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The idea that it costs more to put oats in a blender with an enzyme is more expensive to produce than breeding and feeding cows is pretty laughable. Non-dairy is only more expensive because of gigantic subsidies that simply don't need to exist in the modern era.
Edit: the number of you simping for a gigantic corporation is surprising. Oat water is cheap to make. Milk is not. You buy milk at the grocery store nearly at cost. You buy oat milk in branded containers in the yuppy-vegan-white-women priced section at gouging prices. Starbucks does not have costs like the grocery store lists their prices.
None of this is relevant the only point is if it costs the coffee house more. In other news vans that have wheelchair lifts installed are more expensive than those without.
I completely disagree because of the huge volumes that starbucks uses. They can just buy chobani and get the oat water at cost.
You have now justified imposing upon coffee shops based on a completely fictional world you have invented where maintaining non-dairy options doesn't actually cost more even though it on average does.
Look at the processes to create dairy and non-dairy ingredients.
Dairy can be done on the small scale, but it is typically done on an industrial scale where animals are reared and exploited in an extremely labor, water, energy, and space inefficient process. The outputs are raw milk which must be processed into different milk products and pasteurized then refrigerated and transported.
Compare that to oat milk.
Arable land is sewn and watered. It is tended and then reaped. Oats are processed in a crusher and kiln. They are then crushed again, boiled with enzymes, pasteurized, cooled and transported.
Which one really costs more? Everyone is focusing on price at the store but they aren't asking which product actually costs more. Dairy costs vastly more than oat milk and it is plain to see. The reason oat milk is priced higher is due to low volumes and grocers knowing they can rip off vegan white women which is their overwhelming demographic. The reason dairy milk is priced lower is due to enormous government subsidies and nearly a century of mechanization and optimization.
Why does this matter for starbucks? Because they can easily vertically integrate to remove the price barrier and instead focus on cost. Oat milk costs are extremely cheap when at larger scales like those of a corporation the size of starbucks. Stop focusing on how expensive it is at the grocery store level - it is not an apples to apples comparison to what huge corporations deal with.
I don't disagree that it could be cheaper if its price were determined by price of inputs. I disagree that it matters. No judge in this case is able to fix for some definition of fix the market they are simply deciding in the actual world where we live if its reasonable to force coffee shops to spend more and charge the same for milk alternatives. I assert it isn't. Coffee out and about is a luxury good and if it costs to much you ought to simply make it at home
Oh I don't give a damn about the whole starbucks v ADA bit. I'm just chuffed by the price of oatmilk being out of sync with reality
Concrete is literally rocks, it should be free right?
If you pause to make your product safe just because it costs you more to ensure your customers don't die, bear in mind that I would have formed a less than ideal opinion of you in my mind before I even met you.
Selling dairy containing drinks doesn't put your customers at risk. If they didn't offer non-dairy creamers and I was horrifically allergic to dairy I wouldn't say oh well I guess I have to shit myself to death today.
It's cheaper for Starbucks to buy Cow milk than oat milk because the dairy industry is very heavily subsidized. Starbucks doesn't make the milk.
Could Starbucks eat the pennies of cost difference to make sure everything's fair with no loss in revenue by moving prices around? Yes.
Were the cost increases they put on non-dairy milk just enough to cover those costs? No.
Did they add those costs to hurt people who can't have dairy? No.
But, does their profiting by charging more cost people who can't drink dairy more than people who can? Yes.
Regardless of their intent here we have a situation wheresome people must pay more for the same drink.
Let's not forget starbucks isn't in any way the good guy here. They're spending millions on Union busting so they don't have to pay their workers so they can afford to eat 25c or whatever. If they shouldn' have to, then should the individual? If you think the individual should, why?
So you are agreeing with the person you are replying to that non diary is more expensive?
Yes: At the grocery store.
No: At multinational commercial quantities.
If you say so
Prices for items at scale can be difficult to understand.
I suspect that the real "extra cost" comes from having the slight amount of extra space it takes to stock the non-milk, ship it, handle it and the extra time it takes the employee at the counter to make a different drink.
