Episode 10 - Sugar

This episode featured the inimitable Alexandra Sundarsingh, a PhD student in the History Department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Lex is an historian of food, migration, and labour. She is also part of the Canadian debate illuminati, which is how she and Kristen became friends. Lex highly recommends that you check out the book Sweetness and Power by Sidney W. Mintz – which Lex drew on for some of the information in this episode. (Actually, Lex wants you to gift this book to pretty much everyone you know; we’d endorse that).

We were really excited to link Lex’s expertise on the history of sugar to some of the present-day practices of the sugar industry. So, the research note below focuses primarily on modern human rights abuses in the sugar industry. There is also some information about sugar and the environment, which Kristen collected but did not discuss – like, y’all, we had been recording for two hours and we thought, ‘Let’s maybe save this for a future episode.’ But we’ve put the notes here just in case you want to know what we found.

Background

What is sugar?

Sugar (sucrose) is produced from two major sources: sugarcane and sugar beets. We did not talk about corn syrup (fructose) in this episode, but it could have (probably will have) an entire episode to itself. We also didn’t talk about maple syrup.

Sugarcane is a grass that reaches 10-20 feet. It grows in warm, humid conditions, typically near the equator. It is a perennial. Sugar beet is a 3-5 pound off-white root crop. It can grow in temperate climates with warm days and cool nights. More than 145 million tonnes of sugar is produced annually in 120 countries.

Here are some different kinds of sugar:

·      Granulated sugar: pure sucrose, the most common form of sugar;

·      Icing sugar: powdered granulated sugar with cornstarch to prevent caking;

·      Brown sugar: produced by crystallizing the golden coloured syrup (before purification?) or mixing molasses syrups with white sugar

·      Liquid sugar

·      Other specialty sugars (e.g. plantation raw, organic)

How is sugar made?

Sugar-making is a multifaceted process. Briefly, here are the steps of the process:

·      Sugar plants are cultivated and harvested;

·      Then they are washed and sent to sugar refineries for processing;

·      Processing sugar starts by slicing sugar beets or crushing sugar cane;

·      Then the sugar is extracted by essentially stewing the sugar in hot water to make a juice;

·      Next, the pulp is removed;

·      Then the sugar is purified using a lime solution and concentrated by boiling it at a low temperature;

·      After a thick juice is produced, it is crystallized, spun in a centrifuge, and dried/cooled;

·      Finally, the sugar is packaged and distributed.

There’s a really good video on sugar beet production from How It’s Made. If you are interested in making your own, here is a link to a DIY process. To be honest, though, it seems a lot less efficient than the manufacturing process. But hey, if you’ve got sugar beets on-hand, you do you. The fibre that remains as a by-product of the sugar refining process is used to generate electricity, or it can be manufactured into paper goods or pelletized for animal feed.

Where does our sugar come from?

Most of the sugar that we consume (60-70%) worldwide comes from cane sugar, while the remainder is from sugar beet. Depending on where you live, that proportion can be very different. Fun fact: sugar beet rose in popularity as a result of a blockade of French trade lines during the Napoleonic wars.

The top five global sugar cane producers are Brazil, India, China, Thailand, and Pakistan. If we’re talking about both kinds of sugar, the only major change is that the EU takes third place. Brazil alone accounts for more than half (52%) of the world’s sugar market. 

Almost all Canadian sugar (90%) is from imported raw cane sugar. The remaining 10% is beet sugar, mostly from Alberta. When we import the raw cane sugar, it is processed by Canadian refineries in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver.

Albertan sugar beets are processed by a Canadian company called Rogers Lantic – the product of a recent merger of an east coast sugar company (Lantic) and a western Canadian company (Rogers). All Canadian sugar beets are processed by a refinery in Taber, Alberta. If you’re buying Rogers sugar with a black stamp on the bag that starts with the number 22, you’re buying Albertan beet sugar. There is also some sugar beet production in Ontario near a processing plant in Michigan.

Canada’s sugar industry is essentially dominated by Rogers-Lantic and Redpath Sugar. There are Canadian sugar refineries in Quebec, Ontario, Alberta, and BC. Aside from the Taber facility in Alberta, Canadian sugar refineries all process cane sugar.

Labour Abuses and the Sugar Industry

Human rights and cane sugar farming

Historically, sugar cane has well-documented links to slavery. But what are the practices today? Well, in short: it’s not great. Child labour, forced labour, and bonded labour are still prominent facets of sugarcane cultivation today.

Children between the ages of five and fifteen are engaged in child labour on sugar plantations. They may work as unpaid family helpers or migrate with their parents to find work on commercial plantations during harvest season. In El Salvador, for example, Human Rights Watch found that nearly all of the boys aged fourteen and older harvested sugarcane. And it’s important to remember that this is dangerous work.

