Plant Milk Proliferation: Oat, Soy, Almond, and More, But Which Is Best?

Gastropod

This Gastropod episode explores the history, environmental impact, and nutritional trade-offs of various plant-based milks—such as oat, almo

Key takeaways

• Plant-based milks have a long history dating back millennia, with many civilizations relying on them due to limited access to animal dairy.
• Almond and soy milks were historically used in cooking and medicine rather than consumed as beverages.

Main topics

• History of plant-based milks
• Environmental impact of different plant milks

Notable quotes

"You don't normally come to Gastropod for experimental Stockholm-based music, but here you go."

"Soy milk wasn't typically just drunk as soy milk. It had another purpose. Soybean milk was and is the first step to making tofu."

Conclusion

While no single plant milk is perfect across health, taste, and sustainability, choosing

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:02) You don't normally come to Gastropod for experimental Stockholm-based music, but here you go. It's Portable Dogs with the song Choose Choose. Speaker 1 (0:11) When I walk down the grocery aisle, there's 10,000 kinds of milk on the note and something sounding like a seal. Speaker 1 (0:37) Truly Speaker 3 (0:37) only a slight exaggeration. There are lots of kinds of milk, and there are also lots of songs about them. Everyone's singing about plant-based milks these days. Swap Speaker 6 (0:46) that milk for silk with that tasty plant power and you're feeling plenty good. Speaker 3 (1:00) You too might have noticed that when you go to the supermarket, you can get all kinds of milk. And as this oat milk ad proclaims, many of them have no relationship to a Speaker 2 (1:10) cow. Soy, almond, and oat are the usual suspects, but you can get rice and hemp and pea and cashew and macadamia and pistachio and coconut. The list just Speaker 3 (1:21) goes on and on. Take oat milk. About a decade ago, I'd never even heard of it. But then suddenly, oat milk was everywhere. And some people were even willing to pony up around $100 for a carton. Why? What happened? Speaker 2 (1:32) The whole plant milk vibe seems to be that they're healthy and good for the planet. But is that true? Are they better for us and for the environment than cow's milk? All Speaker 3 (1:41) that plus the weird story of how we even came to drink cow's milk in the first place. This episode was supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics, as well as the Burroughs Wellcome Fund for our coverage of biomedical research. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Speaker 1 (2:03) I'm Ina Garten. On my new podcast, Happy Hour with Ina, I'm inviting really interesting guests to join me for a drink and a fun conversation at my kitchen table in New York City. I'll be getting personal with chefs, actors, comedians, musicians, and writers I admire. So grab a snack, pull up a chair, and join us. Subscribe to Happy Hour with Ina on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes will be available every Wednesday starting September 16th. Speaker 1 (2:40) Megan Rapinoe here. This week on Why Are You Like This, I am talking with Roxane Gay. That's right, Roxane Gay. Roxane is a fearless writer and cultural critic whose impact goes way beyond her New York Times bestselling books. We dig into all the big moments of her life. And of course, she shares if she's more mommy, daddy, or baby. Check out the latest episode of Why Are You Like This wherever you get your podcasts and on YouTube. Speaker 2 (3:08) The question of what a plant milk is starts with why we call it milk. Speaker 7 (3:13) You know, milk is really, it's a white, nutritious liquid that, generally speaking, we obtain through another mammal. Speaker 7 (3:22) But as things have developed, really many different kinds of white, liquidy, nutritious things have been called milks. Speaker 3 (3:31) Jia Chenfu, she goes by Wendy in America. She's a historian and the author of the book The Other Milk. Like she says, all around the world for hundreds and even thousands of years, people have been turning lots of things into milk. In the Pacific, they grated coconut and pressed that into milk. In North Africa, they made a milk from tiger nuts that eventually became known as horchata in Spain. In East Asia, people... boiled rice Speaker 2 (3:52) till it was dissolving and then strained it to make a white liquid. In North America, people pounded hickory nuts or pecans with water to make a nut milk that they used in cooking and fed to babies. Soy milk is another one of the earliest milks around. Speaker 7 (4:05) Well, using soybeans for food is a really long history, actually. It goes Speaker 2 (4:10) back at least a couple thousand years. At first, though, those soybeans were likely just boiled and eaten as beans, often mashed up into a kind of porridge or a congee. Wendy says don't imagine delicious edamame you