Not saying they can't just "eat the costs", but companies never do that. Everything is accounted for and has the 10%+taxes profit margin slapped on top.
If the usage of non-milk would increase, I bet prices would come down in coffee shops as well.
Not really Starbucks' jurisdiction tho
Eh... at their economies of scale I think the oat water would be far, far cheaper. They've vertically integrated quite a few ingredients - what's oat or almond milk to add to the list?
Re your edit, no one is simping for Starbucks, just common sense. You don't have to have milk with your coffee. For fuck sake, you don't even have to have a coffee.
Want something unusual in your coffee? Pay for it.
Not happy, about how much they are charging for it. Make your fucking coffee at home before leaving the house and put whatever you want in there.
We are not talking insulin prices here, let's get real.
Unusual? You should check your biases. Plant milks have been around for a long time (at least the 1400s), are anything but unusual, particularly when the majority of the world has intolerance to baby cow growth formula.
https://vinepair.com/articles/history-of-plant-milk/
Sure, and that why when you walk into a shop and ask for milk, everyone asks you "what kind of milk would you like"?
LOL, way to be taken seriously
Well, it is serious. Cow's milk is a formula that's adapted for the purpose of taking a small calf, and transforming them into a huge cow as rapidly as possible. Is it any surprize that we have obesity, diabetes, and heart disease epidemics?
You think milk is the cause why you have obesity, diabetes and hearth disease?
Look vegetarians and vegans have a couple of good points that can be used to get more people interested. Keep going calling milk whatever you called it, referring to 'murdered animals' and making up shit to explain obesity and no wonder you can't even convince your mum to take you seriously.
I love this, "If vegans weren't [x], we would..." ... what? Take us seriously, what do you mean by that? Are you implying that if only I would say the approved things, you would actually go vegan?! Is vegan discourse a Shin Megami Tensei dialogue tree game, where making the arbitrarily chosen, pre-approved word choices is the key to success?
And I suppose all those people who were saying, "all lives matter", were right when they said they 'no longer' support movements like BLM because a few riots happened?
Be real, you just want vegans to shut up and keep our heads down, so you don't have to have your animal abuse challenged.
Anyway it's not about what I think. The facts are that many things contribute to the rise of obesity and other western lifestyle diseases, including a sedentary lifestyle, poor diet (involving many factors), and possibly even things related to pollution. There is more than enough data to show, however, that the primary factor is animal consumption - including dairy. The Adventist health studies show this clearly, as well as many others.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2671114/
https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition/nutrition-information/health-concerns-about-dairy
No not go vegan, but yes take you seriously and engage in an intelligent conversation, you know not like I'm talking with an edgy 12 years old
Okay, let's talk language. Colloquially, in our age, the word 'milk' is most commonly associated with the somewhat thick, off-white substance that is produced by cows, or any other substance with similar culinary properties. When we hear or read the word, the natural thing that comes to mind is of this substance, and meaningfully, that it is an object meant for human consumption.
So if I, as a vegan, were to use the language that you want me to, it would mean reinforcing the idea that the stuff mother cows produce is a product meant for human consumption. You're trying to push me into complying with the linguistic framework that legitimizes your perception of reality, and your misconduct. I do not accept that as legitimate, and since 'milk' to me implies something for human consumption, only plant milks are milk by my definition.
I refer to the stuff cows produce in the most accurate way that I can - a specialized formula that is meant for the nutritional needs of calves, and most definitely not for human consumption. Baby cow formula.
In the same way, the rotting carcasses of slaughtered animals, and their mutilated body parts are not "meat", because meat also implies something meant for human consumption. Grains and legumes are my main source of "meat," because again, I do not except the distorted perceptions of carnism.
Now let's take this topic more broadly. Are the words vegans use merely 'edgy', or is it an attempt to encapsulate the totality of how monumentally bad of a predicament you carnists are putting us in? "Chick culling" sounds almost innocuous. Why don't you try looking up that term on YouTube, and see what that entails.
