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America’s largest milk producer files for bankruptcy
- kpU8efre7r 7y agoI love cow's milk but only buy local so I imagine this hurts large factory dairy farms. With that said, I doubt I could ever bring myself to stop drinking ethically sourced milk. All of these plant based milks are overly processed, expensive, and fortified with a bunch of nutrient junk that is lacking.
- tayleeganj 7y agothey just add Vit D right is that so bad?
- elhudy 7y ago...and dont get me started on the iodine added to my salt!
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoThey aren't recapturing the cow farts.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mirekrusin 7y agoIt makes cows sad.
- MaximumYComb 7y agoB12 is a big one here too
- blondin 7y agowell, can't remember where i saw it but almond milk seemed to have been at the top spot for a while now.
- ilaksh 7y agoI love almond milk. Unfortunately, almonds are now evil. By the way, Goliath is a great show.
- igetspam 7y agoAlmond milk requires a lot of water to produce but it still take significantly less water to produce than cow milk. Even if you take into account the potential for meat (which is ridiculous because milling cows aren't typical steaks), the amount water used to sustain a cow (through drinking and watering plants) is huge. If your options are cow vs almond and you want to choose the lesser of evils and only care about the negatives of the almond (water) it's still less evil than cow milk.
- the_gastropod 7y ago> All of these plant based milks are overly processed, expensive, and fortified with a bunch of nutrient junk that is lacking. You can make your own very easily. Oat milk, for example, requires you to: 1. Put rolled oats into a blender 2. Put water in blender 3. Blend 4. Pour through a strainer into a container 5. Drink up It’s dirt cheap, easy as can be, tastes great, and has no “nutrient junk”. And if you’re so inclined, you can usually buy rolled oats in the bulk bins in most grocery stores, so you can cut out unnecessary packaging too! ETA: Putting a pitted date in for every ~2 cups of water also adds just enough sweetness to mimic the big manufacturers like Oatly and whatnot. Adding coconut flakes and/or cashews can also bump up the fattiness a bit, which is handy for a frothable “barista” style.
- bluedino 7y agoThat's also...not milk.
- Spivak 7y agoIt’s as much milk as turkey bacon is bacon. Food is labeled based on its culinary classification. Something can be culinarily milk without coming out of a teat.
- naniwaduni 7y agoThey're not even remotely substitutable. Different plant milks aren't even culinarily substitutable for each other. It's like substituting vinegar for cooking wine: broadly speaking, it'll usually work, but they're really not the same thing. "milk" is more of a visual descriptor than a culinary classification.
- rootw0rm 7y agoI don't know what kind of cooking you do, but in my kitchen substituting vinegar for wine would be considered food-crime.
- kawsper 7y agoDo you avoid dairy when eating out, or inquire the restaurant about where they buy it from?
- girvo 7y agoThis style of "gotcha" holier-than-thou bad-faith arguments frustrates me. One doesn't need to go from being a straight omnivore to a Level 5 vegan that doesn't eat anything with a shadow for changing a diet in large part being a good thing. Perfect is the enemy of the good in our line of work, what makes diet any different? One should strive to do the best they can within their location, health, dietary framework and ethical choices. It's as simple as that.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoThe problem is that orthorexics are enacting punitive policies that make it harder to buy cheaper food that is perfectly fine to consume.
- kian 7y agoorthorexia - what a fascinating word!
- mlthoughts2018 7y agoI disagree that plant based milks are overly processed or that, with fortification, the nutritional profile is significantly different than ethically sourced cow’s milk. I can agree that _some brands_ suffer the problems you mention, but other brands that are easy to find don’t differ significantly in nutrition profile or calorie density from cow’s milk. Unsweetened Oatly for instance matches up very well, with the most significant detractor being a bit less protein per serving than similar cow’s milk (but also the benefit of fewer calories per serving). I do agree that plant based milks are often more expensive though.
