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.
I can’t speak to health, but here’s some thoughts on the ecological reason.
All the studies (that I have found at least) look at global carbon emissions and land use in production of milk. This is an important distinction.
The US, for example, is the #2 milk producer in the world (arguably #1 if we’re only talking about cow milk). It’s also the #1 beef producer in the world. The US’s livestock methane footprint is barely a blip on the Global Warming Radar (6% of total methane from all sources). There are even ways to reduce the carbon footprint of cow milk further, but it’s important to note we are very much in the range where we could easily take action to fund offsets and make the dairy industry 100% carbon neutral in the US. You may not be from the US, and that’s not the point. The point is that a lot of European countries that consume milk are in the same boat, and countries that are not as efficient as that could be with some regulatory changes and technological improvements.
Flip-side. As others have said, alt-milks are a lot less “ultra-transformed” than you might think. It’s like calling chicken broth “ultra-transformed”. You could make your own oatmilk or almond milk. It’s not hard or “weird”. They’re just oats and water, or nuts and water.
Actually, found this quote about the health of milk. “if we’re looking at like the nutrient density versus cost, cow’s milk is always going to win”. TO BE CLEAR, the expert in this article is saying “plant-based milk is just fine”, and she agrees that some plant-based milks are comparable to cow milk if less balanced. She has a long explanation of “you really need to know what you plan to get out of milk”, pointing out that most plant milks are too low in protein, but that it doesn’t matter if you’re just using it to remove acidity from your coffee… but that for a vegan they’re just fine.
6% of all methane is not a blip, are you kidding? There isn’t one single easily solvable source of methane worldwide. There are many smaller sources and most of the larger sources are hard to replace.
Offsets are a scam, and offsetting would require more subsidies or make cow’s milk more expensive. Instead of offsetting something that we can easily replace with something less polluting, we can offset the things that are much harder to replace.
Is it though? I live in the Netherlands, and in Europe we have really high milk subsidies. As far as I can tell we have essentially no soy milk subsidies. We have the third highest milk consumption as well, with a long history of production and plenty opportunity for efficient production ar scale.
Despite that, home brand skim milk is €0.99/L with a cheaper brand available at €0.85/L versus €0.89/L for home brand (fortified and unsweetened) soy milk.
No, I’m not kidding. Methane is a moderate contributor, and we are one of the lowest contributors per-calorie, per person, whatever. Also, it would arguably be cheaper to just go carbon neutral with current cattle (which the cattle industry intends to do within 20-30 years) than to retrofit our entire grocery economy and re-educate (force) people away from it. Finally, it’s STILL a band-aid. US’s methane impact is only 20-30% higher than pre-colonial days (due to reduced populations of naturally-occuring animals like buffalo), and a mass-culling of cattle will be “helping out” by us merely having a lower-than-natural methane impact.
In your words “are you kidding?”. But I’m going to explain instead of being shocked. Carbon gasses are a closed system. If I buy a large area of non-arable dead land, keep cows in part of it and coerce a forest out of the other part of, I’ve created a carbon neutral arrangement. Hell, much less natural, I merely need to fund a carbon-sequestering operation to the same amount as the gas production and I’ve fully become carbon neutral. Genuinely carbon neutral. We could hypothetically go full coal if we could find a way to sequester an equal amount of emissions (but unlike meat, that would be a disgusting waste of money and the coal companies have no intention to do it. The meat industry absolutely wants to go carbon neutral, so that vegans can stop trying to make eco claims about them.
I can’t speak for the Netherlands, so maybe you have it different… In the US, dairy subsidies are generally a bit of a scam but so are most of their detractors. A large percent of farmers never see a penny (or sometimes have to pay in, see next paragraph). The price you see a gallon of milk on the shelf for is likely not going to go up much (if at all) if those subsidies go away. Executive bonuses will be cut.
The biggest scam of them I’m aware of in the US is the feed subsidy that makes up most of the complaints about dairy being subsidized. The fund is paid for in a large part by fees/taxes paid by farms on their meat/dairy production (people often miss that many farm subsidies are actually paid by farm-specific taxes), but only a few large cattle operations see any of them… and many of those large cattle operations have loopholes to themselves avoid the feed subsidy taxes.
Nice. I can’t get either for less than twice that in the US.