Are you aware that in the US alone, over 11 billion animals have been killed for food already this year? The basic definition of a holocaust (not to be confused with the Holocaust) is a slaughter done on a mass scale. People frequently lose their minds when a vegan refers to the mass slaughter of animals as a holocaust, despite the fact that it is truly the largest, perpetual, mass slaughter in human history.
That's not even getting into the environmental destruction, and pandemic potential of this holocaust that you're taking part in. Maybe you should check out the vegan communities and take more time to get educated on all the topics. You might come to realize that there is no language edgy enough to capture the full breadth of how awful carnism is.
https://animalclock.org/
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9cEEDbM_GvU&pp=ygUNQWxleCBIZXJzaGFmdA%3D%3D
Look, I am not "trying to push you into complying with the linguistic framework that legitimizes your perception of reality", I am telling you that language is important and you can't make words up or subvert the meaning of them, else society will not understand you at best, or think that you are just a lunatic at worst. Sure you can decide that for you "up" means "down" and insist that everyone else is wrong, but then you are probably wasting your time replying to others' comments on social media.
I get where you are coming from, you really care about your ideas, but so do antivaxers and lots of other radicalized groups that are just drifting off reality and, well most of society thinks they are just lunatics. I am not even a native English speaker but a few examples:
"Murder" is defined as the killing of a person. I understand why you are using it for animals but it comes off wrong, that's not what the word means, and the only use of it as an hyperbole (a karaoke singer killing a song) has the opposite meaning that you are trying to convey. There are plenty of words for describing the killing of animals and some of them are already loaded with meaning, it's not like "slaughter" and "butchering" are used lightly. You don't need to come up with your own vocabulary, that's like Trump saying "bigly" he looks like an idiot to a non-maga crowd.
The word "formula" refers is an artificial (formulated) human milk substitute, your use of it to refer to "cow's milk" sounds pretty ridiculous, particularly when you add another 3-4 words around it and when the rest of society uses the word milk to refer to cows' milk, or if specified, to other milks like goat or soy. Your example where you use "meat" to refer to grains is just bonkers; and describing meat as "rotting" is just silly, as technically so are broccoli that have been cut off the plan: specifying that any food is rotting while waiting to be eaten, while technically not wrong, makes the person you are talking to wonder what is going on in your head.
Based on the above, I am afraid it is merely 'edgy'. In fact it's worse, people that talk like this come through as they are either 12 years old trying to cause a reaction, or just lunatics. You are really not making any favour to your cause, and I will come back to that later because that is a shame Still on language, I am not sure in what world "Chick culling" sounds almost innocuous, it describes exactly what it is, quite perfectly, it's a horrible practice, do you really need to add any more words? One more thing that is quite annoying about radicalized groups is they tell you to check something up on Youtube or do your own research, I am very familiar with the concept of chick culling, I don't like it, you don't need to be vegan to know how certain industries work and suggesting it in that way is again off putting.
I am familiar with most of the arguments vegetarians and vegans use as I have been interested in tangential topics for a long time, I am passionate about environment, permaculture and food self sufficiency. Some of the points I actually agree with, I am against industrial practices like chicks culling, the way animals are treated in industrial farming, I agree that the planet would be better off if we all reduced meat consumption dramatically and if there were more vegetarians and vegans. I think that if someone is passionate about these and other messages they should try to convey them in a way that they can be absorbed by the rest of society. That is, if you want to convince anyone to marry your cause or part of it. And if you don't want to, why are you even wasting words?