Sugarcane may be produced using forced labour in Bolivia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Myanmar, Pakistan, India, and Guatemala, according to Know the Chain. In Brazil, there are approximately 25,000 – 100,000 people in slavery, virtually all of whom are involved in agricultural work. Sugarcane production is one of the major sources of Brazilian slave labour. Most slaves work on estates in the extremely remove eastern Amazon region, occurring out of view of the population. As researcher Justin Campbell describes:

“Enslavement typically begins with a hired contractor, known as a gato, who recruits impoverished men from the slums of large cities or poor, rural villages. By offering cash up front and the promise of decent wages, he is able to entice these men to leave their homes for work on a distant estate. The men are then driven hundreds or thousands of miles to a remote ranch or plantation, where they are informed that they are in debt for the costs of transportation, food provided on the trip, and even tools. The debts are never erased; the illiterate workers have little recourse and are thus enslaved.”[1]

Research by the Conversation found that even among Bonsucro-certified sugar mills in Brazil (where workers are required to provide at least the legal minimum wage) workers’ earnings fall short of what is needed for a decent standard of living. Sugarcane is sometimes called the “hunger crop” for the poverty experienced by plantation workers.

And more generally, sugarcane workers experience negative health impacts. There was recently an epidemic of kidney disease across Central America, with rates rising by as much as 41% in some places (Nicaragua; 27% in Guatemala; 26% in El Salvador; 16% in Costa Rica). The suspected cause was heat stress from working in unsafe conditions on sugarcane plantations.

Canadian sugar beets and Japanese-Canadian internment

Canadian history: so fun! So many human rights abuses! Did you know that some of the Japanese-Canadians that were interned during WWII were forced to work on beet sugar farms? Well, they were. About 4,000 Japanese-Canadians were sent to work on sugar beet farms in Alberta and Manitoba to fill labour shortages (of about 12,000 total interned). Fuck you, William Lyon Mackenzie King.

Canadian sugar beets and the exploitation of Indigenous people

From the 1940s to the 1980s, thousands of Indigenous families were recruited to work on sugar beet farms across the prairies. Essentially, farmers would go into northern Métis reserved to offer families work harvesting sugar beets. Labour conditions were horrendous – 12-14 hour shifts with no food or water and very low pay. Living conditions were just as bad. In some cases, families received no accommodations and slept in their trucks. In other cases, they slept in tents. Indigenous workers were also subject to racism. Families continued to return because they had few other alternatives. The Department of Indian Affairs would cut off social assistance and apprehend children if they did not work on the sugar beet farms.

This practice only stopped when journalists with the Winnipeg Tribune exposed the labour conditions in Winnipeg in 1975. After that, Indigenous farm workers organized to demand better conditions. That struggle, in combination with the availability of farm machinery, ended the practice in the mid-1980s. (So yeah white Canadians did effectively nothing)

Labour practices on beet sugar farms today

What about human rights and sugar beets? We were not able to find a lot on this, but sugar beet farming today is mostly mechanized, so the labour practices are likely not so bad. However, this does prompt an ethical question of whether the guise of buying ethical – which if you’re buying beet sugar means buying from the global north – is perpetuating international income divides. That’s a tricky ethical question and at some point in the future we want to give it a full episode, because it’s a theme that we expect will recur.

For now, though, we’ll say this: we don’t think that buying beet sugar (or switching to substitutes like maple syrup) is really the right way to approach the problem. Definitely, switching to stevia is a bad way to go (see below). Instead, we think the best you can do is to: (1) support fair trade sugar and (2) support political change. More on fair trade later.

Labour practices in Canadian sugar refineries

It was tricky to find information about labour practices on sugar refineries. At least some sugar refinery workers are unionized, though. Lantic Roger’s Sugar workers in Taber, Alberta are unionized through UFCW (local 383); Lantic Suger workers in Montreal also unionized; and workers at Redpath sugar refinery in Belleville also unionized through UFCW. So even though labour issues might come up at sugar refineries, when we’re talking about labour abuses in sugar we are usually talking about sugar extraction – and mostly sugarcane extraction.

Environment and Sugar

The environmental impact of cultivating and processing sugar includes: loss of natural habitats; water use; agro-chemical use, discharge, and run-off; and air pollution (according to a study by WWF). Because sugarcane deteriorates as soon as it is harvested, it needs to be quickly transported to a refinery; in contrast, sugar beets can be stored for months.

