5 ms·

My dad helped build North America's oat supply chain: Can it be remade?

91 points by surprisetalk 4mo ago

bell-cot 4mo ago
In many ways, it's a story about far more than just oats. US Ag policy is so, so screwed up. But with more entrenched interests than the US has Congressmen, and probably 10X that number of full-time lobbyists - good luck trying to fix it.
- llm_nerd 4mo ago
  > In many ways, it's a story about far more than just oats. Sure, and the story is about how Americans look at how they became the richest large country on the planet and endlessly ruminate on how they can have their cake and eat it too. Oats declined as an American crop among farmers because there were more lucrative uses for the land. Literally it wasn't some grand conspiracy or external force, but simply that the crop preferred different climates and without needing it as a feedstock you could make more money growing soy or corn or countless other things. But endlessly there are these sorts of "the children yearn for the mines" sorts of stories where Americans view anyone else producing literally anything as somehow unjustly depriving Americans. The rest of the world settled on putting the center of technology and arts and media and finance in the US, to hugely lucrative benefits for the US, with liberal free trade and IP protections and patent monopolies and a very healthy profit for Americans, but oh no someone else is making that low value crop and that needs to be undone. "Data from the Ag Census cited by NAMA offer a compelling reason for the switch away from oats. Returns per acre are far higher for corn ($604) and soybeans ($544) than for oats ($111)." Americans have some romance with the notion of "millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones". It's bizarre stuff.
  - toast0 4mo ago
    > Americans have some romance with the notion of "millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones". It's bizarre stuff. Screwing in little, little screws to make stuff used to be a pretty decent job in the US. Most people can be trained for assembly work, which really isn't the case for tech, arts, media etc. Most of that work is super repetitive and some of it is dangerous and etc, etc. Lots of reasons not to like doing it, but having it available as an option was pretty nice. That's why there's romantic feelings.
    - llm_nerd 4mo ago
      > Screwing in little, little screws to make stuff used to be a pretty decent job in the US Sure, I get the "romance about the past" notion, but it will never, ever be a decent job again. The clock isn't turning back, and the perverse thing is that in pursuing that "make it the 50s again" political agenda, Americans guaranteed your oligarchs are going to take ever more of the pie. That isn't because Canada grows a low value crop. It's because people like Musk, Bezos and others are completely running away with the country while people vote against themselves chasing an absolute myth. Fun fact -- the US goods trade deficit is literally the worst it has been in history, and every indication is it's going entirely in the wrong direction. But hey, at least Trump got a lot of bribes and you got your first trillionaire.
      - mschuster91 4mo ago
        > Sure, I get the "romance about the past" notion, but it will never, ever be a decent job again. That is a political thing. Pay the masses more money and they can afford domestically made products again. It's not that difficult. Henry Ford figured that one out a century ago - when people had ample money, they could afford to consume. But when all money a company makes has to go to the stock markets because numbers must go up, there is no money left to redistribute to workers.
        s1artibartfast 4mo ago
        American workers already lead the world in earnning and spending. There is a tiny list of much smaller countries that earn more, but they spend less. There is no option to Simply pay the masses more. A company paying Americans a healthy salary for putting in screws would rapidly go out of business.to one that imports from China. If you block imports, you just get more expensive and less stuff. Also, the entire Henry Ford story is entirely bullshit (look it up). Ford raised wages in the 1910s because there was a labor crisis and it was brutal work, so they couldn't keep employees. The average factory worker would quit after 3 months which was extremely disruptive. Also, the economics of the story make no sense. Even if the workers spent their entire pay bump at Ford every year, Ford would still be losing money on the idea. If a $300 raise was spent to buy a $300 car, the company only profits maybe $30 on the sale, so they are still in the hole -$270 on the raise. Workers would have to somehow spend more than their raise on cars every year.
