[Faelon]

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-m...

[marcellus23]

I 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]

Just 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.

[mrguyorama]

The comparison you are bringing up actually just gets to the heart of the issue.

California agricultural water is so fucking cheap, you can buy foreign land, start a farm, grow a bunch of grass, and ship it over to your country.

And that's cheaper than just growing grass locally.

That's insane

Most problems California has are the same: Systems that were initially designed and built a hundred or more years ago to support a state of like a hundred people, and an utter refusal to update those agreements because it would slightly inconvenience some really wealthy farms.

Growing Almonds and Alfalfa in California would be fine if they paid market rates for the water, and would therefore be more conscientious about using it and not wasting it, and that would dramatically improve the water situation of California and upstream places.

But it's way cheaper to pay for people to run absurd narratives on Fox News to make it a culture war issue so that you never have to care.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aux22FHTFXQ

The situation is so fucked up. It's a war of the rich against the richer. Wealthy farm corporations all have lobbying groups, and instead of lobbying for a more free market distribution of water, where they could have all they want as long as they pay for it, they run political campaigns to ensure California never reforms it's water rights system and continues to die of thirst while giving away 90% of it's water for rates decided 100 years ago. All the political agitation about water in California is over an absolute minuscule fraction of the water distribution, because actually fixing the problem would mean these farms paying market rates for water, which they do not currently do.

A microcosm of the US problem basically.

[Yeul]

Corporations never want to pay for the problems that they cause. They would rather go bankrupt and start a new company.

[thayne]

World 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.

[rcpt]

You 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.

[lukeschlather]

I 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]

tbf some of the alfalfa is shipped to China it's not all used on cows here

[HowardStark]

It’s been some years but I recall that at one point probably around 2016-2017, California produced 80% of the world’s almonds. This was notable because at the same time, California was experiencing historic droughts.

[Faelon]

Yes- about half of the total water siphoned from the Colorado river goes to cows. This number astounded me when I first read it, and I hope it has a similar effect on you. I don't like almond milk, for what it's worth, and I don't think we should ignore plant-based foods with a high climate impact, but animal agriculture is the most environmentally devastating institution we have individual power to transition from. https://www.npr.org/2024/09/09/nx-s1-5002090/colorado-river-...

[wongarsu]

GP'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

[ilamont]

Account created 10 minutes ago, hitting talking points of the almond growers industry association.

[litenboll]

They are replying to talking points of the dairy industry.

[phs318u]

Even if true, you’ve not countered a single point. Are there un-truths among those points? If so, let’s hear them.

[Faelon]

I'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??

[ribosometronome]

I 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]

Almond'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.

[hgomersall]

Except that almond trees thrive in hot dry climates. Cows thrive in the rain.

[dylan604]

But 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

[avalys]

“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]

Almond milk is an economic substitute for dairy milk, making the comparison appropriate. No need to be dense about it.

[ipsento606]

Almond 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.

[zemvpferreira]

I 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.

[jodrellblank]

> 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

[zemvpferreira]

You certainly can sir!

[throwaway-42808]

But that's such a good idea though

[ben_w]

> “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-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

The Romans called lettuce "lactūca", derived from lac (“milk”), because of the milky fluid in its stalks: 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

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]

I 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