The reason why I am particularly annoyed when people do this is that there are some topics that I would be interested to discuss like adults, particularly where I stop agreeing with veganism, and this is just off putting. Example, I have three egg producing chickens that are treated like pets, they have plenty of space, protection, access to food, water and treats, they play with my babies, and they drop one egg each every day that they quickly forget about and they proceed to ignore. I use those eggs to feed my family and to reduce our meat consumption with something that is organic, nutritious and (in my opinion) ethically produced with no impact on the planet. In fact, the contrary is true because those chickens eat my leftovers and I use their poo as fertiliser. I'd like to understand how many people are vegans because industrial farming is a horrible practice, and how many would for example still eat eggs if they were produced more "humanely" like I do, and the reason why I am interested is that i cannot conceive non-industrial farming without animals being heavily involved, at the very least for using their shit to grow plants. In short, there are some discussions I'd enjoy having, but every time a vegan engages they distort the language and they make the assumption that I don't know anything about industrial farming :)
Admittedly my language can be edgy, but I think you're being hyperbolic. Also, would you apply your logic about language to neopronouns? Because currently the common language is structured to reinforce gender binaries. Neopronouns are a challenge to this anachronistic, inadequate language. In the same way that vegan language changes are met with contempt and resistance, so are neopronouns. But that doesn't change that it's necessary. For example one thing that does need to change is the pronouns used for animals. 'it' is unacceptable, because animals are living beings, not objects. She/him/they is more appropriate. There's nothing radical about this.
Mind you the language that I'm using in this context is meant to be provocative. If I'm speaking to another vegan I simply refer to plant milk as milk, or specify exactly which plant-kind if I need to refer to one specifically. If I'm talking about the stuff that's produced by animals and I'm not trying to be incendiary, I simply refer to it as 'dairy'.
It's ironic that you're comparing the views of vegans to anti-vaccers, since you omnivores are likely responsible for more illnesses and death from diseases than they are. The majority of infectious diseases have a zoonotic origin, and much of that is the result of animal domestication and farming. Animal ag is also by far the single largest cause of the rise of antibiotic resistant diseases. Covid itself likely never would have occurred if we were a largely vegan world. And most pressingly, h5n1 - which has a 50-60% fatality rate in humans - is virtually guaranteed to become another pandemic if we are not taking every measure to shut down all bird farms as rapidly as possible. The fact that it hasn't happened already is frankly a miracle. Carnists who hate anti-vaccers are hypocrites in the extreme. (And yes, this means your chickens could very well be the death of you).
https://www.surgeactivism.org/coronavirusisjustthestart
The words 'slaughter' and 'butcher' work fine, but why not also 'murder'? Are you trying to imply that it's somehow sanctioned, or not wrong to kill an animal? It is wrong to kill animals, so 'murder' is apt.
Again, the baby cow formula thing is meant to be provocative. I used the language in that case to highlight, from a human health perspective, how it's no surprize that western civilization has the prevalence of diseases that we do - heart disease, diabetes, obesity - when we're saturating so many of our foods with a substance, or formula, that's evolutionarily adapted to make a calf into a much larger cow as quickly as possible. Incendiary maybe, but also useful in highlighting how something that most people consider "food" is really something not fit for human nutritional needs at all. You cannot consume dairy without 1) becoming addicted to it, and 2) inexorably ripping your life's trajectory in the direction of a lot of suffering from unnecessary disease and premature death. Something that does that is not food. This same logic applies to eggs, btw. Eggs might not be addictive like dairy is, but consuming them regularly causes most of the same disease onsets. That would make this my second reason why your chicken raising is a bad idea (both practical health related arguments). So if anything is absurd, it's to refer to animal products as food, when really they're more like poison to humans.
https://nutritionstudies.org/dairy-consumption-weight-loss-claims/ https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition/nutrition-information/health-concerns-about-dairy https://www.pcrm.org/good-nutrition/nutrition-information/health-concerns-with-eggs
"Meat" is a non-issue. What I've been seeing is a gradual supplanting of the word 'meat' with the word 'protein', anyway. For all we know, the use of the word 'meat' may eventually fall out of usage all together. I only make jokes about plants being the "real meat" to, again, provoke discussion. Like with dairy, I'm pointing out the absurdity of using language that implies that the rotting carcasses of animals are food, when in fact the consumption of animal products in general, including animal flesh, is the leading cause of death in industrialized nations. Poison. I also use this colorful language because carnists have this strange cognitive dissonance where, the slaughter that is done to animals is correctly recognized as the gore and abuse that it is (I've even been censored by mods on lemmy for posting links to the Dominion documentary), but carnists don't recognize the end-products as being that same trauma-infused gore. I am conveying a hint at the macabre nature of what you carnists force onto the rest of us. Vystopia. What you call "meat" is only carnage and systematic violence being carried out in the most casual, unconscious ways.