Land use

We were unfortunately not able to find much on whether sugarcane or sugar beets are relatively more land intensive. Articles seemed to point to the fact that both divert land use. A European sugar lobby (le Comité Européen des Fabricants de Sucre) study found that sugar beets are 50% less land intensive, but this is a pretty biased source (Europeans grow sugar beet).

In 2019, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro lifted a ban on cultivating sugarcane in the Amazon rainforest and other areas of primary forest. This surprised even the sugarcane industry, which views the move as an unnecessary reputational risk. Sugarcane in Brazil is used for biofuel as well as sugar. Bolsonaro’s decision has been uniformly criticized by environmental groups. Sugarcane plantations threaten biodiversity and can cause deforestation.

Water use

Producing a 0.5 litre bottle of pop uses between 170 and 310 litres of water. Less than 1% of this is from the actual water in the final product. Most of the rest (95%) comes from the supply chain. A large portion of this comes from sourcing the sugar.

Sugarcane is a more water-intensive crop than sugar beet:

●      1 kg of sugar from sugarcane = 390 gallons of water

●      1 kg of sugar from sugar beets = 243 gallons of water

Oftentimes, to grow sugar producers will siphon water from local populations in water-stressed regions.

Air pollution

Harvesting process for sugarcane involves torching the fields to strip the crop of leaves. That causes air pollution.

Emissions

There is a lot more variability in how emissions-intensive sugar beets are, compared with sugar cane. At the high end, sugar beets and sugarcane are comparable. At the low end, sugar beets have a smaller carbon footprint. One of the big factors underlying this gap is transportation. Sugar beet is processed directly into white sugar (fewer steps than cane sugar) and generally at nearby factories.

Sustainability Labels for Sugar

Want to buy sustainable sugar? Here is some information about the ecolabels you might see.

Rainforest Alliance certification

Sustainable Agriculture Standard includes rules on biodiversity conservation; improved livelihoods and human wellbeing; natural resource conservation; and effective planning and farm management systems

Bonsucro certification

Bonsucro is a sustainability standard for sugar cultivation and processing. Producers must adhere to seven principles: obey the law; respect human rights and labour standards; manage efficiency to improve sustainability; manage biodiversity and ecosystem; continuously improve; adhere to EU directives; and organization of farmers (smallholder standard only).

Fairtrade

What is fair trade?

Fair trade is a set of movements, campaigns, and initiatives that have emerged in response to the negative effects of globalization, especially the often unjust and inequitable nature of international trade.[2] Fair trade began as a small church and Third World solidarity movement in the early postwar period.[3] Generally speaking, fair trade standards include values like decent and safe work, fair prices for producers, and sustainability

What fair trade labels are out there, and which is best?

There are five recognized fair trade labels: Fair Trade International (certified by FLOCERT); Fair Trade USA (certified by SCS Global Services); Fair for Life (certified by Institute for Marketecology (IMO)); the World Fair Trade Organization (a membership organization that recognizes its members by determining their adherence to 10 principles of fair trade); and the Fair Trade Federation (which is similar to WFTO).

Artificial Sweeteners

There are a bunch of artificial sweeteners out there, and we’ll do an episode on them sometime. But we do want to talk briefly about biopiracy and one artificial sweetener – Stevia – because it came up in the episode.

Stevia – Product of Biopiracy

Stevia is actually a product of biopiracy. Stevia rebaudiana is a plant native to eastern Paraguay and Brazil. Indigenous Guaraní peoples have traditionally used it to sweeten tea and medicine. In the late 1800s, stevia was identified in Western science as a sweetener.

Stevia is commercialized as steviol glycosides, which are ‘high-intensity’ sweeteners. Actually, it is not legal to sell Stevia leaves in EU, US, or Swiss markets. That is essentially because there has been little commercial interest in pursuing an approval process for Stevia leaves. Whereas steviol glycosides have been approved. “In practice this means that the products of large multinational corporations are able to access markets far more easily than products based on the traditional use of whole stevia leaves” (from the Bitter Taste of Stevia). Which is especially fucked because companies will play up the “natural” character of Stevia

The Guaraní have received negligible benefits from the global market for Stevia. This is in violation of their right to benefit from the use of stevia, as established under the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Nagoya Protocol. Today Stevia is grown in many countries outside of Paraguay. China is now the main producer and exporter of Stevia leaves. Stevia is primarily produced by smallholder farmers.

“In Paraguay, the average smallholder producer has only 5-10 ha of arable land available, and cultivates Stevia in crop rotation with other crops such as cotton, cassava, sesame or soy bean. Similarly, in China, Stevia is typically produced by contracted smallholders on plots of […] 667 square metres” (from the Bitter Taste of Stevia).