might have as a snack at a sushi restaurant. Those are boiled or steamed immature soybeans. A bowl of boiled and mashed mature soybeans is apparently a little less snackable. Speaker 7 (4:32) Generally speaking, the textual references suggest that it was not appetizing. Speaker 3 (4:37) And then another way you could prepare soybeans was to soak them and grind them and press out the liquid, which is white and creamy. But that first step doesn't get you a drinkable milk. Speaker 7 (4:46) You don't actually want to drink it. At that moment. In fact, if you drink the soy milk at that moment, it will probably taste both very astringent as well as cause you all sorts of stomach issues because it's really not edible at that particular moment. If you boil it, that's when you really get soy milk. Speaker 2 (5:07) Raw, unboiled soy milk has a couple of compounds in it, one that blocks digestive enzymes and one that's really astringent and bitter, and boiling neutralizes them. But the result still tastes a little beany. That didn't matter so much in Speaker 3 (5:19) the past because soy milk wasn't typically just drunk as soy milk. It had another purpose. Soybean milk was and is the first step to making tofu. You Speaker 7 (5:27) don't have to enjoy soybean milk as a food to get to tofu. Like you could just use it as an intermediary step, get to tofu and then just enjoy the tofu. Speaker 2 (5:34) Which is mostly what people did. Historically, Chinese people weren't regularly chugging soy milk as a liquid drink. Some did, sometimes. Wendy says it was typically seen as a warming drink for winter and a restorative drink for the week. Speaker 3 (5:48) Almond milk is another milk that has been around for at least a thousand years. It was mentioned in an Islamic medical text in the 8th century as a cough treatment, and it's in a cookbook from Baghdad from the 1200s. It was an ingredient in meat stew and in a dessert custard. Like soy milk, Speaker 2 (6:02) it mostly wasn't consumed as a drink. Almond milk made it to Europe via trade and also because at the time Spain was under Islamic rule. By the 1300s, almond milk showed up in cookbooks in England and France. It had become popular across Europe. Speaker 4 (6:17) Because the church had this long list of things that you couldn't eat on Holy Days. And Holy Days were about half the year. Speaker 3 (6:26) Mark Kurlansky wrote the book Milk, a 10,000-year food fracas. He told us that Catholics weren't allowed to consume any kind of animal product on Holy Days. So no meat, of course, but also no animal milk. Speaker 4 (6:39) Any milk recipe that was used on a holy day, which as they say was half the days of the year, they used almond milk. Speaker 3 (6:47) Mark says that, like in the Middle East, Europeans were mostly using that almond milk in recipes, not drinking it straight. Speaker 2 (6:52) This is kind of a weird thing because when I was a kid growing up in England, almond milk was not common at all. In fact, I don't remember seeing it on the supermarket shelves until much more recently. So what happened? Speaker 4 (7:05) They stopped using almond milk. Well, for a couple of reasons. One was the Protestant Reformation, so, you know, the Holy Days really didn't have a... weight that they once had. The Speaker 3 (7:17) Protestant Reformation mostly affected people in Northern Europe. This also happened to be where they had more access to dairy. Ditching Catholicism might have gotten rid of all those holy day restrictions, but that wasn't the only thing. Almonds were also expensive because they had to be imported to Northern Europe. Speaker 2 (7:32) And so by the 1600s, people mostly switched back to dairy for all their sauce and dessert needs. But just like they weren't drinking almond milk, they weren't drinking dairy milk as a liquid beverage either. Speaker 4 (7:44) Well, in general, people didn't used to drink milk. They used milk to make things, gruels and porridges and cheese. But a glass of milk was a... strange thing. I Speaker 3 (8:00) mean, a glass of milk is a strange thing to me because it makes me feel sick. And maybe that's why people didn't drink milk in the past. Most of humanity, except for northern Europeans, were and are lactose intolerant as adults. It's a common explanation for why people in China never really drank much milk. Speaker 7 (8:16) But Speaker 3 (8:16) that kind of reasoning Speaker 7 (8:17) actually doesn't really make sense, if only because they didn't know that they were lactose intolerant. Speaker 2 (8:22) Connecting digestive distress to earlier milk consumption is a modern idea. And Wendy says that historically, people would wouldn't have necessarily made that connection. But also, they didn't have a lot of milk. In Speaker 3 (8:32) the Middle East and in the Americas and in Asia and all those places where plant-based milks were first invented, it makes sense that they were using these milk alternatives because the animals