- MaximumYComb 7y agoA lot of them are fortified with nutrients that are lacking from a vegan diet, i.e. B12, D, etc. I don't think the nutrients in them are meant for most people but are meant for a certain demographic who consumes this product.
- TrisMcC 7y agoVitamin D is lacking in all diets. The only meat that has any measurable D is some fish but one cannot maintain an optimal level on fish alone. Dairy milk is commonly fortified with Vitamin D. Some mushrooms, if left in the sun, also have vitamin D. Vitamin D comes from the sun.
- consp 7y agoYou could try free roaming chicken eggs if you do not prefer fish or mushrooms. The yolk contains quite some vitamin D.
- htor 7y agobut, there is no harm in getting an extra b12 dose for meat consumers as well! plant-based milks are not meant only for plant-eaters (to put it simply) they are of course meant for everyone
- hervature 7y agoCow's milk is so processed that it needs to be refortified with vitamin D because it was destroyed in the process and the calcium would be useless without the added vitamin D.
- refurb 7y agoHuh? That’s not true at all. Vitamin D was added to milk as a part of public health policy to prevent rickets since milk consumption was near universal.[1] [1] https://phpa.health.maryland.gov/OEHFP/OFPCHS/Milk/Shared%20Documents/DPC053_Vitamin_AD_Fortification_Fluid_Milk.pdf https://phpa.health.maryland.gov/OEHFP/OFPCHS/Milk/Shared%20...
- hervature 7y agoOk, I admit, saying it gets destroyed was a poor choice of words. But from your article: >> Although milk as it comes from the cow is a poor source of vitamin D, fortified milk is considered an excellent source, especially because of its calcium content. Other foods considered good dietary sources of vitamin D are relatively rare but do include fatty fish, eggs and liver. Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin. As for the "destroyed" part of my comment, I meant that both it and vitamin A are fat soluble. So when you "skim" the milk, you lose lots of the vitamins. You lose so much, that vitamin A has to be re-added. Again from your article: >> As skim and lower fat milks became popular, the reduction of vitamin A levels with fat reduction became an issue since whole milk was considered a good source of vitamin A. TL;DR - I should've said vitamin A but got lazy/greedy. Vitamin D, while subject to the same problem as vitamin A, is added as refurb explains.
- adtac 7y agoPeer-reviewed sources please? I'd love for this to be true, I can show this to anyone who brings up the "but what about all the vitamin D you're missing?" argument.
- hervature 7y agoSee refurb's sibling comment and my reply. They have the actual source.
- TheHypnotist 7y agoI prefer almond milk and have been drinking it for 5+ years now. Luckily most stores carry their own brand of Almond milk now which usually costs 25% less than Almond Breeze or a similar brand.
- jamil7 7y agoSorry but there is no such thing as ethical consumption of cow milk.
- corodra 7y agoThere's also no such thing as an ethical person. Somewhere on the economic scale, in any country, a person's happiness is derived from another's suffering. Africa's cocoa farming. Sugar cane farming and production. Foxconn treatment of workers on cellphones and other goods. Clothing and shoe worker treatment in China and Vietnam. Slave labor use in cobalt mining. But yea. I mean, let's gang up on cow farmers instead.
- sebsito 7y agoIt depends on your moral values which can be different. If you skip the simplification vegans are using to justify eating plants (they don't scream and run away when we're trying to eat them) you hardly can eat anything ethically.
- jamil7 7y agoPlants lack nerves or a central nervous system or the ability to directly react to their circumstances, at somepoint you have to draw a line somewhere and most draw the line there. Regardless, if you really believe that plants feel pain, you're killing a lot more of them by raising animals for dairy and meat.
- ars 7y agoI read elsewhere that there is a massive overcapacity of milk right now. It's part of the trade arguments between the US and Canada. So I suspect very low milk prices probably didn't help. Anecdotally it seems to me the market these days is for milk products like Greek yogurt and aged cheeses. Also, I was bored one day and watched a lot of dairy farm videos - it's become very automated, where just a couple of people can manage an enormous herd of cows, and the cows even have better living conditions than at typical farms. So that probably drives the massive overproduction as well since it's so easy to have a running farm.