The largest Stevia (steviol glycosides) producers are the multinational corporations Cargill, Stevia First, and DSM. There is currently an effort to produce steviol glycosides through synthetic biology (SynBio) instead of producing them from leaves. Essentially, that would mean that you wouldn’t need to cultivate stevia farms to produce steviol glycosides. If that happens it could hurt smallholder farmers in Paraguay and elsewhere.

Sugary Drinks

Ethical Consumer recommends reducing packaging and food miles by making your own sugar at home, using Fairtrade and organic ingredients

But SodaStream has some of its own issues. It has been criticized for being complicit in Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights because of its operations in the West Bank. And it was recently bought by Pepsi, which has a number of ethically questionable practices.

Call to Action

Looking for something concrete that you can do? We’ve already recommended a few actions above. As a reminder, you can always seek out more ethical sugar by buying fair trade. It is also important to help keep human rights in the sugar industry on our political radar: tell your friends about what you’ve heard; stay informed; sign petitions and support organizations (like Know the Chain and Human Rights Watch) that work to uncover human rights abuses in sugar and elsewhere. But here’s one action we would recommend taking right now: contact your MP and ask them why Canada hasn’t ratified the Nagoya Protocol.

Endnotes

[1] Campbell, Justin. (2008). A Growing Concern: Modern Slavery and Agricultural Production in Brazil and South Asia. Human Rights and Human Welfare, https://www.du.edu/korbel/hrhw/researchdigest/slavery/agriculture.pdf, p.131-2.

[2] This is from an edited volume: Raynolds, Laura, Murray, Douglas, and Wilkinson, John. (eds.). (2007). Fair Trade: The Challenges of Transforming Globalization. NY: Routledge.

[3] Ibid.

Kyla’s Notes

An interesting and well-sourced article with more on how sugar affects the brain.

An idea of average sugar intake.

More on the Maple Syrup Heist.

More info on residential schools.

Even more info on residential schools, from Secret Life of Canada, a podcast we love.

Episodes 07 and 08 - Vegetarianism

Types of Vegetarian

 There are a few different variants of vegetarianism. Generally speaking, these variants can be put into three categories: the vegetarian-inclined, vegetarians, and vegans.

 Vegetarian-inclined people can be flexitarian or semi-vegitarian. These are people that sometimes eat meat. Then there are pollotarians, who eat poultry and fowl but not other meats. Pescatarians eat fish, but not other meats.

 There are also some different kinds of vegetarians. First, ovolactarians (lacto-ovo-vegetarians) eat dairy products and eggs. Lactarians (lacto-vegetarians) eat dairy but not eggs. Ovo-vegetarians eat eggs but not dairy.

 Then there are vegans! Vegans do not eat animal products at all. However, a variant of veganism called beeganism describes people who do eat honey, but not other animal products.

 If you are interested in moving toward a plant-based diet for environmental reasons, Food is the Solution is a helpful starter. It has good recipes for people who are new to plant-based eating.

 History of Vegetarianism

 Vegetarianism has a long history.

Proto-vegetarianism

 Humans have been vegetarian since before recorded history. Anthropologists believe that early humans would have eaten a predominantly plant-based diet, out of ease. Ancient Egyptians relied mostly on wheat and barley for their diets. They refrained from eating meat, except during festivals and special occasions, for religious reasons (source).

 Pythagoreans were some of the first self-proclaimed vegetarians. This refers to the followers of Pythagoras, an ancient Greek philosopher. They were vegetarian for religious and ethical reasons. Pythagoras considered it wrong to treat any animal differently than one would treat a human (source), as he believed all living beings had a soul. For many years following, a meatless diet was referred to at the Pythagorean diet .  Following a Pythagorean diet was linked to piety and asceticism, since meat was a symbol of wealth and power.

 During the Renaissance, being a Pythagorean was viewed as heresy. But during that same time, influential figures like Leonardo da Vinci and Montaigne began to speak out against animal cruelty (source). Leonardo da Vinci followed a Pythagorean diet and, apparently, was known to set free any caged birds that he found in the marketplace (source). Moral arguments against meat consumption gained speed after the Renaissance, but was still a fringe movement that faced ridicule from society (source)

 The early vegetarian movement

 The term ‘vegetarian’ was first listed in the OED in 1839 (source). The Vegetarian Society of England, the first vegetarian society, formed in England in 1847 in Ramsgate (source). The American Vegetarian Society formed in NYC in 1850. Notable early vegetarians include: Leo Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, Mahatma Gandhi (practice of Ahimsa, non-injury), and Susan B. Anthony. Vegetarianism in the 19th and early 20th century was often associated with temperance and abstinence. There is also an uncomfortable association between some early vegetarians and the eugenics movement (e.g., John Kellogg, inventor of corn flakes, was vegetarian and a huge eugenics promoter).

