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.
Need to keep the ag subsidies flowing so that rural areas keep voting conservative
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The industry got too big and too reliant on subsidies. A reckoning will occur at some point, it’s just a matter of whether it’s announced ahead of time or surprises everyone.
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Every day the reckoning will be worse than it would have been the day before. That’s why it should be planned and not A) ripped off like a bandaid or B) have it fail on its own.
Right now the government is doing practically the opposite and reassuring and strengthening the bandaid despite the inevitable need for it to come off.
I get it. I’m also on board with UBI. Hell, I’m even a vegan that isn’t calling for an immediate end to all subsidies for the ag industry even though a vast majority of it is in support of a practice that I believe to be highly unethical and horrendous. But I get that it can’t change overnight, but that doesn’t mean to keep kicking the can down the road either.
The human cost then will be more than the human cost now. It just will be “future” humans instead of the current ones so they so keep supporting it and making it someone else’s problem.
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Ok, leave a note behind to explain to your children’s family why they’re in extreme poverty because some folks didn’t want to gradually remove a subsidy in a controlled fashion. Again. You’re just punishing more future people. But I guess since you don’t have to meet them, you’re ok with sacrificing their livelihood.
You will never get a UBI while large amounts are subsidizing specific industries. Wanna know where you can get that money though?
The thing is, I don’t even think we disagree that much. You just are taking the one approach I advocated against (but still argued would be better than doing nothing; ie keeping the subsidies) and pretending that’s my whole argument. I argued for gradual removal of subsidies to correct the market over time. You are advocating for a scenario that likely will never occur without some other large scale disaster or giant swing in public consciousness (UBI will never occur prior to ag having a market bubble pop… one will never happen during our life, one has a chance to).
“It’s not a good time right now” - the party in power at the time
Too big and too reliant on subsidies is a feature, not a bug. You want your farmers producing a fairly large surplus most of the time, because the harm resulting from a major food shortage is catastrophic. A widespread drought, disease, natural disaster, crop failure, or other shortage needs to be made up with other foodstuffs.
Subsidization incentivizes production even when market rates fall below profitability, which is what happens when production is significantly greater than actual demand.
Sorry, but that’s horseshit.
Taking away dairy subsidies would drive up milk and milk product prices, pushing more people to buy alternatives instead. Any loss of employment in the dairy industry is balanced by new jobs in manufacturing plant milks and dairy alternatives. This isn’t people being replaced by robots, it’s cows being replaced by plants. You still need pretty much the same workforce to package and distribute it regardless.
Only 1% of americans work in the primary sector and that is not only comprised of farmers. Furthermore, there are more farming products than dairy, oats for oat milk have to be farmed somewhere as well.
It’s not as if Democrats don’t also throw plenty of bones to farmers.
Even if the farmers themselves are likely to be relatively conservative, they’re such a politically sympathetic group that no one wants to be seen as “going after hard-working real American farmers!”. Things like the Iowa caucuses playing a huge role in national politics don’t help either (although the Dems have thankfully killed that).