  - bell-cot 4mo ago
    > Returns per acre are far higher for corn ($604) and soybeans ($544) than for oats ($111). How much of that difference is "natural", and how much is the Federal Gov't spending $billions to make it so? https://www.fsa.usda.gov/news-events/news/04-08-2026/usda-announces-2026-marketing-assistance-loan-rates-wheat-feed-grains https://www.fsa.usda.gov/news-events/news/04-08-2026/usda-an... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_policy_of_the_United_States#Political_and_economic_dynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_policy_of_the_Uni...
    - llm_nerd 4mo ago
      Why didn't you just research and actually provide the answer? Because you would find, quite quickly, that it's less than 1/10th of the difference, so instead just post some vague hand-wavy "but what if..." kind of open question. And of course oats were subsidized as well. The US agricultural industry is basically soviet russia, and the entire system is hugely backstopped by the government, and an endless recipient of government welfare.
      - downrightmike 4mo ago
        People like to eat, if they don't, there is no government
  - ButlerianJihad 4mo ago
    Look, my fathers and their five fathers were all tech/EECS/radio guys; I learned PCB and soldering and schematics informally. If I had my druthers, I would've trained early and diligently for a lifelong career in Electronics Assembly, because that should have been a solid and stable industry/job market. But I did not, and it is not, in these United States. Pity.
  - Amezarak 4mo ago
    > The rest of the world settled on putting the center of technology and arts and media and finance in the US, to hugely lucrative benefits for the US, with liberal free trade and IP protections and patent monopolies and a very healthy profit for Americans, The US is still the world's #2 manufacturer and it's still one of the biggest parts of the economy; 10x more people are employed in manufacturing than in the information sector. Moreover, manufacturing has been in a steep decline since the 1990s. The "romance" is people remembering well-paying jobs for people who are not interested in or cannot do tech, arts, media, or finance. Centering your economy on those things deliberately would also be very foolish. Besides the fact you end up with a few urban cores with the rest of the country hollowed out (like the UK has seen), they are all things that are very easy to shift to other countries if there's a small cultural wind change - Hollywood especially is not in a great position in terms of "enduring global market titan." At any rate it's absurd to say it's over and people should just give up on something that to this day employs so many people.
3eb7988a1663 4mo ago
USDA[0] says that the US produces 1 million metric tons of oats per year, or 4% of global production. Sure, that is not the best, but clearly still in the game. [0] https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/production/0452000 https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/production/0452000
- fleahunter 4mo ago
  [flagged]
hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago
I thought this was a fantastic read! In a time when I get nauseated by all the AI posts, the section about how the author's father rejiggered the supply chain to import oats from Canada was an excellent example of hacking to get a better solution and perfect content for Hacker News IMO: > Connecting Canada’s oat supply with U.S. mills was where my dad entered the story. > In a business that measured volume in millions of tons, squeezing even a few cents out of the supply chain could be extremely profitable. My dad, a gifted mechanic, excelled at finding creative ways to move oats cheaper than the other guy. For example, Canadian rail lines could deliver oats cheaply to Thunder Bay, Ontario, but rail freight across the border into the U.S. was expensive. My dad realized that instead of paying the high rail rates past Thunder Bay, oats could instead be loaded into a Great Lakes freighter designed to haul iron ore pellets (like the