they raised, like llamas or goats or yaks, they didn't produce much milk. And so people there didn't really have access to much animal dairy. But Speaker 2 (8:48) even in Northern Europe, where the cow was king and most adults were lactose tolerant, it's not like milk was flowing like water. There just wasn't a lot available. Speaker 4 (8:58) Nobody had a lot of cows. A farm might have three cows. And it was a seasonal thing because raising livestock is the seasonal thing. Speaker 3 (9:10) It was hard to raise cows. There wasn't a lot of spare food around to feed them a lot over the winter, which is what you need to do if you want milk in the winter. And the animals didn't produce much more milk than they needed to feed their own spring babies, just a little more. Speaker 4 (9:23) Milk was around in the spring and summer. It was like a spring treat. Speaker 2 (9:27) And what little milk there was was mostly turned into things that would last much longer than fragile, perishable milk. They pretty much all became butter and cheese. That's how Northern Europeans consumed almost all of Speaker 3 (9:40) their dairy. Dairy milk was like soy milk and almond milk. It was turned into something else. Basically, throughout history, almost nobody was just downing liquid milk of any kind. This was true even when dairying started to grow in Europe and then in New England over the centuries. But Speaker 2 (9:53) then, in the early 1800s, a new field of science popped up. Chemistry. And those chemists started figuring out what food was made from. In the 1830s, a British chemist called William Prout published a landmark book. He was the first to divide food into the three categories we know today, fat, carbs, and protein. And in that book, he said milk contained all three categories, and thus was clearly the most perfect and complete food of all. And as evidence, he pointed out that babies could live on milk alone. Mr. Speaker 3 (10:24) Prout didn't know about the difference between breast milk and cow's milk or the difference between what babies need and what adult nutritional needs are. He really didn't know much about nutrition at all. Basically, no one did back then. But this book did kick off more of an interest in milk. At the same time, due to social changes, it became unfashionable for upper class women to breastfeed. And lower-class women were increasingly working out of the home and often didn't have time to breastfeed. Speaker 2 (10:48) Women with a shortage of breast milk of their own had always fed their babies with some kind of substitute. But this moment in the mid-1800s was different. Cow's milk started to be seen as almost preferable to breast milk. It was something babies should be drinking. But there were some problems at the time. Speaker 3 (11:04) First, cow's milk was expensive. As we said, there just wasn't a lot of it, and most was stored by turning it into butter and cheese. But even more than that, by the mid-1800s, milk was dangerous. Speaker 4 (11:15) It was really terrible in cities like New York and Boston, where something like half the babies died. Speaker 4 (11:24) You know, a third to a half of the deaths in New York and Boston in the mid-19th century were attributed to drinking bad milk. Speaker 3 (11:34) almost unbelievable. Mark is saying that about a quarter of all the babies in New York and Boston died because of bad milk. Fresh milk was lethal, but not everyone knew what was killing their babies, and many people believed the authority figures who were saying that cow's milk was the best for them. Speaker 2 (11:50) There were a few different reasons why cow's milk got so deadly. Part of the problem was the cities themselves, which were growing really fast in the 1800s, meaning there were lots of babies that needed milk. In response, there was a boom in the urban cow population. Speaker 4 (12:05) What they started doing is they started building these dairies next to breweries. And the leftover slop from the breweries was fed to the cows, who lived this horrible life, chained forever in one spot, eating nothing but this gruel from the breweries, which wasn't particularly healthy for them. And so these are very unhealthy cows and they produce very unhealthy milk. Speaker 3 (12:30) This was known as swill milk. The people who owned the dairies would water it down and the water itself wasn't treated and was full of harmful bacteria and viruses. And then on top of all that, they'd add chalk to the milk to make it look thicker and creamier. It was bad. It made babies sick. Many died from swill milk. Speaker 2 (12:47) Then, as the railways were built, the urban dairies were replaced by milk brought in from farms in the countryside. The problem there was that this rural milk was traveling long distances, and there wasn't much in the way of refrigeration, and so any bacteria in the milk had plenty of opportunity to reproduce en route and, yes, kill more babies. And Speaker 4 (13:07)