Like an estimated two-thirds of the world’s population, I don’t digest lactose well, which makes the occasional latte an especially pricey proposition. So it was a pleasant surprise when, shortly after moving to San Francisco, I ordered a drink at Blue Bottle Coffee and didn’t have to ask—or pay extra—for a milk alternative. Since 2022, the once Oakland-based, now Nestlé-owned cafe chain has defaulted to oat milk, both to cut carbon emissions and because lots of its affluent-tending customers were already choosing it as their go-to.
Plant-based milks, a multibillion-dollar global market, aren’t just good for the lactose intolerant: They’re also better for the climate. Dairy cows belch a lot of methane, a greenhouse gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide; they contribute at least 7 percent of US methane output, the equivalent emissions of 10 million cars. Cattle need a lot of room to graze, too: Plant-based milks use about a tenth as much land to produce the same quantity of milk. And it takes almost a thousand gallons of water to manufacture a gallon of dairy milk—four times the water cost of alt-milk from oats or soy.
But if climate concerns push us toward the alt-milk aisle, dairy still has price on its side. Even though plant-based milks are generally much less resource-intensive, they’re often more expensive. Walk into any Starbucks, and you’ll likely pay around 70 cents extra for nondairy options.
. Dairy’s affordability edge, explains María Mascaraque, an analyst at market research firm Euromonitor International, relies on the industry’s ability to produce “at larger volumes, which drives down the cost per carton.” American demand for milk alternatives, though expected to grow by 10 percent a year through 2030, can’t beat those economies of scale. (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.)
What else contributes to cow milk’s dominance? Dairy farmers are “political favorites,” says Daniel Sumner, a University of California, Davis, agricultural economist. In addition to support like the “Dairy Checkoff,” a joint government-industry program to promote milk products (including the “Got Milk?” campaign), they’ve long raked in direct subsidies currently worth around $1 billion a year.
Big Milk fights hard to maintain those benefits, spending more than $7 million a year on lobbying. That might help explain why the US Department of Agriculture has talked around the climate virtues of meat and dairy alternatives, refusing to factor sustainability into its dietary guidelines—and why it has featured content, such as a 2013 article by then–Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, trumpeting the dairy industry as “leading the way in sustainable innovation.”
But the USDA doesn’t directly support plant-based milk. It does subsidize some alt-milk ingredients—soybean producers, like dairy, net close to $1 billion a year on average, but that crop largely goes to feeding meat- and dairy-producing livestock and extracting oil. 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. Alt-milk makers, Sumner says, may also have thinner profit margins: Their “strategy for growth is advertisement and promotion and publicity,” which isn’t cheap.
Starbucks, though, does benefit from economies of scale. In Europe, the company is slowly dropping premiums for alt-milks, a move it attributes to wanting to lower corporate emissions. “Market-level conditions allow us to move more quickly” than other companies, a spokesperson for the coffee giant told me, but didn’t say if or when the price drop would happen elsewhere.
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.
You can make plant-based cheeses. And some of them are pretty good. But they lack all of the same properties. Like, you can get a cheese that that when hot will stretch a little bit like the cheese on a pizza, but as it cools off it loses all of that elasticity and is not great for lukewarm pizza. You can get cheese that is pretty decent for lukewarm and hot pizza, but it doesn’t have that stretch. It more just rips apart. And you definitely don’t have the span of “flavors” of cheese or whatever you’d call it. Some of the big ones, sure, but again, they don’t have all the same physical properties.
I don’t mind the loss of those properties, but many people do.
Cheese isn’t a great source for protein compared to beans in regards to price though.
Honestly, I think we subsidize the dairy industry simply because they’ve been lobbying so long. Meat is subsidized too. It’s the one market that the conservatives are fine with ignoring the mantra of “free market” and support regulating the hell out of it in whatever way supports the “farmers” (big farm is nothing like the labeling suggests and is all headed by big guys in suits who likely never have been on a farm in their life).
Beans can taste amazing when prepared by a competent chef, but often taste like shit when prepared wrong.
Cheese, on the other hand, is much more forgiving of poor preparation. Eat it straight out of the package, sliced and on bread or crackers, melt it into sauces, or grill it, or any number of other uses.
Simply put, cheese is fast and easy, and can elevate almost any other food.
Also, try to get kids to eat beans. It can happen. But not easily, and often you have to do it in the form of chili, with loads of cheese.
You’re just describing American children raised in a poor diet. Beans are a staple food among not of the world population, including their children. They’re super easy to prepare as well. Talking about the extremely fatty and unhealthy cheese like that is probably one of the many reasons the US is obese and unhealthy.
Cheese is not a healthy part of a diet in any quantity where it provides a significant protein of the person’s protein needs.
This. First of all, very few people are ever going to be deficient in protein, at least in the U.S. Secondly, cheese seems like one of the very worst sources. Animal sources in general are bad, of course.
I think it depends on context and how you are raised. I was given exposure to a broad array of vegetables and beans as a kid, and liked most of them, even as a kid. I think its a cultural thing - if you (or TV, or peers, or media) tell kids that “kids don’t like X”, well, they probably won’t.
Both meat and dairy are subsidized because they consume huge amounts of corn, and the corn industry is an even bigger lobby.
I seem to recall people are working on bacteria-produced casein, and so that may, if it could be done at scale, solve the ethical and environmental problems, but I wonder if casein in that form will be just as bad as dairy is in its “natural” form.