For a while now I have been made substantially of oats. I have oats for breakfast, with nuts, seeds and fruit and… oat milk.
Oat milk on oats? Crazy.
What’s crazier though, by far, is huge tracts of land that could be rewilded or used to grow food that *we* eat, instead being given over to overwhelmingly female cows who are trapped in a cycle of sorrow and relentless exploitation to produce milk.
It is incredibly wasteful and intentionally cruel…
@urlyman For profit of a few...
…Although I didn’t eat meat for 36 of the first 56 years of my life, I did participate in this cruelty and idiocy by continuing to eat dairy.
And then I switched to oat milk and, admittedly harder, worked towards giving up cheese.
The oat milk thing was kind of like giving up meat in that I found myself thinking “What had all the fuss been about?” I just didn’t miss the cow juice. At all.
But…
…because we live in the stupidest culture ever concocted, the oat milk came to me in plastic-lined cartons. We diligently put these in the carton recycling banks but fuck knows what happens to them after that.
We’ve this month switched to a *much* better way of ‘getting our oats’…
@steve thanks Steve. Will buy 👍
I’m in the beginnings of collaborating with these folks https://ukwin.org.uk/
@urlyman I’m literally reading about incineration right now. It’s somewhat disheartening but I’m hoping that the book has a happy ending 😂
…That better way is Overherd, a subscription service where we receive pouches of dried oat milk powder. Each pouch has enough powder to make 8 litres and a bamboo scoop to use with the *glass* mixing jar that comes with the initial order.
There are still regrettable aspects, including that the pouches are plastic and the jar has a plastic lid.
That needs to be worked on. But it seems probable to me that it has a lower footprint than shipping cartons and then burning them
@urlyman hmm... I really like the idea. The pricing is just a little high.
Currently I have four cartons of my favourite oat milk brand for coffee - there is an enormous difference between the best and worst. Every time the supermarket across the road has it at £1.50 a litre instead of £2.10, I grab one if I have room in my fridge.
The subscription model worries me - it takes me a long time to get through 8l, so the non-sub refills are about £2 per litre including shipping. Still... I'm going to keep it in mind, if it's a good barista-type mix.
Cow milk and butter kind of grosses me out (as do eggs). Still an omnivore, but probably trending towards an early human diet - mostly veggie.
…Mark has pointed out this option to me. I’ll look into whether that’s offered in Portsmouth.
It would be good to see a full, thorough and independent analysis of the respective footprints of bottle delivery vs carton purchase and disposal va Overherd.
All of them will be better than traumatising cows for the sake of astonishingly low returns
…Thinking in the above a bit more.
An Overherd pouch which makes 8 litres weighs in at 820g and takes up the volume of about 2 x 1 litre cartons of oat milk from Lidl. But each Lidl carton weighs in at 1,050g.
So 8 x litre cartons weigh 8.4kg, taking up 4 times the delivery and storage space and a little over 10x the weight of a single Overherd pouch.
At £10.99 for a regular delivery, an Overherd pouch costs 26% more than the Lidl oat milk we had been buying…
…An empty Lidl oat milk carton weighs 40g so 8 of those is 320g of card fused with plastic.
When we’ve used up our first Overherd pouch I’ll see what that weighs.
I don’t know what happens to cartons dropped into Portsmouth’s carton ‘recycling’ collectors. I’ll find out
@urlyman pay someone to deliver the lidl milk to your door and it will become a lot more expensive!
How to get lidl to stock it and what would the price be there?
@urlyman Nice.
As our NZ* dairy industry figured out years ago, it makes no sense to ship water around. So dry it and reconstitute it. I little idea what the energy to dry a kg of (oat) milk is vs the energy to ship it but I'd confidently guess its more efficient once you go beyond a hundred miles (ish).
*probably just the global dairy industry TBF
@urlyman
In Manchester you can get it in glass bottles, from the milkman.
The regular milk delivery is a very valuable but largely invisible support to communities. That persistent presence can give security and alert to untoward things, like bottles building up on a doorstep.
And resource use is lower. And supermarket profits a little lower too?
The same is true in Bristol.
We get our oat milk delivered, 3 times a week, in glass bottles.
@urlyman me too. I switched to oat milk to lower cholesterol, and enjoyed the moral benefit of not supporting a rampant dairy industry