- porknubbins 7y agoAnd the Greek yogurt and cheese don’t see to be getting cheaper. I understand like with 20 months aged parmesan that the warehouse time and labor probably far outweigh the milk as input costs, but yogurt cmon, I’ve made it myself for way cheaper (without economies of scale) but its still expensive for brand names at the grocery store (like $8 for big jar).
- thrower123 7y agoThe weirdest thing about Greek yoghurt is that it is so hard to find any that isn't ultra-low or nonfat. The only brand that seems to sell full-fat yoghurt is Cabot, at least that I've seen. It's wildly better, and usually far lower sugar.
- ses1984 7y agoCertain retailers stock only what sells in this highest volume which is usually the nonfat variety, costco for example. I started making my own full fat greek yogurt, it's pretty easy.
- hyperbovine 7y agoThat has not been my experience at all. Trader Joe's, for one, has sold full-fat Greek yogurt for at least ten years. It's in a blue and white container. Thicker than sour cream and will probably kill me at 50, but damn good!
- Causality1 7y agoThis has much less to do with the rise of plant-based milk than the article implies. USDA checkoff programs force diary farmers to fund marketing while USDA marketing orders set minimum dairy prices. The result of this meddling is an enormous oversupply of dairy products. The USDA buys surplus cheese to encourage domestic cheese production. They buy surplus milk and give it to food banks. The oversupply caused by this bizarre fixation was noticed decades ago and a warning was published in the Federal Register in 1983: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1983-08-02/pdf/FR-1983-08-02.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1983-08-02/pdf/FR-198...
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoBut when China does it...
- metaphor 7y ago> The oversupply caused by this bizarre fixation was noticed decades ago and a warning was published in the Federal Register in 1983: > https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1983-08-02/pdf/FR-1983-08-02.pdf https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-1983-08-02/pdf/FR-198... ...starting on p. 13, for interested parties.
- azinman2 7y ago> That's not the only problem Dean Foods has faced. Walmart (WMT), which was one of Dean Food's biggest customers, dropped them last year after building its own dairy plant. Burying the lead here... I’m sure that had an outsized impact on them.
- staticautomatic 7y agoI think you meant "lede".
- cfield 7y agoPerhaps.[0] Or perhaps not.[0] ----- [0] https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2019/lead-vs-lede-roy-peter-clark-has-the-definitive-answer-at-last/ https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2019/lead-vs-lede-...
- tptacek 7y agoReally, just, not. You can spell it either way; if you're writing for (or as) an editor, or just for the affectation of knowing editor jargon, "lede"; if in conversational English, "lead". (I write "lede" all the time, and it is totally an affectation).
- jcims 7y agoI just want to know what happened to dilemna.
- pen2l 7y agoI notice you tend to use semicolons more than anyone else I know. Is that also an affectation? I mean, are you sometimes reformulating your thoughts in order to avail yourself to the opportunity of using a semicolon? Because me, rarely does a thought come to me in a way which would be best communicated with the usage of a semicolon, but maybe that's just me and my thinking style.
- 7y ago
- stevespang 7y agoDates are way high in sugars. Glad to see cow's milk go, have you ever seen the stealth videos of agents sneaking into dairy milking operations ? Bleeding teets and utters - - all going right into your milk, you milk drinkers.
- xvx 7y agoGood riddance! The level of animal abuse and rape in the world just decreased.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- indigodaddy 7y agoThe articles indicates that Dean Foods owns the Organic Valley cooperative, which is not accurate. There is a 50/50 partnership between Dean and Organic Valley called Organic Valley Fresh, but Dean certainly does not own Organic Valley.
- radec 7y agoThanks for that info, I was curious
- projektfu 7y agoLet them go. It’s the consolidated milk marketers that, in my opinion, have driven most of the problems in the dairy industry.
