you buy?
I usually buy oat milk although I still use conventional milk sometimes too. I’d read a while ago that almond milk is bad due to the massive amounts of water required.
Anyway yesterday as the Intermarché had run out of oatmilk I did buy almond milk for a change but then ended up reading up on the different plant based milks just now.
None of it is that great (even if much better than cow’s milk).
Looks like I will have to try and buy organic oats from now on -thanks Bayer/Monsanto!
And what they do to bees in California and no doubt elsewhere.
You can make your own plant based milk alternatives and use the okara for something else (or give it to your hens if you have any, they love it).
I use soya ‘milk’ produced in France from French-grown soya beans.
Don’t know how good it would be in coffee or tea, though.
What I would find interesting is some sort of table showing the damage done by different sorts of food. It would have to be reliable, of course. This week I don’t think I’ve eaten any meat - though today I will - but I’ve eaten cheese and kefir and milk. How does my consumption of 60g of Camembert, or 200g of kefir, compare to a 200g steak?
Oh delicious horchata but possibly a bit sickly-sweet in coffee or tea. Get some chufi and try it I suppose is the answer.
The impact of your steak depends on what is done with the rest of the beast, where it came from, how it lived etc. I think industrial milk production is utterly grim and seeing bull calves as byproducts is awful.
Edited to add I am fairly sure you can easily get a filter you use with a stick mixer to grind up the chufa ‘nuts’ and make your own horchata (or other nut/grain whatever). I saw one in La Vie Claire a couple of years ago.
If you make you own then at least you know what processes it goes through whereas industrialised crap added to make it look more like dairy is a lot worse for you. Carageenan and other emulsifying agents are known to be bad for gut microbiome, immune system and gut leakage.
Objecting to dairy is fine if its the farming aspect that worries but deeming the alternatives as healthy is a worry.
Best do without them, its only habit that makes you add them to beverages.
I buy Oatly ‘Barista’ oat milk. Presently trying reduced dairy to see if it helps reduce joint pain, and I think it’s helped a bit. It’s less watery/bitter/icky than the other milk-substitutes I’ve tried, and I did evaluate a fair range of stuff.
Will likely try adding back t see if discomfort increases.
There are lots of reasons why the BBC might pick it up - people in Britain are discussing these kinds of protests, and so this is quite topical, just as it’s topical to report deforestation in Brasil or the shooting of Imran Khan. Here we have the thing than many have feared actually happening.
Listening to Prof Tim Spector this morning on his trial with cutting out milk before as he had mucus and some breathing issues as he said it made no difference its just a universal urban myth unless you are lactose intollerant that actual dairy milk does this or that. Its a good source of nutrition and useful fats.
Interesting - and disappointing - it tends to be the anglo-saxon countries that fail to pay their fair share towards addressing climate injustice. France is doing comparatively really well.
Or more accurately, a much smaller issue - though they are still net contributors to global heating. It’s possible to replace a lot of energy use altogether with passive technologies like insulation, or just better design.
If you feed them with electricity which has not caused any release of CO2 (or other greenhouse gas) they just move heat around.
OK, they do take some power of their own - but direct heating of the atmosphere due to dissipation of heat by electrical appliances is tiny- total solar irradiation is something like 6.33x1017W or 633PW - over a year that’s 5.8x1021Wh - or 5,807,880,000TWh compared with a global electricity generating capacity of just about 28,000TWh - i.e all the direct heating, from ALL of the world’s generating capacity is just 0.00048% of the energy we get from the sun.
If you are really worried about direct heating, make sure you run them on solar and it will completely cancel out.
The above calculations show how nuts it is to keep burning fossil fuels though - when there is a huge amount available from our closest star, of which we need to tap into a massively tiny fraction.