ill-fated Edmund Fitzgerald). Lake freighters typically unloaded their cargo in Thunder Bay and had to sail empty to pick up more iron ore on the U.S. side of the border. If you could fill them with oats in Thunder Bay, deliver the oats to Duluth, Minnesota, and then load the oats on U.S. rail lines, you could substantially cut shipping costs. > The problem was that Duluth’s elevators were built as a one-way spigot to ship grain out. Moving grain from a freighter into the elevator required a McGyver-esque solution. The grain company cut a hole in the side of the massive elevator bin so the lake freighters could pour oats into them, reversing the flow of grain from export to import. These kinds of fixes were how my dad made his living, and it’s how a supply chain was built.
danans 4mo ago
> Demand for oats increased in the 1980s when researchers announced that beta glucan, a type of fiber in oats, can lower cholesterol. I'm skeptical that this was a factor, because in total only 5% of oats are used for human consumption. 95% is used for animal feed: https://oklahoma.agclassroom.org/resources/agricultural-facts/ag-facts/oats/ https://oklahoma.agclassroom.org/resources/agricultural-fact... I doubt it was that much different back then. This relates to the "Oat Mafia" that the article responds to: https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/provide-food-and-water-sustainably/food-and-water-stories/oat-crops/ https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/provi... While I support their efforts to shift their industry toward human-consumption-grade vs animal feed-grade oats and more sustainable agricultural practices, they will have to also learn how to shape tastes (literally). I'm not sure that Americans are willing to shift their consumption from oat-fed animals toward oat-derived products. Realistically, they should plan on a generational scale project. As this article indicates, the oat-consumption health fad has come and gone before (in the 1980s)- but it didn't make a significant shift in Americans' meat consumption. Arguably the only thing that will is higher prices of meat - which are now here, but for different reasons (drought, war-spiked energy and fertilizer costs, and now screw-worm).
tokioyoyo 4mo ago
[flagged]
- simpaticoder 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - ButlerianJihad 4mo ago
    Constructive https://m.xkcd.com/810/ https://m.xkcd.com/810/
  - dang 4mo ago
    That's not allowed on HN - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.
- hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 4mo ago
    I realize you were provoked and FWIW your GP comment did not sound like genai to me (and we do a lot of pattern matching these days). Still, please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago
      Fair, but FWIW my fuck you comment was intended to be tongue-in-cheek and more of an attempt to show that I am actually a human.
moomin 4mo ago
This is one of those little things I’ve had trouble putting my finger on: the US eats surprisingly few oats. The U.K. eats more than three times as much on average. Which is probably one of the reasons I find US cuisine slightly uncanny valley. Southern Europe doesn’t really consume much either, but most US food is closer to Northern European food.
- joe_mamba 4mo ago
  [flagged]
ikidd 4mo ago
As long as corn and soybeans are subsidized via crop insurance, and propped up by biofuel mandates, oats will not be a popular crop in the US. Canada doesn't do any such subsidies so oats make a lot of sense. In fact, some years it's our most profitable crop, even outstripping canola.
goodroot 4mo ago
Kicked dairy about a decade ago. I'm grateful for oat milk. Also, one of the very, very many examples of strong, necessary, and useful collaboration between Canada and the United States. Happy Fourth of July, neighbours down south. I'm eager to be buds again.
- hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago
  I am a bit surprised that oat milk is as popular as it is, given that, nutritionally, it's a very poor substitute for dairy as it's mostly just more sugar and carbs with very little protein. In terms of non-dairy milk, soy milk is basically the only one that gets close to the nutritional value of dairy (and a lot of the fear mongering about endocrine effects of soy are just wrong). Even almond milk usually only has a teeny amount of actual almonds in it, as it's primarily just added water and sugar.
