Like an estimated two-thirds of the world’s population, I don’t digest lactose well,

That number, like all world population numbers is heavily skewed by just how many people are in China. The mutation that causes adults to continue to produce the enzyme to digest lactose is less common among those of Asian descent.

(Globally, alt-milks aren’t new on the scene—coconut milk is even mentioned in the Sanskrit epic Mahābhārata, which is thousands of years old.)

…and there are medieval European recipes that call for almond milk, and tofu is made from soy milk and there are written sources referencing it roughly a thousand years old. You’re right, none of these are really new on the scene, aside from maybe oat milk.

A 2021 report by industry analysts Mintec Limited and Frost Procurement Adventurer also notes that, while the inputs for dairy (such as cattle feed) for dairy are a little more expensive than typical plant-milk ingredients, plant alternatives face higher manufacturing costs.

I feel like your first paragraph completely ignored this aspect. You squeeze milk out of a cow. Nut and bean milks require grinding the stuff up with a lot of water, mixing it thoroughly, then squeezing the wet pulp through a fine filter (for small batches something like a cheesecloth) to separate the milk from the pulp.

Commercial oat milk requires further processing, because just pulping, mixing with water and straining oats does not produce anything appetizing at all.

In the United States, meanwhile, it’s a waiting game to see whether the government or corporations drive down alt-milk costs. Currently, Sumner says, plant-based milk producers operate under an assumption that “price isn’t the main thing” for their buyers—as long as enough privileged consumers will pay up, alt-milk can fill a premium niche. But it’s going to take a bigger market than that to make real progress in curbing emissions from food.

That’s not a bad assumption on their part - people who are deeply concerned with the emissions involved in producing their food tend to be richer, in no small part because poor folks are going to put price first, because they have to think about how food fits into their budget more.

Also cheese - you can’t make cheese from plant milks. Well, you can try, but that’s basically how you make tofu, and performing a similar process on other plant milks creates something closer to tofu than cheese.

This is a weird advertisement. Drink water. Plant milk does not have the protein or calorie density as dairy milk. You may as well drink water and eat your greens instead of supporting industries that are gentle rapists of the earth. I’ll drink my own vomit before reading that rag again.

We don’t need non human milk in the first place so I don’t need a milk alternative either lol

Also, for the record I’m mostly off human milk too now that I’m an adult

Probably because everyone tried only the shittiest alt-malks, assume they are all bad, and somehow don’t get heartburn and diarrhea and gunky mouth and throat feel from cow milk. I save all my lactose intolerance suffering for cheese and ice cream.

Seriously though it’s the same as people that say only bad things about tofu but have only eaten white American ‘recipes’ that genuinely suck. Meanwhile Asians happily inhaling literal tons of it prepared in actually good meals. Try making bread from scratch without salt (or salty ingredients) and that’s what tofu foods for the white market remind me of.

Because most plant juice tastes like shit and has the wrong mouth-feel for most things we use cow milk for. Its not rocket surgery.