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Maybe this results in replacing much of our dairy consumption with more environmentally sustainable plant-based alternatives? (Not almond milk, which is worse,

• war1025 7y ago
  The current push for plant-based alternatives to everything reminds me of the effort to replace butter with margarine and tallow with vegetable shortening. I believe the consensus these days is that butter is superior to margarine health-wise. Wouldn't be surprised if we see a resurgence in rendered animal fats for cooking as well at some point. The thing that is great about animals (ruminants specifically) is that they can take a feed source that isn't useful to humans (grass) on land that isn't tillable and convert it into a useful food source (meat / milk / fat). The whole idea behind margarine was a chemist figured if cows could get fat from plants, he could skip the cow and just get the fat from the plant. Very similar to current thinking on vegan meats, etc. Except it turns out that the end product was loaded with trans fats that turned out to be super bad for you. Oops. I would expect most meat alternatives to run into similar issues as we study them more.
  • rsynnott 7y ago
    > The thing that is great about animals (ruminants specifically) is that they can take a feed source that isn't useful to humans (grass) on land that isn't tillable and convert it into a useful food source (meat / milk / fat). While that's true as far as it goes, the reality is that most animals are not farmed that way; they're fed largely stuff grown on land that could be used to farm crops for humans (and indeed often stuff that humans can eat directly).
    • chrisco255 7y ago
      Crop land is more intensive than grassland. To grow crops today profitably, you have to use synthetic fertilizer and pesticides. So cows for example largely eat grass. They also get some hay and some silage (which is made from the stalks of corn, inedible for humans). Even soy beans, which are used to feed pigs and chickens, only about 20% of the bean is useful for human consumption so they already extract that (soybean oil) and use it in many products. The rest is used for meal, and fed to livestock.
• mywittyname 7y ago
  Most immediately this is the result of the trade war with China. The government has been pumping tens of billions into the agg industry. But most of this money is funneled to the big players to keep them from complaining too much, and it does nothing for the supply-side. So the small/mid tier producers have been hit especially hard. It could be that long term trends were headed this direction anyway, but the trade war has been devastating to the industry.
  • x86_64Ubuntu 7y ago
    How would the trade war with the Chinese bring this about? Asians are generally lactose intolerant.
  • waffle_ss 7y ago
    It's really not despite some popular papers covering that angle. Milk prices have been in a long downward trend long before Trump as dairy farms continue to consolidate into megafarms and vertically integrate.