  - wizzwizz4 4mo ago
    > and a lot of the fear mongering about endocrine effects of soy are just wrong Farmed cow's milk contains enough oestrogens, progestogens, etc. that academics have argued (e.g. in the 00s) over the extent to which cow milk consumption affects human health. The macho crowd seem to think that it's implicitly obvious that the juice of a bean is more feminising than the mammary secretions of calved female mammals, from a lineage selectively bred to have massive udders. I don't understand this, but I do find it very funny. (From a distance. I like having teeth.) That said, if there were a significant and obvious effect on humans from dairy (or substitutes), academics probably wouldn't have argued about it for so long.
    - antonvs 4mo ago
      > The macho crowd seem to think that it's implicitly obvious that the juice of a bean is more feminising I’m not sure that’s true. But they’ve heard that soy milk has phytoestrogens in it, and that Asians tend to be smaller than Americans. From there it’s just math: 1+1 = 11
    - hammock 4mo ago
browningstreet 4mo ago
The almond/coconut cream substitutes are my favorite but most coffee shops don’t stock them. Bought my own espresso machine because I got tired of dairy after effects when indulging in cold brews from coffee shops. Straight espressos are safer in that respect. I eat steel cut oats every day but can’t really do oat milk. Not enough texture or flavor. I’d rather use Ripple in my oats for that little bit of extra. Straight dairy tastes too weird to me now.
- specialist 4mo ago
  +1 coconut cream Before switching to daily steel cut oats, I made "oat milk" for my daily smoothie. Rolled oats, water, and an enzyme (banana, honey, yogurt), quick frappé, let it sit in the fridge overnight. Add the rest of smoothie ingredients in the morning. (I love almonds, but they don't love me.)
Scoundreller 4mo ago
> My dad realized that instead of paying the high rail rates past Thunder Bay, oats could instead be loaded into a Great Lakes freighter designed to haul iron ore pellets (like the ill-fated Edmund Fitzgerald). Lake freighters typically unloaded their cargo in Thunder Bay and had to sail empty to pick up more iron ore on the U.S. side of the border. If you could fill them with oats in Thunder Bay, deliver the oats to Duluth, Minnesota, and then load the oats on U.S. rail lines, you could substantially cut shipping costs. The fun part about the “upper” Great Lakes is that some ships were built on it that can go through the Soo Locks, but not the Welland Canal. So they’re just stuck there moving ore (and I guess oats). https://saultstemarie.com/the-ultimate-list-of-1000-foot-freighters-on-the-great-lakes/ https://saultstemarie.com/the-ultimate-list-of-1000-foot-fre... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Paul_R._Tregurtha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Paul_R._Tregurtha
swed420 4mo ago
Can we get rid of the chlormequat while we're at it? https://www.earth.com/news/banned-chemical-chlormequat-found-in-popular-oat-brands-eaten-by-millions/ https://www.earth.com/news/banned-chemical-chlormequat-found...
tomvow 4mo ago
[flagged]
chickensong 4mo ago
I don't drink oat milk, but man I love oats. Oatmeal is so good. Oatmeal cookies, oat crumble, goo balls, muesli, overnight oats, rolled, steel-cut, all of it. I make oatmeal sourdough bread that's like a meal in a slice, literally just put leftover oatmeal in the dough. Just waving the flag for team-oat here. Thanks Canadian oat farmers!
- antonvs 4mo ago
  I’m with you. For beer drinkers, there’s also oatmeal stout - try Samuel Smith’s version, which is widely available and very good. Plus I cook oatmeal using oat milk.
  - garettmd 4mo ago
    I'm not a huge stout fan but Sam Smith's is pretty outstanding.
  - chickensong 4mo ago
    How could I forget oatmeal stout, I love it also! Nice one!
tomaow 4mo ago
[flagged]
- sbayg 4mo ago
  Why don’t you go elsewhere?
burnt-resistor 4mo ago
PSA: In the US, always buy organic oats because non-organic are typically laden with unknowable amounts of glyphosate residues as it is sprayed with it as a desiccant near harvest time to reduce harvesting costs. The root cause is America's sick agri corp industry imposes undeclared substances of varying toxicity on consumers without their consent because of a lack of regulation based on monitoring, enforcement, and the precautionary principle.