- anthony_doan 7y agoTo be fair they filed for bankruptcy and arranged a loan to help keep the pension in place. I thought it was a nice gestures. Most story like these I've seen the tax payers end up footing the bill for the pension. A particular coal company that John Oliver's cover recently did the same thing.
- parrellel 7y agoWell, that buried the lede rather thoroughly. Walmart - it did throw them under a bus.
- dimino 7y agoWait why is Walmart a bad guy here? Walmart isn't obligated to keep these folks in business, relying on one customer is risky.
- parrellel 7y ago... I was typing up a long reply about the excessive power and influence of companies like Walmart, Amazon, or Apple (the app store) and the effects of companies pursuing vertical monopolies and monocultures, but, seriously, do I need to explain this?
- dimino 7y agoYes, but try to stay specific to this situation. How is Walmart obligated to buy milk from one specific supplier forever? You seem to want to go wide with this, but the question isn't a generic one; it's very particular to Walmart, milk, and the claim that Walmart is somehow supposed to buy from Dean Foods, or else they're acting immorally.
- parrellel 7y agoThe issue here from the article, specifically, is Walmart cut them out of the supply chain after building their own dairy plant - the buried lede, and literally the last sentence. So it follows: Walmart dropped Dean as a result of its continued efforts to vertically integrate its supply chain. This kills Dean. And given we are talking Walmart here, I feel pretty safe assuming it's the key actor in this situation, not the 50 some million dollar almond milk industry :P
- dimino 7y agoYes, those are the facts, but why is that a problem? Why is Dean the responsibility of Walmart?
- cies 7y agoAs a vegan I rejoice. Consumer's reduced interest in dairy is going to reduce cow's (and bull's) suffering significantly. Hurray! I look fwd to many more animal-cruelty-corp bankruptcies.
- gherkinnn 7y ago“How to spot a vegan”
- crististm 7y agoCows need to be milked or they will suffer. Animal cruelty is when you inject them with hormones and cause them mastitis as a justification to increase milk production.
- igetspam 7y agoCows need to lactate when they have calves. They're not unending milk machines. They're like other mammals: they lactate to help their young survive. If you don't take away their calf and beat it to death, it'll drink all that milk and the mother cower won't suffer one bit. So is it just the hormones that make this cruel? What happened to the calf and why isn't that cruel?
- oulu2006 7y agoand when you forcefully inseminate them over and over.
- Hitton 7y agoIt's not surprising at all. Dairy industry has for long time pushed various flavoured milk drink on schoolchildren and now with war on obesity it stopped being viable. There was long lasting myth about milk preventing bone fractures and osteoporosis and when someone finally decided to do a study on it [0][1], these claims fell apart too. Vegans are another factor. People drink milk now because they actually like, instead of drinking it for some dubious health benefits. And that's fine. [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9224182 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9224182 [1]: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/1769138 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
- mrarjen 7y ago> "accelerated decline in the conventional white milk category." Overall it's not looking like people are drinking less milk, they simply want more variety and this company seems to be having a hard time in all area's from Walmart to slowly upcoming alternative milk replacers. Seems also in part they haven't innovated enough in new types of product to draw more customers.
- Erlich_Bachman 7y agoVariety like what? Other non-milk white liquids? I think that is exactly what they mean that "conventional" milk is on the decline.
- mrarjen 7y agoOther non white milk type products, like milk based drinks with fruit flavors, protein drinks or breakfast replacement options.
- torgian 7y ago“Conventional white milk”? When is milk any other color?
- crististm 7y agoAlso "less sugary"?? Do they add sugar to shelf milk in US?
- esotericsean 7y agoYes they do, especially in lower fat milks like 1% or non-fat.
- _n_b_ 7y ago[citation needed] I've never seen this, or heard of it happening. (Except chocolate or strawberry milk.)
- freehunter 7y agoWhen it’s chocolate or strawberry flavored.
