Which milk should you buy? (Almond, Rice or Oat?)
Every time I walk into a store to pick upsome plant-based milk there’s always an
overwhelming range of options.
I’m bombarded by almond milks, rice milks,soy milks, oat milks,, cashew milks, and pea
milks.
Questions start running through my head: Issoy milk better for the environment then rice
milk?
Or Maybe almond milk is the best of the three?
But wait a minute, I‘ve heard that almondsuse up a lot of water.
It can be an extremely frustrating process,and more often than not, I’ll leave the
store feeling confused and frustrated withoutever making a choice.
So, it’s time to clear things up.
Which non-dairy milk is the worst for theenvironment?
And really, when it comes down to it, whichone should I be reaching for when I head to
that vast refrigerator wall of milk cartons?
But first, I need to clarify something.
Out of all the milks that you can purchase,cow’s milk has by far the largest environmental
impact.
One glass of that childhood classic is associatedwith drastically higher land use, emissions,
and water requirements than all non-dairymilks.
So when we’re talking about alternativemilks, we’re really just being picky.
The most environmentally impactful choiceyou can make is to stop drinking cow’s milk
altogether if you haven’t already.
Now that we’ve got that settled, let’sdive into the world of plant-based milks.
We’ll start with the top-selling milk alternativein America: Almond milk.
This drink always seems to be jostling withrice and soy for the crown of best milk, but
there are a lot of environmental issues thatcome from growing and processing almond milk.
And on top of that list is water.
In turns out you don’t actually need a lotof water to grow almond trees, but you do
need a lot of water if you want to grow almondtrees that have consistently high yields.
One 2011 study shows that almond trees cansurvive on as little as 7.6 inches of water
a year, but a 2007 study reveals that in orderto produce maximum yields in a place like
California, which is where 80% of almondsare grown globally, almonds need 54 to 58
inches of water annually.
Even when you consider the fact that you don’tneed that many almonds to make milk (because
it’s mainly just water mixed with a handfulof ground up almonds), almond milk still stands
above the rest in terms of water usage.
But if you’re considering the greenhousegas emissions and pollution of non-dairy milks,
then rice milk is the worst of them.
Rice milk has such a large emissions footprintassociated with it because of a surprising
process that occurs when paddies are purposelyflooded to suppress weeds and encourage growth.
In that watery rice paddy habitat, bacteriabegin to multiply and basically fart out a
lot of methane causing rice emissions to increase.
Add to that the fact that the standing waterof rice paddies then gets drained into waterways
causing fertilizer runoff and water contaminationproblems, and you’ve got the most polluting
alternative milk on average.
So rice and almond milk don’t seem likegood options to go with.
But if that’s the case then what shouldwe drink?
One promising plant-based milk that I’vestarted to turn to is oat milk.
It not only requires less water, in the rangeof 48L of water per litre of oat milk, but
also could add a beneficial cover crop tomany farming rotations that currently rely
solely on corn and soybean.
According to Matt Liebman, agronomist at IowaState University, if farmers switch to a three
year rotation of corn, soybeans, and in thethird year a mixture of oat and red clover,
they could potentially reduce herbicide useby 25-51%.
The green manure properties of clover andoats would also mean that farmers could use
88-92% less synthetic nitrogen fertilizer.
But according to a Mother Jones article, theoat market is still pretty small, especially
when compared to corn and soybeans.
Oat milk would need to explode in popularityin order to for this three season rotation
to even be economically feasible for farmers.
But overall, I think oat milk is a great choiceif you need to douse your morning cereal or
coffee in something cold and creamy.
In short, when deciding between dairy andnon-dairy, the environmental award goes to
the plant-based team.
However, once your in the vast realm of alternativemilks, things can get a bit more dicey.
Almond milk uses a lot of water, but ricemilk releases more greenhouse gases.
Many milks have positives and negatives, butat the end of the day, the milk sitting in
my fridge is oat milk.
Hey team, Charlie here.
While researching for this video I leanedheavily on the Gimlet Media’s Science Vs.
podcast dealing with alternative milks, soI’d definitely go check it out if haven’t
already.
Also, I’ve totally revamped the Patreonreward, so if you want to support this channel,
head over to patreon and pledge some moneyfor an action handbook or secrete video essays.
Thanks for your support, and I’ll see youin two weeks.
In this Our Changing Climate environmental video essay, I take a look at three plant-based non-dairy milks in order to see which one is the most environmentally friendly. Specifically, I look at how Almond milk, Rice milk, and Oat milk affect the environment in a number of different ways through water use and emissions. I ultimately find that almond milk uses the most water, rice milk has the most emissions associated with it, and oat milk is the best for the environment overall. Help me make more videos like this via Patreon: http://bit.ly/2iz4lIV Twitter: https://twitter.com/OurClimateNow Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/occvideos/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/occ.climate/ Email me for freelancing or business inquiries: occ.climate@gmail.com I use Artlist.io for all my music. You can get 2 months free of Artlist.io with this link: https://artlist.io/Charlie-278823 ________ Resources: 1. Soy, Almond, Oat Milks: Are They Udder Bull? (Science VS.) https://soundcloud.com/science-vs/soy-almond-oat-milks-are-they-udder-bull 2. Alternative Milk Podcast Show Notes (Science Versus): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GwAp1DTEIweQReAtW7nvhF52F8jRojGa0Pd7DPYThZI/edit 3. Rotating Crops, Turning Profits (Union of Concerned Scientists): https://www.ucsusa.org/sites/default/files/attach/2017/05/rotating-crops-report-ucs-2017.pdf 4. This Amazing New Milk Is Going to Change Everything (Mother Jones): https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2018/05/this-amazing-new-milk-is-going-to-change-everything/ 5. Reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers (Poore and Nemecek): https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:b0b53649-5e93-4415-bf07-6b0b1227172f/download_file?file_format=pdf&safe_filename=Reducing_foods_environment_impacts_Science%2B360%2B6392%2B987%2B-%2BAccepted%2BManuscript.pdf&type_of_work=Journal+article 7. Drought Management for California Almonds (University of California): https://anrcatalog.ucanr.edu/pdf/8515.pdf 8. A Global Assessment of the Water Footprint of Farm Animal Products (Mekonnen and Hoekstra): https://waterfootprint.org/media/downloads/Mekonnen-Hoekstra-2012-WaterFootprintFarmAnimalProducts.pdf