Plant Milk Proliferation: Oat, Soy, Almond, and More, But Which Is Best?
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Why are there so many different types of plant‑based milks on supermarket shelves today?
You don't normally come to Gastropod for experimental Stockholm based music, but here you go. It's Portable Dogs with the song Choose Choose.
The grocery aisle. There's ten thousand kinds of milk. Come out. A soe. And something sounded like so. Oh ten thousand kinds.
Truly only a slight exaggeration. There are lots of kinds of milk and there are also lots of songs about them. Everyone's singing about plant-based milks these days.
Swap that milk for silk with that tasty
plant power. And you're feeling plenty good. Wow. Wow.
You too might have noticed that when you go to the supermarket, you can get all kinds of milk, and as this oat milk ad proclaims, many of them have no relationship to a
cow. Soy almond and oat are the usual suspects, but you can get rice and hemp and pea and cashew and macadamia and pistachio and coconut the.
The list just goes on and on. Take oat milk. About a decade ago, I'd never even heard of it. But then suddenly oat milk was everywhere. And some people were even willing to pony up around a hundred bucks for a carton. Why? What happened? The
whole plant milk vibe seems to be that they're healthy and good for the planet, but is that true? Are they better for us and for the environment than cow's milk?
All that plus the weird story of how we even came to drink cow's milk in the first place. This episode was supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics, as well as the Boroughs Welcome Fund for our coverage of biomedical research. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
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The question of what a plant milk is starts with why we call it milk.
You know, milk is really it's a white, nutritious liquid that generally speaking we obtain through another mammal. But as things have developed, really many different kinds of white, liquidy, nutritious Things have been called milks. Jet
Chen Fu, she goes by Wendy in America. She's a historian and the author of the book The Other Milk. Like she says, all around the world for hundreds and even thousands of years, people have been turning lots of things into milk. In the Pacific, they grated coconut and pressed that into milk. In North Africa, they made a milk from tiger nuts that eventually became known as horchata in Spain. In East Asia, people boiled.
Rice till it was dissolving and then strained it to make a white liquid. In North America, people pounded hickory nuts or pecans with water to make a nut milk that they used in cooking and fed to babies. Soy milk is another one of the earliest
milks around.
Well, using soybeans for food is a really long history, actually. Um it goes back at least a couple thousand years.
At first though, those soybeans were likely just boiled and eaten as beans, often mashed up into a kind of porridge or congee. Wendy says, Don't imagine delicious edamame you might have as a snack at a sushi restaurant.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why are there so many different types of plant‑based milks on supermarket shelves today?
0:02–6:00
2
What exactly qualifies a liquid as “milk” and how did cultures around the world create their first plant milks?
6:00–12:18
3
How did soy, almond and other early plant milks originate and why were they originally used more for cooking than drinking?
12:18–19:07
4
Why did people historically drink very little liquid cow’s milk and how did dairy become a staple in the 19th century?
19:07–25:49
5
What caused the 1800s milk‑safety crisis and how did that spur interest in plant‑based alternatives?
25:49–34:32
6
Who were the early 20th‑century pioneers (Kellogg, Henry Ford, etc.) that promoted plant milks and what were their motivations?
34:32–41:03
7
How did Oatly’s Swedish laboratory breakthrough turn oat milk into a coffee‑shop phenomenon and a global brand?
41:03–48:26
8
What does the latest science say about the health benefits and environmental impacts of plant milks versus cow’s milk?
48:26–52:31