[bythreads]

Milk is a byproduct of producing meat, and its a fallacy to see it in isolation.

Plantmilks are firstorder product.

This means that clinate impact of most plantmilks are higher than milks, excepting oat and ryemilk.

On a cost note - : making oat milk is literally just blending some oats and let them soak a day or 2, filter the water and done, perhaps do that if cost is an issue?

On a sidenote, if you drink soy, almond or worse ricemilk you're actually doing something worse for the climate/environment

[maeil]

This completely ignores second order effects, which lead to the opposite conclusion.

If milk is a byproduct of producing meat that can be sold for money, this means milk subsidizes the price of meat. Even if the effect is small, this is almost certainly enough to make it worse for the environment than e.g. soy milk, as the difference between raising cattle and growing soy is orders of magnitudes.

[troyvit]

This is what drives me crazy about oat milk. Oats grow everywhere. Almonds, on the other hand, take a gallon of water per almond to make[1]. Despite this, at my store anyway, almond milk is about $2.89/half gallon while oat milk is at least $4/half gallon. What in our economy makes this feasible?

[1] https://bastyr.edu/about/news/ugly-truth-about-almonds

[mrguyorama]

>What in our economy makes this feasible?

What do you mean "feasible"? It's profitable to sell something for more than it costs to make. If the only companies that offer Oat milk for sale price it at $4 a gallon, that's the price you have to pay to get it.

Meanwhile there are laws around the pricing of Milk, and in my neck of the woods that includes a MINIMUM price.

People wave their hands like "the market" is magic. As long as some consumers are willing to pay $4 a gallon for oat milk, companies will not reduce the price, and plenty of people are willing to pay MORE for oat milk than for cow milk.

If you wonder why nobody starts a company that undercuts the $4 oat milk, the simple answer is that the second you are done spending $1 million on a factory to make cheap oat milk, the producers already in the market drop their price and your business fails. This is why Google Fiber for example struggled. There is no technical reason prices are high. There's just no competition because the current producers are so massive and have such giant war chests that they can just kill your brand new competitive business, and soon your business will be dead and they can slowly ratchet up prices again.

There's also the fact that homemade oat milk is trivial to produce, results in a great product, and is cheaper than even that mythical competitive industry would produce.

[troyvit]

I mean maybe you're right. Maybe people are like, "Oat milk is so different than almond milk that I am going to pay twice the price." I'm like uhhh it's white, vegan, and I can dunk a cookie in it. I'll buy what's cheaper.

[barbazoo]

> if you drink soy, almond or worse ricemilk you're actually doing something worse for the climate/environment

In what way? Data seems to suggest otherwise but maybe I'm misunderstanding

https://ourworldindata.org/environmental-impact-milks