- Pete_D 7y agoLately, I've been seeing fancy expensive milk with a slight yellow tint on the shelves. Different type of cow, apparently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernsey_cattle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guernsey_cattle
- crististm 7y agoThe artificial increase in milk production by injecting cows with hormones takes its toll after how many years? 30-40? It did not matter that they (for your sample of 'they') caused health problems to cows - including mastitis - and it also did not matter that the side-effects of these hormones on human consumption were not fully considered. One commercial that I clearly remember was by one of those "farmers" saying that if you as a farmer do not inject your cow to increase milk production, you are simply leaving money on the table.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago>> Once a staple of the American refrigerator, milk has slowly fallen out of favor with consumers as they seek less-sugary or plant-based alternatives. Call me a clueless European bumpkin but I was a bit shocked about that. Milk in the US has sugar added to it. Another comment explains that it's particularly low-fat milk that has sugar added to it. But that's pointless. Supposedly one prefers low-fat milk because it's more healthy. What's the point of adding sugar and making it less ealthy again?
- puranjay 7y agoHere in India, when I was young, the milkman would bring his cow with him and milk it right in front of you. Just to prove to his customers that the milk was unadulterated. Maybe its childhood nostalgia, but milk has never tasted as good again.
- kaybe 7y agoHow do the logistics of this work? Did he bring one cow or several? Or is one cow enough to cover the sales of the day? Or is there a stash of cows nearby and he exchanges them? Are they on different milking time rhythms? So many questions. Can you elaborate a little please?
- lenkite 7y agoThis is still prevalent in small Indian towns and villages. There is a stash of cows nearby and he chooses a cow, brings it to the residence, you provide your wide-container/pail and he milks the cow at your veranda. Milk is served at only one time - early morning. You still need to boil the milk for several minutes to kill all bacteria.
- igetspam 7y agoToday I learned... Presumably those cows are treated quite well too. I've been stuck in cow related traffic jams before and I've seen how well they're regarded, so I can only assume milk cows are taken very good care of. Injections seem like they would be off the table because they're both not free and inflict pain. That means there are probably calves involved. Any idea what happens to them?
- thorwasdfasdf 7y agoThis is great news. Dairy, although it tastes incredibly delicious, is pretty bad for people's health. Dairy is very closely linked to Liver Cancer (the landmark china study), ovarian cancer, prostate cancer (very closely linked), diabetes in children, etc. In forks over knives they even sited one study that showed Dairy proteins (casein) could actually feed and active growth of cancerous cells. In experiments they were able to turn on and off the cancerous growth just by chaning the percentage of casein protein. And, lets not forget milk increases the chance of osteoporosis and bone fractures. prolonged ingestion of dairy leads to metabolic acidosis which causes the body to leach calcium from the bones increasing the rate of bone fractures. All that calcium in the milk can't be absorbed by the body anyways, it just gets pissed out of the body: they've demonstrated this in labs by measuring the amount of calcium that leaves the body after drinking milk. It's much better to get your calcium from natural sources. there's so many foods that are naturally high in calcium: https://kale.world/c https://kale.world/c (set the bar for calcium) leafy green vegetables, Oranges, potatoes, kidney beans etc.
- AnonC 7y agoYour claims are dubious. The Forks Over Knives study was on rats, not humans. That milk increases osteoporosis or causes the body to leach calcium from the bones are decades old myths that have no basis in science. Please check Dr. Michael Greger’s videos or lookup what some vegan dietitians who follow science have said. Myths like these cause more harm and eliminate trust. I say this as someone who doesn’t want animals to be harmed.
- thorwasdfasdf 7y agothe connection between dairy intake and bone fractures is undeniable. the countries with the greatest milk intake also have the highest number of bone fractures. And the links between dairy and cancer (especially prostate cancer) are also very strong: there are numerous studies making this connection ~ check out what Dr. Milton Mills has to say on all this, he knows what he's talking about.
- ohiovr 7y agoSkip the cows and just sell bottled water. Bottled water can cost more than milk.