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Oatly: The New Coke?

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Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#251

Post by realityking »

formerly_proven wrote: post #215
Asooka wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We (consumers) are to blame No, the farmers are to blame. This is the kind of thing regulations solve. If we force the use of sustainable and ethical farming methods through regulation, like how we force producers to obey all other aspects of food safety and production, then the market will adjust to the new prices, whatever they may be.

Actually I think the fault mostly lies with discounters leveraging the fuck out of farmers to compete against other discounters. There's a EU directive being implemented currently that would prohibit discounters from selling below cost, and it's very necessary.

I would say the fault is with EU and its subsidies: https://m.dw.com/en/are-subsidies-driving-dairy-farmers-into...

Agriculture is a surprisingly difficult market. Part of that is an understandable desire of governments to maintain local production. Nobody wants to risk being cut-off their food supply.

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#252

Post by Nursie »

maxerickson wrote: post #243
NotOscarWilde wrote: post #38

A tangent on Canola and rapeseed oil: I have recently watched a Chinese Cooking Demystified video (I believe it was [1]) about the Chinese rapeseed oil and its comparison in taste and erucic acid contents to Canola oil, which is its only available variant in Western countries. The video stated a thesis echoed on Wikipedia's page on Erucic acid [2]: > Studies done on laboratory animals in the early 1970s show that eru…

What health risks do you imagine might exist? We can break down the composition of it very precisely and have lots of information about each molecule present in it. It's not some big mystery. And it's not invalidating for a safety study to be rat based if the rats are more sensitive to the molecule than humans...

But it may invalidate it if rats are unique among mammals in suffering any harm at all.

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#253

Post by Nursie »

rattray wrote: post #117
prepend wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is about the failings of Oatly, not the failures of milk. There’s lots of milk substitutes that aren’t as bad for you as Oatly. I read the comparison to milk as just a comparison to the baseline or what Oatly wants to taste like, not as an endorsement of cow milk.

Which milk substitutes are better? Especially in the sense that they wouldn't be able to accrue complaints from an assailant as dogged as this writer.

"Innocent" branded oat milk-substitute contains no added oil of any kind, so all of his canola objections would be moot there.

I guess it still contains oat sugars though, at 3.2g per 100ml (of 7g carbs per 100ml)

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#254

Post by dandanqu82 »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #214

I liked the article but it could have been much simpler and shorter. I believe that non-dairy "milk" can be healthy, but I look for a few things on the label: the package should contain almost no carbohydrates and no added oil. I just checked out our pantry, and indeed, the oat "milk" we have has more carbohydrates than I want, so that is off our shopping list. Other milk substitutes that I just checked met my criter…

The low fat version of Oat-ly has no oil added. It’s not like the company is giving you no choice but to buy a product with “controversial” ingredients.

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#255

Post by istjohn »

prawn wrote: post #173
seanwilson wrote: post #76

"Made for humans" also draws attention to the fact that the milk you're drinking from a cow is not being drank by the offspring of that cow like it normally would and many people don't realise you have to keep making diary cows give birth to get more milk. Newly born male cows are usually turned into veal in a few weeks and female cows are separated from their mothers so they don't drink the valuable milk. Milk givin…

I believe that some dairies use "sexed" semen to minimise the ratio of male calves. Doesn't detract from the separation, etc though.

I didn't believe you, but:

> The method works by staining sperm with a DNA-binding fluorescent dye. The bovine Y-chromosome-bearing sperm contain 3.8% less DNA than the X-chromosome-bearing sperm. Because of the dye, the male and female sperm can be electrically charged differently. This allows for their separation by a fluorescence-activated cell sorter (Seidel, 2007). The method is fairly accurate with ~90% of the sperm containing the desired sex (Garner and Seidel, 2003; DeJarnette et al., 2008). Sexed semen will contain a lower concentration of sperm per straw (approximately 2 million) than non-sexed semen (approximately 20 million) because the sorting process is relatively slow. Because of lower doses of sperm per straw, and possibly a negative effect of the sorting process, fertility of sexed sperm is typically lower compared with conventional sperm (Garner and Seidel, 2003; DeJarnette et al., 2008).[1]

1. https://dairy-cattle.extension.org/the-economics-of-sexed-se....

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#256

Post by jhardy54 »

seanwilson wrote: post #131
mcculley wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hosted a meetup on “dairy tech”. Before the presentation, I think I had an implicit assumption that cattle raised for beef were treated poorly. I came away realizing that cattle used for milk production suffer more. In the most efficient dairies, they never leave their enclosure, are kept pregnant continuously via artificial insemination, and are injected with hormones.

> I came away realizing that cattle used for milk production suffer more. I think you could certainly argue that. Beef cows are slaughtered at around 3 years and diary cows are slaughtered at around 5 years but after giving birth with their offspring taken away several times (both have about a 20 year life span). Personally, I don't understand how vegetarians justify it as being much different in terms of animal crue…

> Personally, I don't understand how vegetarians justify it as being much different in terms of animal cruelty. You're still paying into a system that's killing animals for your benefit.

I've been vegan for years and I wish people wouldn't take this position publicly.

I agree with you, but it's more effective to have lots of people consuming fewer animal products than a few people cutting out animal products "100%". (Of course it's never 100%, that'd be impossible unless you left society.)

Let's be optimistic about the amount of change that normal people can do instead of chastising allies for not doing enough.

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#257

Post by maxerickson »

Nursie wrote: post #252
maxerickson wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What health risks do you imagine might exist? We can break down the composition of it very precisely and have lots of information about each molecule present in it. It's not some big mystery. And it's not invalidating for a safety study to be rat based if the rats are more sensitive to the molecule than humans...

But it may invalidate it if rats are unique among mammals in suffering any harm at all.

That doesn't really invalidate a 'safe' result.

(it's not a particularly useful result at that point, I agree)

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#258

Post by gridlockd »

ianai wrote: post #174
cribbles wrote: post #145

I'm sympathetic to marketing counterfactuals, so I wanted to like this article, but its claims did not sway me. - The appalling environmental footprint of the dairy industry was never addressed. - The canola oil claims cited were nowhere near conclusive (see twanvl and NotOscarWilde's comments below). - The nutritional comparison seemed to me to be more or less trivial. Okay, it's got a higher glycemic index and simi…

For all the talk about fat content and quality, the topic of hormones in milk should be discussed. Cows load their milk up with hormones to stimulate growth in their calves. We’re not calves and don’t need stimulating. Further, modern dairy farms pump hormones into cows to induce higher milk production-thus more hormones make it into the milk in the container. There are even morphine-like compounds in milk and dairy…

> Ref “your body in balance” by Barnard

A vegan neurologist might be a bit biased...

What does he have to say about plant-based hormones such as phytoestrogens?

Also, what is wrong with a little bit of morphine in your food?

Re: Oatly: The New Coke?

#259

Post by thrill »

Bootwizard wrote: post #247
lapinot wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> cow milk is perfectly fine to drink for a good percentage of people There's no debating that milk is heavy to digest, more so than water infused with whatever you want (tea, rice, soy, oat, almond...), whatever your ancestry. You actually need some enzyme to cut it down so that you can metabolize it. This process doesn't exist for infused water. > The solution then is to just not drink milk, not substitute it with…

At least where I'm from in the US, there is no "bulk goods aisle" in the grocery. It makes it a hell of a lot harder to eat healthy because we have no alternatives to canned and packaged goods in many categories of foods.

Whole Foods does. There's also bulk grain stores most everywhere there's "regular" grocery stores, but of course far fewer because there's little demand for such. Bulk goods also trivial to buy online.
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