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Oat has quite a pleasant taste, works well in coffee plus a much smaller environmental impact seems like the logical choice.
It pains me that even though every single of the alternatives uses less resources and should actually be cheaper to produce (not only ecological, but also economical!) they are typically way more expensive than dairy.
Assuming you're in the US: Because the government subsidises dairy, you know, with your tax money.
It's the same reason there's corn syrup in fucking everything.
In a way, simply existing in the US is not vegan.
In Germany most stores have oat milk that's cheaper than their cheapest dairy! Even though oat milk is taxed at 19% while dairy at 7% I think.
A bit off-topic: there have also been initiatives to reduce the tax for oat milk. My favorite example is when multiple cafes came together for a protest to simply sell coffee with oat milk with a 7% tax instead of 19% (they sued themselves afterwards).
Not just that, they're often way less nutritionally useful. Nearly all alternative milks have very low protein content. It would be trivially cheap to add in a small amount of whey protein or use less sugar, but for some reason I haven't been able to find a brand that does. At most they focus on making it analogous to milk when it comes to frothing for coffee...
Almond without added sugar. But I'm going to try making it myself. I'm growing so much skeptical of anything industrially processed...
It's not super efficient to do it on a small scale but it does taste quite a bit better than it does bottled/carton for a month before drinking.
Oat! There's so many good brands. Cow milk mostly tastes the same, sometimes weird, sometimes bland. With Oat you can really have different flavours and with additives like some vegetable oils you can have different viscosities for different applications. I like the Oatly "milk" a lot.
One could consider to stop drinking coffee. Coffee itself has a rather large environmental impact as it is. Or drink it without milk-like substances.
For sure, my coffee stays black 95%+ of the time but change is the spice of life. Nonetheless, you highlight a solid point regarding the consumption of coffee. Being soo prominent world wide must make it detrimental environmentally.
Is tea better in that regard?
Not Milk is my favorite, followed closely by soy. Oat tastes good but has a thin mouth feel.
I feel it, I drink milk seldomly but oat works when I crave some cereal or want to lighten up my coffee every now and again. Soy is a solid choice though as well, pretty even with oat when it comes to global impact!
I've been loving low-calorie almond milk for years; great to see it does well for total emissions and land use, which I'd think are the most important factors in most contexts.
Oat milk might not be great for some folks with blood sugar issues, though it sounds like it probably isn't too bad as long as you aren't guzzling it, and enjoying it with other food helps: https://www.insider.com/oat-milk-health-benefits-sugar-dietitian-advice-2021-4
great to see it does well for total emissions and land use, which I’d think are the most important factors in most contexts
yeah, i'm against human trafficking, because of the vehicle emissions of the trucks transporting them 😤
I use almond for cereal and oat or coconut for coffee/tea or pink drink etc. I don’t really drink milk or milk substitutes plain anymore, though in the winter i might have
Mine is Dairy, i can't afford anything else, it's way too expensive (Brazil)
Soy ftw, proteins are too important IMHO and soy is the only real source of protein between those choice. The biggest problem here is that soy "milk" is taxed 4-5 times more than regular milk
Some things about almond milk, a good and a bad:
Almond milk could potentially be a net carbon sink depending on the source, because having almonds requires planting an orchard, essentially a form of afforestation. Often, almond plantations are planted to replace previously deforested fields, where they are better for the local environment than those fields, including long term carbon fixation in the form of wood production. Obviously it's still not as good as a natural forest, it's still a monoculture, but an orchard is better than something like wheat.
However, most commercial almonds are pollinated by captive bees. They will literally truck in hives of bees to pollinate them. Transporting a hive places a lot of stress on it and many bees die in the process, plus, being forced to work in monocultures of a single species is not great for hive resilience or health. Of course, some orchards do have bees on site and don't rent them, but even then they're still captive and have their honey extracted. Plus that's not information available on the packages at the grocery store. Depending on your definition, almonds might not be vegan. Actually, this is true for most flowering crops, namely other nuts, and fruits. In contrast, most grains are wind pollinated so they're okay. I think the only way to reconcile this completely is to have wild bees and biodiverse permaculture farming, like what Indigenous populations did before colonialism, but good luck with that in our current capitalistic, money over life economy.