I'm not big into vegetarian substitutes but oatmilk is legitimately delicious. It's good for lattes, cereal, whatever. I guess maybe not good for baking?
The thing that gets me is that the price of oat milk is so completely divorced from what it cost to produce. It's absolutely wild that oat milk, made with one of the cheapest bulk grains, is as expensive as almond milk, made with an expensive nut.
Almondmilk is mostly water and thickeners. A typical 32-oz carton uses around 12 almonds. You can tell by the protein content of all of these altmilks how cheap they actually are to make.
The only exception is soymilk which does actually have a lot of protein and also has a really long tradition. People have been making soymilk for over 2,000 years. American grocery store soymilk is quite different but you can actually go to an Asian grocery store and still find soymilk that has a single ingredient.
For baking: depends on the recipe. In one recipe of a sort of muffin style bread that uses egg to rise (no baking powder, yeast, etc), oat milk makes it not rise properly and you get dense bricks instead. Other recipes have been fine. YMMV.
(Though, I quite like the non-homogenized full fat milk with bits of thick cream floating on top too. Oat milk, while pretty good, got nothing on that. Perfect on the porridge for breakfast.)
I am a bit surprised that oat milk is as popular as it is, given that, nutritionally, it's a very poor substitute for dairy as it's mostly just more sugar and carbs with very little protein.
In terms of non-dairy milk, soy milk is basically the only one that gets close to the nutritional value of dairy (and a lot of the fear mongering about endocrine effects of soy are just wrong). Even almond milk usually only has a teeny amount of actual almonds in it, as it's primarily just added water and sugar.
I drink milk because a) I prefer flat whites to espressos and b) to make my cornflakes wet. In both cases I prefer oat milk and in neither cases do I care about nutrition. I’m guessing that’s the reason.
Makes sense. For me it was less about the health aspects of nutrition than the fact that I just feel a lot less sated when I drink protein-devoid plant milks. Corn flakes with oat milk is basically a big bowl of sugar with a little bit of oil and some vitamins sprayed on - it's not like it's a ton better with cow's milk but I'm not craving a "second breakfast" an hour later like I do if I have a breakfast that's primarily only carbs.
Soy milk actually has as much protein as dairy and less sugar. It has even more protein if you get the traditional kind. You can often find soymilk with a single ingredient at an Asian grocery store.
Not if it causes contact allergies with your mouth, as soy milk does for me. Same with coconut milk. I have to stick to oat, almond or animal milk. (Goat milk tastes pretty good too by the way.)
> and a lot of the fear mongering about endocrine effects of soy are just wrong
Farmed cow's milk contains enough oestrogens, progestogens, etc. that academics have argued (e.g. in the 00s) over the extent to which cow milk consumption affects human health. The macho crowd seem to think that it's implicitly obvious that the juice of a bean is more feminising than the mammary secretions of calved female mammals, from a lineage selectively bred to have massive udders. I don't understand this, but I do find it very funny. (From a distance. I like having teeth.)
That said, if there were a significant and obvious effect on humans from dairy (or substitutes), academics probably wouldn't have argued about it for so long.
The problem is not that milk is a mammary secretion. After all, boys and girls both drink mother’s milk!
The problem is dairy practices that keep cows pregnant for 9 months out of the year, every year, and milk them for 10-11 months out of the year, every year. !!
When you operate a dairy on a more natural rhythm you don’t get the elevated pregnancy hormones in the milk.
This is one of the reasons why goat milk is healthier, because they don’t do the same to goats.
> The macho crowd seem to think that it's implicitly obvious that the juice of a bean is more feminising
I’m not sure that’s true. But they’ve heard that soy milk has phytoestrogens in it, and that Asians tend to be smaller than Americans. From there it’s just math: 1+1 = 11
While I support their efforts to shift their industry toward human-consumption-grade vs animal feed-grade oats and more sustainable agricultural practices, they will have to also learn how to shape tastes (literally). I'm not sure that Americans are willing to shift their consumption from oat-fed animals toward oat-derived products. Realistically, they should plan on a generational scale project.
As this article indicates, the oat-consumption health fad has come and gone before (in the 1980s)- but it didn't make a significant shift in Americans' meat consumption. Arguably the only thing that will is higher prices of meat - which are now here, but for different reasons (drought, war-spiked energy and fertilizer costs, and now screw-worm).
The almond/coconut cream substitutes are my favorite but most coffee shops don’t stock them. Bought my own espresso machine because I got tired of dairy after effects when indulging in cold brews from coffee shops. Straight espressos are safer in that respect.
I eat steel cut oats every day but can’t really do oat milk. Not enough texture or flavor. I’d rather use Ripple in my oats for that little bit of extra.
