Is Almond Milk Bad for the Environment? And How Does It Compare to Cow's Milk
Is Almond Milk Bad for the Environment? And How Does It Compare to Cow's Milk
How bad is almond milk for the environment? It turns out, it’s a complex question.
Good thing is i dont like almond milk. I always thought it was one of the more fancy alternatives because of the price. But tbh i would rank it somewhere near D tier. While some of the oat based milks rank for me even higher(S) than cow juic(A-B).
Is there a common, good oat milk?
I’m honestly here for oatly’s base oat milk - it cooks relatively well like regular milk. I use it in so many sauces
One thing you can try to look out for, is that it's fermented. Cheaper oat milk is basically just oat flour mixed with water, oil, sugar and salt. And yeah, the better stuff is fermented. Unfortunately, that's not the most marketable term, so those can be tricky to spot. The fermentation turns some of the oat into sugar, so you may find "no added sugar" written onto the packaging in big letters.
My other half takes their coffee with extra creamy oatmilk. We ran out of cow juice and I had a glass of oats with my sando the other day. Good gracious that’s good stuff!
They don't do the math for this in the article. A recipe I found says it takes 2.5 cups of almonds to make a gallon of almond milk. Another source says there are 92 almonds average in a cup. With the figure given in the article, 3.2 gallons of water to grow one almond, that means each gallon of California grown almond milk requires use of 736 gallons of water.
They mention it takes 30-50 gallons of water to sustain a cow, but don't mention that much of that is water required by growing grass, which is water that cannot readily be put to other uses. They also fail to mention the average milk production of a cow: 7.5 gallons per day in the US, so that's only (roughly) 7 gallons of water per gallon of cow's milk produced.
I'm under the impression other plant based milks are radically more water efficient, but aren't as profitable as almonds.
A very long sidenote: I was curious about the water consumption of almond trees. I found that a typical tree will produce roughly a ton of almonds over a 30 year lifespan. They will also produce about 7 times that much mass of shells around the almonds. The tree will weigh between half and a full ton by the end of that 30 years. I couldn't find a number I trust for how much leaf matter is discarded by a typical orchard tree in 30 years of growing, but I expect that to be substantial also. Overall, it seems that a typical orchard almond tree needs 20-25 thousand gallons of water per year, versus 6-8 thousand for other trees of a similar size.
It’s funny how you conveniently left out a source for your wild claims…
Your comment is a bunch of nonsense claiming dairy milk is more sustainable than almond milk.
Dairy milk uses 8.95 m² land while Almond Milk uses .05 m².
Dairy milk produces 3.15 kg gas emissions while almond produced 0.7 kg.
Dairy milk uses 628.2 L freshwater while almond milk uses 371.46 L.
The rate of Eutrophication caused by dairy milk is 10.65 g while almond milk causes 1.5 g
Get out of here with your disinformation.