https://www.pcrm.org/health-topics/heart-disease
As a sidenote, flesh is rotting. You know how smokers are less able to smell exactly how strong the scent of tobacco is on themselves? In the same way carnists very often have a faint rotting odor, particularly when you have just eaten. Since going vegan one of the most visceral things I've experienced is that no matter how fresh a cut of animal flesh is, it always has a rotten smell. And technically speaking all high-protein foods putrefy, so while animal flesh is rotten, broccoli would be fermenting.
"Chick culling" does sound pretty bad. But anyone who doesn't know what that is, would never guess that it means that when they purchase eggs, they are paying for something where male chicks are separated and sent down a conveyer belt where they are systematically ground up into a paste en mass. Carnist language is like the sanitized language that Nazis used for their wrongs - it's clearly meant to downplay the true extent of atrocity.
Alright, now let's talk about those backyard chicken. I've already pointed out how for practical and health reasons alone, you'd be better off without the chickens or their eggs. Animal flesh, dairy, and eggs are all nutritionally package deals, and they're mostly the same package - things that our body can't properly process, and thus they are the primary causes of heart disease, our number one killer (as well as potentially other health problems like diabetes, cancer, and possibly autoimmune disorders as well). I would suggest finding and joining a whole-food plant-based support group. You'll quickly find that people routinely report dramatic changes in their health when they switch to wfpb. I don't just mean feeling good, I mean hard stats like their cholesterol levels dropping, body fat melting away, real results. Obviously anecdotes are no substitute for science, but it means something when the science and anecdotes are consistent.
https://adventisthealthstudy.org/studies https://nutritionstudies.org/the-china-study/ https://my.clevelandclinic.org/departments/wellness/integrative/esselstyn-program https://pmri.org/
Now ethics. Admittedly backyard chicken raising doesn't seem so bad at first glance. It's certainly significantly less cruel than commercial operations. But as the article I'm about to post gets into, is your chicken's own biology really compatible with producing eggs so abundantly? Like, you know it can't be a comfortable experience to lay an egg, right? One of the ways I've heard it described is that it's akin to a woman going through her period every day (with the addition of a relatively large object coming out of their body every day). That's not a comfortable life.
And also in the article, you have to think about how you perceive your chickens, and your motives for having them around. When you look at an animal of any kind, do you recognize that they have an intrinsic, moral right to life and the pursuit of their own wills and happiness in the same way humans do? Or do you permit their existence only because it brings benefits to you? Vegan ethics are not just about reducing or eliminating acts of cruelty and suffering. The core of vegan ethics is recognizing that all animals are here with us, not for us, and they have as much right to exist as we do, and for their own ways and reasons. We need to seek an end to speciesism, and raising backyard chickens for personal gain is a form of speciesism.
https://www.surgeactivism.org/backyardeggs
Lastly I have a basic Permaculture certification (for whatever that's worth). For the environmental side of things, what you're looking for is veganic gardening/farming/Permaculture. For most practices out there, it's not about keeping animals out entirely. What veganic growers do in addition to plant-based methods of soil building like composting, mulches, cover crops (eg., legume-based nitrogen fixing); is to have free-living symbiotic relations with animals. So vermicomposting, for example, is fine as long as your bin has no bottom and is open in the ground so worms can come and go as they please. Another option is putting up houses for bats, and occasionally cleaning them which brings in manure. The simple act of growing one oak tree on your property (if you have the room for one) can eventually provide a home for something like 300 species of animals. The key difference is the absence of captivity or exploitation of any kind.
https://spiralseed.co.uk/graham-burnett-%e2%80%92-path-permaculture/
https://veganpermaculture.org/
https://veganicpermaculture.com/