> My dad realized that instead of paying the high rail rates past Thunder Bay, oats could instead be loaded into a Great Lakes freighter designed to haul iron ore pellets (like the ill-fated Edmund Fitzgerald). Lake freighters typically unloaded their cargo in Thunder Bay and had to sail empty to pick up more iron ore on the U.S. side of the border. If you could fill them with oats in Thunder Bay, deliver the oats to Duluth, Minnesota, and then load the oats on U.S. rail lines, you could substantially cut shipping costs.
The fun part about the “upper” Great Lakes is that some ships were built on it that can go through the Soo Locks, but not the Welland Canal. So they’re just stuck there moving ore (and I guess oats).
USDA[0] says that the US produces 1 million metric tons of oats per year, or 4% of global production. Sure, that is not the best, but clearly still in the game.
I don't drink oat milk, but man I love oats. Oatmeal is so good. Oatmeal cookies, oat crumble, goo balls, muesli, overnight oats, rolled, steel-cut, all of it. I make oatmeal sourdough bread that's like a meal in a slice, literally just put leftover oatmeal in the dough.
Just waving the flag for team-oat here. Thanks Canadian oat farmers!
This is one of those little things I’ve had trouble putting my finger on: the US eats surprisingly few oats. The U.K. eats more than three times as much on average. Which is probably one of the reasons I find US cuisine slightly uncanny valley.
Southern Europe doesn’t really consume much either, but most US food is closer to Northern European food.
In many ways, it's a story about far more than just oats.
US Ag policy is so, so screwed up. But with more entrenched interests than the US has Congressmen, and probably 10X that number of full-time lobbyists - good luck trying to fix it.
> In many ways, it's a story about far more than just oats.
Sure, and the story is about how Americans look at how they became the richest large country on the planet and endlessly ruminate on how they can have their cake and eat it too.
Oats declined as an American crop among farmers because there were more lucrative uses for the land. Literally it wasn't some grand conspiracy or external force, but simply that the crop preferred different climates and without needing it as a feedstock you could make more money growing soy or corn or countless other things.
But endlessly there are these sorts of "the children yearn for the mines" sorts of stories where Americans view anyone else producing literally anything as somehow unjustly depriving Americans. The rest of the world settled on putting the center of technology and arts and media and finance in the US, to hugely lucrative benefits for the US, with liberal free trade and IP protections and patent monopolies and a very healthy profit for Americans, but oh no someone else is making that low value crop and that needs to be undone.
"Data from the Ag Census cited by NAMA offer a compelling reason for the switch away from oats. Returns per acre are far higher for corn ($604) and soybeans ($544) than for oats ($111)."
Americans have some romance with the notion of "millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones". It's bizarre stuff.
> Americans have some romance with the notion of "millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones". It's bizarre stuff.
Screwing in little, little screws to make stuff used to be a pretty decent job in the US. Most people can be trained for assembly work, which really isn't the case for tech, arts, media etc.
Most of that work is super repetitive and some of it is dangerous and etc, etc. Lots of reasons not to like doing it, but having it available as an option was pretty nice. That's why there's romantic feelings.
> Screwing in little, little screws to make stuff used to be a pretty decent job in the US
Sure, I get the "romance about the past" notion, but it will never, ever be a decent job again. The clock isn't turning back, and the perverse thing is that in pursuing that "make it the 50s again" political agenda, Americans guaranteed your oligarchs are going to take ever more of the pie.
That isn't because Canada grows a low value crop. It's because people like Musk, Bezos and others are completely running away with the country while people vote against themselves chasing an absolute myth.
Fun fact -- the US goods trade deficit is literally the worst it has been in history, and every indication is it's going entirely in the wrong direction. But hey, at least Trump got a lot of bribes and you got your first trillionaire.
> Sure, I get the "romance about the past" notion, but it will never, ever be a decent job again.
That is a political thing. Pay the masses more money and they can afford domestically made products again.
It's not that difficult. Henry Ford figured that one out a century ago - when people had ample money, they could afford to consume. But when all money a company makes has to go to the stock markets because numbers must go up, there is no money left to redistribute to workers.
Look, my fathers and their five fathers were all tech/EECS/radio guys; I learned PCB and soldering and schematics informally.
If I had my druthers, I would've trained early and diligently for a lifelong career in Electronics Assembly, because that should have been a solid and stable industry/job market.
But I did not, and it is not, in these United States. Pity.
Why didn't you just research and actually provide the answer? Because you would find, quite quickly, that it's less than 1/10th of the difference, so instead just post some vague hand-wavy "but what if..." kind of open question.
And of course oats were subsidized as well. The US agricultural industry is basically soviet russia, and the entire system is hugely backstopped by the government, and an endless recipient of government welfare.