91 points by surprisetalk 4mo ago

In many ways, it's a story about far more than just oats. US Ag policy is so, so screwed up. But with more entrenched interests than the US has Congressmen, and probably 10X that number of full-time lobbyists - good luck trying to fix it.

llm_nerd 4mo ago
> In many ways, it's a story about far more than just oats. Sure, and the story is about how Americans look at how they became the richest large country on the planet and endlessly ruminate on how they can have their cake and eat it too. Oats declined as an American crop among farmers because there were more lucrative uses for the land. Literally it wasn't some grand conspiracy or external force, but simply that the crop preferred different climates and without needing it as a feedstock you could make more money growing soy or corn or countless other things. But endlessly there are these sorts of "the children yearn for the mines" sorts of stories where Americans view anyone else producing literally anything as somehow unjustly depriving Americans. The rest of the world settled on putting the center of technology and arts and media and finance in the US, to hugely lucrative benefits for the US, with liberal free trade and IP protections and patent monopolies and a very healthy profit for Americans, but oh no someone else is making that low value crop and that needs to be undone. "Data from the Ag Census cited by NAMA offer a compelling reason for the switch away from oats. Returns per acre are far higher for corn ($604) and soybeans ($544) than for oats ($111)." Americans have some romance with the notion of "millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones". It's bizarre stuff.
- toast0 4mo ago
  > Americans have some romance with the notion of "millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones". It's bizarre stuff. Screwing in little, little screws to make stuff used to be a pretty decent job in the US. Most people can be trained for assembly work, which really isn't the case for tech, arts, media etc. Most of that work is super repetitive and some of it is dangerous and etc, etc. Lots of reasons not to like doing it, but having it available as an option was pretty nice. That's why there's romantic feelings.
  - llm_nerd 4mo ago
    > Screwing in little, little screws to make stuff used to be a pretty decent job in the US Sure, I get the "romance about the past" notion, but it will never, ever be a decent job again. The clock isn't turning back, and the perverse thing is that in pursuing that "make it the 50s again" political agenda, Americans guaranteed your oligarchs are going to take ever more of the pie. That isn't because Canada grows a low value crop. It's because people like Musk, Bezos and others are completely running away with the country while people vote against themselves chasing an absolute myth. Fun fact -- the US goods trade deficit is literally the worst it has been in history, and every indication is it's going entirely in the wrong direction. But hey, at least Trump got a lot of bribes and you got your first trillionaire.
    - mschuster91 4mo ago
      > Sure, I get the "romance about the past" notion, but it will never, ever be a decent job again. That is a political thing. Pay the masses more money and they can afford domestically made products again. It's not that difficult. Henry Ford figured that one out a century ago - when people had ample money, they could afford to consume. But when all money a company makes has to go to the stock markets because numbers must go up, there is no money left to redistribute to workers.
      - s1artibartfast 4mo ago
        American workers already lead the world in earnning and spending. There is a tiny list of much smaller countries that earn more, but they spend less. There is no option to Simply pay the masses more. A company paying Americans a healthy salary for putting in screws would rapidly go out of business.to one that imports from China. If you block imports, you just get more expensive and less stuff. Also, the entire Henry Ford story is entirely bullshit (look it up). Ford raised wages in the 1910s because there was a labor crisis and it was brutal work, so they couldn't keep employees. The average factory worker would quit after 3 months which was extremely disruptive. Also, the economics of the story make no sense. Even if the workers spent their entire pay bump at Ford every year, Ford would still be losing money on the idea. If a $300 raise was spent to buy a $300 car, the company only profits maybe $30 on the sale, so they are still in the hole -$270 on the raise. Workers would have to somehow spend more than their raise on cars every year.
- bell-cot 4mo ago
  > Returns per acre are far higher for corn ($604) and soybeans ($544) than for oats ($111). How much of that difference is "natural", and how much is the Federal Gov't spending $billions to make it so? https://www.fsa.usda.gov/news-events/news/04-08-2026/usda-announces-2026-marketing-assistance-loan-rates-wheat-feed-grains https://www.fsa.usda.gov/news-events/news/04-08-2026/usda-an... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_policy_of_the_United_States#Political_and_economic_dynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_policy_of_the_Uni...
  - llm_nerd 4mo ago
    Why didn't you just research and actually provide the answer? Because you would find, quite quickly, that it's less than 1/10th of the difference, so instead just post some vague hand-wavy "but what if..." kind of open question. And of course oats were subsidized as well. The US agricultural industry is basically soviet russia, and the entire system is hugely backstopped by the government, and an endless recipient of government welfare.
    - downrightmike 4mo ago
      People like to eat, if they don't, there is no government
- ButlerianJihad 4mo ago
  Look, my fathers and their five fathers were all tech/EECS/radio guys; I learned PCB and soldering and schematics informally. If I had my druthers, I would've trained early and diligently for a lifelong career in Electronics Assembly, because that should have been a solid and stable industry/job market. But I did not, and it is not, in these United States. Pity.
- Amezarak 4mo ago
  > The rest of the world settled on putting the center of technology and arts and media and finance in the US, to hugely lucrative benefits for the US, with liberal free trade and IP protections and patent monopolies and a very healthy profit for Americans, The US is still the world's #2 manufacturer and it's still one of the biggest parts of the economy; 10x more people are employed in manufacturing than in the information sector. Moreover, manufacturing has been in a steep decline since the 1990s. The "romance" is people remembering well-paying jobs for people who are not interested in or cannot do tech, arts, media, or finance. Centering your economy on those things deliberately would also be very foolish. Besides the fact you end up with a few urban cores with the rest of the country hollowed out (like the UK has seen), they are all things that are very easy to shift to other countries if there's a small cultural wind change - Hollywood especially is not in a great position in terms of "enduring global market titan." At any rate it's absurd to say it's over and people should just give up on something that to this day employs so many people.

