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Tangential to the point, I think we should be careful about the almond talking point. Insofar as it is used for milk, almond milk uses almost half as much water
by Faelon 11mo ago
Tangential to the point, I think we should be careful about the almond talking point. Insofar as it is used for milk, almond milk uses almost half as much water as dairy milk, uses 1/18 the land and emits 1/5 the amount of carbon. As food, it is eaten in such a vanishingly small quantity compared to other water-hungry foods (meat) as to be insignificant. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/environmental-footprint-milks https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/environmental-footprint-m...
- avalys 11mo ago“Almond milk” is not milk. You know what else is less carbon-intensive than milk? Candy corn. But that is also _not milk_, and so equally irrelevant!
- sixo 11mo agoAlmond milk is an economic substitute for dairy milk, making the comparison appropriate. No need to be dense about it.
- zemvpferreira 11mo agoI don’t drink ‘almond beverage’ but given the amount of uses it has substituting milk (and the amount of people that accept them) it seems like a very relevant comparison. Maybe I’m not sofisticated enough but I’m yet to see a candy corn mlik latte be ordered.
- throwaway-42808 11mo agoBut that's such a good idea though
- jodrellblank 11mo ago> I’m yet to see a candy corn mlik latte be ordered. Not exactly the same, but can I interest you in a caramel-waffle-oat-milk latte? https://mightydrinks.com/cdn/shop/files/Barista-CW.png https://mightydrinks.com/cdn/shop/files/Barista-CW.png
- zemvpferreira 11mo agoYou certainly can sir!
- ipsento606 11mo agoAlmond milk is not dairy milk, but it is absolutely "milk", in the sense of a white liquid derived from plants - a definition that has existed in English for hundreds of years. The name "almond milk" has been used since at least the 1500s.
- ben_w 11mo ago> “Almond milk” is not milk. You know what else is less carbon-intensive than milk? Candy corn. But that is also _not milk_, and so equally irrelevant! While almond milk is an incomplete substitute for bovine mammary secretions, it is so much closer than candy corn that it has been used as a substitute for the last 800 or so years, and shared the "milk"-ness in the name before we had an English language: The word “milk” has been used since around 1200 AD to refer to plant juices. - https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/food-technology-magazine/issues/2018/december/columns/processing-how-plant-based-milks-are-processed https://www.ift.org/news-and-publications/food-technology-ma... This makes this use of the word older than English people spelling the thing chickens lay as "eggs" rather than "eyren": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ5znvym68k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZ5znvym68k The Romans called lettuce "lactūca", derived from lac (“milk”), because of the milky fluid in its stalks: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lettuce https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lettuce Similar examples abound. For example, I grew up in the UK, where a standard Christmas seasonal food is the "mince pie", which is filled with "mincemeat". While this can be (and traditionally was) done with meat derivatives, in practice those sold in my lifetime have been almost entirely vegetarian. The etymology being when "meat" was the broad concept of food in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincemeat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mincemeat Further examples of this: today we speak of the "flesh" and "skin" of an apple. Personally, I don't like almond milk. But denying that something which got "milk" in its name due to it's use as a milk-like-thing, before our language evolved from cross-breeding medieval German with medieval French, to argue against someone who said "Insofar as it is used for milk", is a very small nit to be picking.
- AstroBen 11mo agoI mean I'm drinking a coffee with almond milk right this second.. which coincidentally replaced the dairy milk Candy corn in my coffee wouldn't taste anywhere near as good
- hgomersall 11mo agoExcept that almond trees thrive in hot dry climates. Cows thrive in the rain.
- marcellus23 11mo agoI thought the problem is that that growing almonds is usually done in arid regions, so the issue is not that it uses lots of water, but that it uses lots of water in areas that frequently experience droughts. This is an honest question (I truly don't know, although I suspect I can guess): are dairy farms also common in those areas?
- lukeschlather 11mo agoJust for a single point of comparison, California's alfalfa consumes 15% of the state's water. All that alfalfa is going to feed cattle. California only produces 9% of the USA's alfalfa so it's easy to say that this is a tremendous amount of water. Almonds also consume 15% of California's water. But California produces 80% of the world's almonds. We're talking about an order of magnitude difference in water consumption, almonds are far more efficient and beef is both far more wasteful and far more common.
- thayne 11mo agoWorld beef production is approx. 60x almond production by mass, and that doesn't include dairy. That isn't the whole story, because cattle use more water than just what is used to grow alfalfa, but you are comparing apples to oranges here.
- lukeschlather 11mo agoI was drawing a point of comparison in response to the question about almonds disproportionately using scarce water resources in arid areas, which is a different question from overall water usage. My point was that almond water usage is literally only an issue in California, and that their water usage is not that extreme given the size of the market California serves.
- rcpt 11mo agoYou can check the per calorie stats. Animal agriculture is wildly inefficient and honestly it's not surprising because you have to keep living moving animals around for it.
- ilamont 11mo agoAccount created 10 minutes ago, hitting talking points of the almond growers industry association.
- phs318u 11mo agoEven if true, you’ve not countered a single point. Are there un-truths among those points? If so, let’s hear them.
- litenboll 11mo agoThey are replying to talking points of the dairy industry.
- Faelon 11mo agoI've read here for a long time but just made my account because I have been feeling very compelled by the data surrounding the huge economic effects of the animal agriculture industry and how otherwise pro-science and pro-data people find themselves with deeply entrenched unscientific viewpoints. Should I link my Google scholar to prevent people from seeing conspiracies everywhere??
- wongarsu 11mo agoGP's point works just as well if you substitute almonds with diary milk or hamburger meat though. The specific water use of almonds is indeed completely tangential
- dylan604 11mo agoBut it's okay. This has been solved very recently as in last week. We are going to now be getting our beef from Argentina. Not only has the prices of beef issue been fixed, it'll also fix the country's water shortage issue as a bonus. /s
- ribosometronome 11mo agoI think the almond talking point takes hold because, like a lot of complaining about LLM usage, large parts of the blame gets directed elsewhere rather than the choices that we're all way more likely to be making and could influence. Like, it's 2025. Even the people most likely to be drinking almond milk have largely moved to oat, whose water usage is great.
- wyre 11mo agoAlmond's get brought up because it distracts from the fact that beef and dairy milk production uses a lot more water than almonds do. No one wants to be reminded that their 4 oz burger they had for lunch used 460 gallons of water to produce.