Normally I do not care much about what people choose to eat. What people eat is very much a personal choice and my main concern is that I and my family are not forced to eat that which is either hateful, disgusting or forbidden to us for religious reasons. Unfortunately there are a lot of vegans out there who believe that they do have a right to tell people what they should and should not eat. Some vegan activists, such as those from the group Milk Pour, have even gone so far as to go into high end supermarkets such as Waitrose and pour dairy milk on the floor as part of a dubious and wasteful protest against the dairy industry.

These militant and often very much middle class vegan activists make a number of questionable or even easily debunked claims about the benefits of plant based ‘milks’ whilst they are doing damage to and wasting dairy milk products during their protests. Some of the claims that these vegan militants make are based around a belief that somehow vegan milk substitutes are better for the environment and better for health.

The farmer and writer John Lewis-Stempel has waded into the claims made by vegan activists about milk substitutes in an article in Unherd magazine. What he has found is that not only are many of the claims about the environmental and health benefits of milk substitutes are wrong but that many of these milk substitutes are over processed and come from massive and very wealthy food companies.

On the subject of the environmental damage that almond milks create Mr Lewis-Stempel said:

While the media obligingly laps up the Milk Pour stunts, the heads of the alt-milk firms must feel like fat cats who have got all the synthetic cream. The protests are a convenient diversion from the crass environmental profile of their own products, now drunk by one in three Britons, and worth £400 million a year. Take almond milk. Or maybe not, if you value biodiversity — hell, even if you even fancy a drink of water. Industrialised almond agriculture requires five litres of the blue stuff to produce a single nut. A litre of almond milk drink requires 158 litres of water, or 20 times as much as dairy.

The author added that a rush to capitalise on the almond milk market by Californian farmers has caused drought and desertification and almond trees having to be dug up due to a lack of water with which to grow them. Also in order to get a commercially viable crop of almonds for almond milk the trees have to be kept in environments that require very aggressive weed suppression which means that massive levels of glyphosate weedkiller is needed. This has devastated California’s bee population meaning that bees have to be imported to California in order to pollinate crops. These imported bees often die from the weedkiller needed to grow almonds for the almond milk so beloved of the vegan militants.

There’s also a lot of money to be made out of exploiting the idiocies of the vegan movement. In the case of one of the big alt milk brands Oatly, Mr Lewis-Stempel continued:

People are getting rich off the faux white stuff. Although Oatly promotes itself as a folksy, right-on, climate-change-busting start-up, it is a $2 billion business, the world’s largest oat milk company. Top investors include that well-known friend of the people Goldman Sachs, and the equity group Blackstone. According to Bloomberg, the CEO of Blackstone, Stephen Schwarzman, donated $3.7 million to Super Pac America First Nation, which supported the reelection of Donald Trump.

So buying some oat based milk substitutes as these vegan activists do means that they could be supporting Donald Trump. Knowing the hostility towards Trump from many of the leftist vegans this is a delicious irony.

This is a fabulous article by Mr Lewis-Stempel and one well worth reading as it uncovers the stupidity and hypocrisy of these vegan militants. Vegan products especially dairy alternatives have their small place in the food supply chain. They can be beneficial to those who for medical reasons cannot digest dairy milk of any sort and for people like me who for religious reasons cannot mix milk and meat products together. For me soya milk allows me to make a religiously compliant Yorkshire Pudding but I recognise that this market of these alt milk products when used for these reasons is pretty tiny which is as it should be bearing in mind the environmental and other damages that come from producing many of the alt milks.