3eb7988a1663 4mo ago

USDA[0] says that the US produces 1 million metric tons of oats per year, or 4% of global production. Sure, that is not the best, but clearly still in the game. [0] https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/production/0452000 https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/production/0452000

fleahunter 4mo ago
[flagged]

hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago

I thought this was a fantastic read! In a time when I get nauseated by all the AI posts, the section about how the author's father rejiggered the supply chain to import oats from Canada was an excellent example of hacking to get a better solution and perfect content for Hacker News IMO: > Connecting Canada’s oat supply with U.S. mills was where my dad entered the story. > In a business that measured volume in millions of tons, squeezing even a few cents out of the supply chain could be extremely profitable. My dad, a gifted mechanic, excelled at finding creative ways to move oats cheaper than the other guy. For example, Canadian rail lines could deliver oats cheaply to Thunder Bay, Ontario, but rail freight across the border into the U.S. was expensive. My dad realized that instead of paying the high rail rates past Thunder Bay, oats could instead be loaded into a Great Lakes freighter designed to haul iron ore pellets (like the ill-fated Edmund Fitzgerald). Lake freighters typically unloaded their cargo in Thunder Bay and had to sail empty to pick up more iron ore on the U.S. side of the border. If you could fill them with oats in Thunder Bay, deliver the oats to Duluth, Minnesota, and then load the oats on U.S. rail lines, you could substantially cut shipping costs. > The problem was that Duluth’s elevators were built as a one-way spigot to ship grain out. Moving grain from a freighter into the elevator required a McGyver-esque solution. The grain company cut a hole in the side of the massive elevator bin so the lake freighters could pour oats into them, reversing the flow of grain from export to import. These kinds of fixes were how my dad made his living, and it’s how a supply chain was built.

danans 4mo ago

> Demand for oats increased in the 1980s when researchers announced that beta glucan, a type of fiber in oats, can lower cholesterol. I'm skeptical that this was a factor, because in total only 5% of oats are used for human consumption. 95% is used for animal feed: https://oklahoma.agclassroom.org/resources/agricultural-facts/ag-facts/oats/ https://oklahoma.agclassroom.org/resources/agricultural-fact... I doubt it was that much different back then. This relates to the "Oat Mafia" that the article responds to: https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/provide-food-and-water-sustainably/food-and-water-stories/oat-crops/ https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/provi... While I support their efforts to shift their industry toward human-consumption-grade vs animal feed-grade oats and more sustainable agricultural practices, they will have to also learn how to shape tastes (literally). I'm not sure that Americans are willing to shift their consumption from oat-fed animals toward oat-derived products. Realistically, they should plan on a generational scale project. As this article indicates, the oat-consumption health fad has come and gone before (in the 1980s)- but it didn't make a significant shift in Americans' meat consumption. Arguably the only thing that will is higher prices of meat - which are now here, but for different reasons (drought, war-spiked energy and fertilizer costs, and now screw-worm).

tokioyoyo 4mo ago

[flagged]

simpaticoder 4mo ago
[flagged]
- ButlerianJihad 4mo ago
  Constructive https://m.xkcd.com/810/ https://m.xkcd.com/810/
- dang 4mo ago
  That's not allowed on HN - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079.
hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago
[flagged]
- dang 4mo ago
  I realize you were provoked and FWIW your GP comment did not sound like genai to me (and we do a lot of pattern matching these days). Still, please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago
    Fair, but FWIW my fuck you comment was intended to be tongue-in-cheek and more of an attempt to show that I am actually a human.

moomin 4mo ago

This is one of those little things I’ve had trouble putting my finger on: the US eats surprisingly few oats. The U.K. eats more than three times as much on average. Which is probably one of the reasons I find US cuisine slightly uncanny valley. Southern Europe doesn’t really consume much either, but most US food is closer to Northern European food.

joe_mamba 4mo ago
[flagged]

ikidd 4mo ago

As long as corn and soybeans are subsidized via crop insurance, and propped up by biofuel mandates, oats will not be a popular crop in the US. Canada doesn't do any such subsidies so oats make a lot of sense. In fact, some years it's our most profitable crop, even outstripping canola.

goodroot 4mo ago

Kicked dairy about a decade ago. I'm grateful for oat milk. Also, one of the very, very many examples of strong, necessary, and useful collaboration between Canada and the United States. Happy Fourth of July, neighbours down south. I'm eager to be buds again.

