Kat Gale’s Reviews > No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating > Status Update

The US government subsidizes the industrial meat and dairy industries for $38 billion per year; meat and dairy are socialized food industries with horrifying working conditions in a country that won’t give us Medicare for All or wipe away our student loan debt.

the future needs justice, reparations, the redistribution of wealth, and radical restructuring of who has land, who farms, and how land is used.

The planet needs the radical restructuring of land use and people need self-determination with regard to farming for the Global South, as well as for the Black and Indigenous people upon whose land the United States and other nations settled. Indigenous farming practices and agroecology are the documented ways forward, as well as a new economic system that isn’t built upon cancerous, endless growth.

What does it matter if Oatly is in every coffee shop if one of its stakeholders is Blackstone, a private equity firm also invested in a company deforesting the Amazon and led by a CEO who donated $3 million to a super PAC supporting Trump’s re-election? More vegan food doesn’t inevitably lead to a more just world, but it does let a lot of companies greenwash their money-making in its name.

Vegan and vegetarian food-makers are held to a higher standard than omnivore ones—that’s a fact, because by being dedicated to one particular facet of environmentalism and care, they are implicitly dedicated to more.

68% of the world has an issue absorbing lactose—why start the day with a stomachache if oat milk tastes just as good and is now just as accessible as dairy?

–oat milk is also super easy to make yourself

it’s [almond milk] actually been around since at least 1226 CE. That’s when almond milk was first mentioned in a manuscript by “the scribe of Baghdad,” Al-Baghdadi, called A Baghdad Cookery Book. Soy milk, called doufujiang, is mentioned in Remnant Notions from I Ya, which dates to around 1365.

The [IPCC] panel wrote, “Healthy and sustainable diets are high in coarse grains, pulses, fruits and vegetables, and nuts and seeds; low in energy-intensive animal-sourced and discretionary foods (such as sugary beverages).” The grains, pulses, fruits, and vegetables are less depleting to soil and yield more energy per calorie than animal-sourced foods.

The [IPCC] panel wrote, “Healthy and sustainable diets are high in coarse grains, pulses, fruits and vegetables, and nuts and seeds; low in energy-intensive animal-sourced and discretionary foods (such as sugary beverages).”20 The grains, pulses, fruits, and vegetables are less depleting to soil and yield more energy per calorie than animal-sourced foods.

“Throughout the Americas, colonization meant the transfer of land from Native peoples to Europeans, the death of millions of Indigenous people, rape of Native women, and the violent suppression of Indigenous knowledge, cultures,” Calvo and Esquibel write. “We recognize the importance of Indigenous knowledge and ways of being in the world and believe in the need to dismantle colonial systems of knowledge.”