I thought this was a fantastic read! In a time when I get nauseated by all the AI posts, the section about how the author's father rejiggered the supply chain to import oats from Canada was an excellent example of hacking to get a better solution and perfect content for Hacker News IMO:
> Connecting Canada’s oat supply with U.S. mills was where my dad entered the story.
> In a business that measured volume in millions of tons, squeezing even a few cents out of the supply chain could be extremely profitable. My dad, a gifted mechanic, excelled at finding creative ways to move oats cheaper than the other guy. For example, Canadian rail lines could deliver oats cheaply to Thunder Bay, Ontario, but rail freight across the border into the U.S. was expensive. My dad realized that instead of paying the high rail rates past Thunder Bay, oats could instead be loaded into a Great Lakes freighter designed to haul iron ore pellets (like the ill-fated Edmund Fitzgerald). Lake freighters typically unloaded their cargo in Thunder Bay and had to sail empty to pick up more iron ore on the U.S. side of the border. If you could fill them with oats in Thunder Bay, deliver the oats to Duluth, Minnesota, and then load the oats on U.S. rail lines, you could substantially cut shipping costs.
> The problem was that Duluth’s elevators were built as a one-way spigot to ship grain out. Moving grain from a freighter into the elevator required a McGyver-esque solution. The grain company cut a hole in the side of the massive elevator bin so the lake freighters could pour oats into them, reversing the flow of grain from export to import. These kinds of fixes were how my dad made his living, and it’s how a supply chain was built.
I realize you were provoked and FWIW your GP comment did not sound like genai to me (and we do a lot of pattern matching these days). Still, please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
Also, one of the very, very many examples of strong, necessary, and useful collaboration between Canada and the United States.
Happy Fourth of July, neighbours down south. I'm eager to be buds again.
The only exception is soymilk which does actually have a lot of protein and also has a really long tradition. People have been making soymilk for over 2,000 years. American grocery store soymilk is quite different but you can actually go to an Asian grocery store and still find soymilk that has a single ingredient.
(Though, I quite like the non-homogenized full fat milk with bits of thick cream floating on top too. Oat milk, while pretty good, got nothing on that. Perfect on the porridge for breakfast.)
In terms of non-dairy milk, soy milk is basically the only one that gets close to the nutritional value of dairy (and a lot of the fear mongering about endocrine effects of soy are just wrong). Even almond milk usually only has a teeny amount of actual almonds in it, as it's primarily just added water and sugar.
And non-homogenized full fat milk is delicious.
Farmed cow's milk contains enough oestrogens, progestogens, etc. that academics have argued (e.g. in the 00s) over the extent to which cow milk consumption affects human health. The macho crowd seem to think that it's implicitly obvious that the juice of a bean is more feminising than the mammary secretions of calved female mammals, from a lineage selectively bred to have massive udders. I don't understand this, but I do find it very funny. (From a distance. I like having teeth.)
That said, if there were a significant and obvious effect on humans from dairy (or substitutes), academics probably wouldn't have argued about it for so long.
The problem is dairy practices that keep cows pregnant for 9 months out of the year, every year, and milk them for 10-11 months out of the year, every year. !!
When you operate a dairy on a more natural rhythm you don’t get the elevated pregnancy hormones in the milk.
This is one of the reasons why goat milk is healthier, because they don’t do the same to goats.
Source: I’m a farmer
I’m not sure that’s true. But they’ve heard that soy milk has phytoestrogens in it, and that Asians tend to be smaller than Americans. From there it’s just math: 1+1 = 11
I'm skeptical that this was a factor, because in total only 5% of oats are used for human consumption. 95% is used for animal feed: https://oklahoma.agclassroom.org/resources/agricultural-fact...
I doubt it was that much different back then. This relates to the "Oat Mafia" that the article responds to:
https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/provi...
While I support their efforts to shift their industry toward human-consumption-grade vs animal feed-grade oats and more sustainable agricultural practices, they will have to also learn how to shape tastes (literally). I'm not sure that Americans are willing to shift their consumption from oat-fed animals toward oat-derived products. Realistically, they should plan on a generational scale project.
As this article indicates, the oat-consumption health fad has come and gone before (in the 1980s)- but it didn't make a significant shift in Americans' meat consumption. Arguably the only thing that will is higher prices of meat - which are now here, but for different reasons (drought, war-spiked energy and fertilizer costs, and now screw-worm).
I eat steel cut oats every day but can’t really do oat milk. Not enough texture or flavor. I’d rather use Ripple in my oats for that little bit of extra.
Straight dairy tastes too weird to me now.