hn_throwaway_99 4mo ago
I am a bit surprised that oat milk is as popular as it is, given that, nutritionally, it's a very poor substitute for dairy as it's mostly just more sugar and carbs with very little protein. In terms of non-dairy milk, soy milk is basically the only one that gets close to the nutritional value of dairy (and a lot of the fear mongering about endocrine effects of soy are just wrong). Even almond milk usually only has a teeny amount of actual almonds in it, as it's primarily just added water and sugar.
- wizzwizz4 4mo ago
  > and a lot of the fear mongering about endocrine effects of soy are just wrong Farmed cow's milk contains enough oestrogens, progestogens, etc. that academics have argued (e.g. in the 00s) over the extent to which cow milk consumption affects human health. The macho crowd seem to think that it's implicitly obvious that the juice of a bean is more feminising than the mammary secretions of calved female mammals, from a lineage selectively bred to have massive udders. I don't understand this, but I do find it very funny. (From a distance. I like having teeth.) That said, if there were a significant and obvious effect on humans from dairy (or substitutes), academics probably wouldn't have argued about it for so long.
  - antonvs 4mo ago
    > The macho crowd seem to think that it's implicitly obvious that the juice of a bean is more feminising I’m not sure that’s true. But they’ve heard that soy milk has phytoestrogens in it, and that Asians tend to be smaller than Americans. From there it’s just math: 1+1 = 11
  - hammock 4mo ago

browningstreet 4mo ago

The almond/coconut cream substitutes are my favorite but most coffee shops don’t stock them. Bought my own espresso machine because I got tired of dairy after effects when indulging in cold brews from coffee shops. Straight espressos are safer in that respect. I eat steel cut oats every day but can’t really do oat milk. Not enough texture or flavor. I’d rather use Ripple in my oats for that little bit of extra. Straight dairy tastes too weird to me now.

specialist 4mo ago
+1 coconut cream Before switching to daily steel cut oats, I made "oat milk" for my daily smoothie. Rolled oats, water, and an enzyme (banana, honey, yogurt), quick frappé, let it sit in the fridge overnight. Add the rest of smoothie ingredients in the morning. (I love almonds, but they don't love me.)

Scoundreller 4mo ago

> My dad realized that instead of paying the high rail rates past Thunder Bay, oats could instead be loaded into a Great Lakes freighter designed to haul iron ore pellets (like the ill-fated Edmund Fitzgerald). Lake freighters typically unloaded their cargo in Thunder Bay and had to sail empty to pick up more iron ore on the U.S. side of the border. If you could fill them with oats in Thunder Bay, deliver the oats to Duluth, Minnesota, and then load the oats on U.S. rail lines, you could substantially cut shipping costs. The fun part about the “upper” Great Lakes is that some ships were built on it that can go through the Soo Locks, but not the Welland Canal. So they’re just stuck there moving ore (and I guess oats). https://saultstemarie.com/the-ultimate-list-of-1000-foot-freighters-on-the-great-lakes/ https://saultstemarie.com/the-ultimate-list-of-1000-foot-fre... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Paul_R._Tregurtha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Paul_R._Tregurtha

swed420 4mo ago

Can we get rid of the chlormequat while we're at it? https://www.earth.com/news/banned-chemical-chlormequat-found-in-popular-oat-brands-eaten-by-millions/ https://www.earth.com/news/banned-chemical-chlormequat-found...

tomvow 4mo ago

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chickensong 4mo ago

I don't drink oat milk, but man I love oats. Oatmeal is so good. Oatmeal cookies, oat crumble, goo balls, muesli, overnight oats, rolled, steel-cut, all of it. I make oatmeal sourdough bread that's like a meal in a slice, literally just put leftover oatmeal in the dough. Just waving the flag for team-oat here. Thanks Canadian oat farmers!

antonvs 4mo ago
I’m with you. For beer drinkers, there’s also oatmeal stout - try Samuel Smith’s version, which is widely available and very good. Plus I cook oatmeal using oat milk.
- garettmd 4mo ago
  I'm not a huge stout fan but Sam Smith's is pretty outstanding.
- chickensong 4mo ago
  How could I forget oatmeal stout, I love it also! Nice one!

tomaow 4mo ago

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sbayg 4mo ago
Why don’t you go elsewhere?

burnt-resistor 4mo ago

PSA: In the US, always buy organic oats because non-organic are typically laden with unknowable amounts of glyphosate residues as it is sprayed with it as a desiccant near harvest time to reduce harvesting costs. The root cause is America's sick agri corp industry imposes undeclared substances of varying toxicity on consumers without their consent because of a lack of regulation based on monitoring, enforcement, and the precautionary principle.