The fun part about the “upper” Great Lakes is that some ships were built on it that can go through the Soo Locks, but not the Welland Canal. So they’re just stuck there moving ore (and I guess oats).
https://saultstemarie.com/the-ultimate-list-of-1000-foot-fre...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Paul_R._Tregurtha
[0] https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/production/0452000
Just waving the flag for team-oat here. Thanks Canadian oat farmers!
Plus I cook oatmeal using oat milk.
Southern Europe doesn’t really consume much either, but most US food is closer to Northern European food.
Canada doesn't do any such subsidies so oats make a lot of sense. In fact, some years it's our most profitable crop, even outstripping canola.
US Ag policy is so, so screwed up. But with more entrenched interests than the US has Congressmen, and probably 10X that number of full-time lobbyists - good luck trying to fix it.
Sure, and the story is about how Americans look at how they became the richest large country on the planet and endlessly ruminate on how they can have their cake and eat it too.
Oats declined as an American crop among farmers because there were more lucrative uses for the land. Literally it wasn't some grand conspiracy or external force, but simply that the crop preferred different climates and without needing it as a feedstock you could make more money growing soy or corn or countless other things.
But endlessly there are these sorts of "the children yearn for the mines" sorts of stories where Americans view anyone else producing literally anything as somehow unjustly depriving Americans. The rest of the world settled on putting the center of technology and arts and media and finance in the US, to hugely lucrative benefits for the US, with liberal free trade and IP protections and patent monopolies and a very healthy profit for Americans, but oh no someone else is making that low value crop and that needs to be undone.
"Data from the Ag Census cited by NAMA offer a compelling reason for the switch away from oats. Returns per acre are far higher for corn ($604) and soybeans ($544) than for oats ($111)."
Americans have some romance with the notion of "millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones". It's bizarre stuff.
Screwing in little, little screws to make stuff used to be a pretty decent job in the US. Most people can be trained for assembly work, which really isn't the case for tech, arts, media etc.
Most of that work is super repetitive and some of it is dangerous and etc, etc. Lots of reasons not to like doing it, but having it available as an option was pretty nice. That's why there's romantic feelings.
Sure, I get the "romance about the past" notion, but it will never, ever be a decent job again. The clock isn't turning back, and the perverse thing is that in pursuing that "make it the 50s again" political agenda, Americans guaranteed your oligarchs are going to take ever more of the pie.
That isn't because Canada grows a low value crop. It's because people like Musk, Bezos and others are completely running away with the country while people vote against themselves chasing an absolute myth.
Fun fact -- the US goods trade deficit is literally the worst it has been in history, and every indication is it's going entirely in the wrong direction. But hey, at least Trump got a lot of bribes and you got your first trillionaire.
That is a political thing. Pay the masses more money and they can afford domestically made products again.
It's not that difficult. Henry Ford figured that one out a century ago - when people had ample money, they could afford to consume. But when all money a company makes has to go to the stock markets because numbers must go up, there is no money left to redistribute to workers.
If I had my druthers, I would've trained early and diligently for a lifelong career in Electronics Assembly, because that should have been a solid and stable industry/job market.
But I did not, and it is not, in these United States. Pity.
How much of that difference is "natural", and how much is the Federal Gov't spending $billions to make it so?
https://www.fsa.usda.gov/news-events/news/04-08-2026/usda-an...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_policy_of_the_Uni...
And of course oats were subsidized as well. The US agricultural industry is basically soviet russia, and the entire system is hugely backstopped by the government, and an endless recipient of government welfare.
> Connecting Canada’s oat supply with U.S. mills was where my dad entered the story.
> In a business that measured volume in millions of tons, squeezing even a few cents out of the supply chain could be extremely profitable. My dad, a gifted mechanic, excelled at finding creative ways to move oats cheaper than the other guy. For example, Canadian rail lines could deliver oats cheaply to Thunder Bay, Ontario, but rail freight across the border into the U.S. was expensive. My dad realized that instead of paying the high rail rates past Thunder Bay, oats could instead be loaded into a Great Lakes freighter designed to haul iron ore pellets (like the ill-fated Edmund Fitzgerald). Lake freighters typically unloaded their cargo in Thunder Bay and had to sail empty to pick up more iron ore on the U.S. side of the border. If you could fill them with oats in Thunder Bay, deliver the oats to Duluth, Minnesota, and then load the oats on U.S. rail lines, you could substantially cut shipping costs.
> The problem was that Duluth’s elevators were built as a one-way spigot to ship grain out. Moving grain from a freighter into the elevator required a McGyver-esque solution. The grain company cut a hole in the side of the massive elevator bin so the lake freighters could pour oats into them, reversing the flow of grain from export to import. These kinds of fixes were how my dad made his living, and it’s how a supply chain was built.
https://www.earth.com/news/banned-chemical-chlormequat-found...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html