 Vegetarianism goes mainstream

 Vegetarianism grew in the 1970s after the publication of a bestselling book called Diet for a Small Planet, written by Francis Moore Lappe (1971). The book is on the environmental impact of eating meat. Around the same time, Peter Singer (1975) published Animal Liberation.

 1990s-today

 From the 1990s onward, it has become increasingly popular to eat a plant-based diet. As of 2018, 3 million Canadians identify as vegetarian or vegan (almost 10% of the population). This is according to research done by Sylvain Charlebois at Dalhousie University. About 8% of Americans are vegetarian or vegan, and that figure has been relatively flat since the late 1990s, according to Gallup polling data. Flexitarianism is also gaining in popularity – between 2014 and 2018, sales of meat substitutes doubled in the US (from $702M to $1.44B)

 Animal Welfare

 The animal welfare justification for vegetarianism is rooted in two questions. First, is it wrong to raise/kill animals for human consumption, even if it is done humanely? Second, is it wrong to raise/kill animals for human consumption in the way that we are doing it via industrial agriculture? Vegans would extend that question to ask whether it can ever be right to use animals for our consumption purposes (but we’ll go into that in the upcoming veganism episode).

 Animal Rights versus Suffering

 There is a debate on whether to apply a framework of rights to animal welfare concerns. The animal rights (or non-human person rights) movement argues for applying rights to non-human animals. The argument for animal rights typically relies on taking aim at the difference between animal and humans. Animal rights activists argue that humans and animals are not so different on things like consciousness and having distinct preferences. Others argue that animals don’t have rights on grounds that animals and humans are different.

 The non-human animal rights movement has often focused efforts on ‘higher’ animals like primates. In 2016, an Argentine court ordered that a chimp named Cecilia should be released from a zoo. The argument of animal rights lawyers was essentially that Cecilia’s confinement without companionship had a detrimental impact on her health.

 Peter Singer has famously rejected the use of a rights-based frame to justify vegetarianism. Instead, he uses suffering as the metric. This approach is rooted in utilitarianism. Singer essentially says that speciesism is wrong: that we shouldn’t discriminate on the grounds that a being belongs to a species. So, Singer argues that we should take into account whether we are causing harm to another being irrespective of the species. Taking that frame, Singer argues that the key metric is capacity to feel pain. It’s for this reason that he thinks it’s okay to eat bivalves (oysters, mussels, clams) because they probably don’t feel pain.

 So, even if you don’t think that animal rights, you can think that animals have interests that are violated (e.g., to live in decent conditions, to make free choices, to be free from fear/pain, to live healthy lives, to enjoy the normal social/family/community life of its species).

 Factory Farming

 You know this already: factory farming is a nightmare-scape. Factory farms are operations with more than: 500 beef or dairy cattle; 1,000 hogs; 100,000 egg-laying chickens; or 500,000 broiler chickens (sold annually). In America, the vast majority of meat is factory-farmed: upwards of 95% for most animal protein.

 Animals in factory farms have very little space. Breeding sows kept in ‘gestation crates’ that keep them completely immobilized. Most chickens are kept in ‘battery cages’, which hold 5-10 birds. Each bird may have an amount of floor space equivalent to less than a sheet of letter-sized paper. Stress from overcrowding and boredom causes aggression, which is why most pigs have their tails cut off to prevent tail-biting. For the same reason, chickens, turkeys, and ducks are often de-beaked (and a significant portion die during the ordeal). Cows are dehorned and castrated, usually without pain management.

 The overcrowding also means that animals get sick a lot, which is why factory-farmed meat is so pumped with antibiotics.

 Factory farming prioritizes productivity over the well-being of the animals. Egg-laying chickens are put through something called ‘force molting’ where they are denied food for up to two weeks, in order to shock their bodies into another egg-laying cycle. Calves in feed lots are fattened for slaughter on an unnatural diet in order to reach “market weight” of 1,200 pounds within six months. Once they reach this weight they’re killed.

 There are ways to eat non-factory farmed meat, which maybe we’ll cover in a future episode.

 Environment

 Approximately 70 billion animals are raised annually for human consumption. From an environmental perspective, animal agriculture is less efficient than plant-based agriculture, simply because we also need to feed animals when we raise them.

 Shout out to this cool study by Clark, Springmann, Hill and Tilman 2019 on the multiple health and environmental impacts of foods. They look at five health metrics: mortality, coronary heart disease, colorectal cancer, diabetes, and stroke. Clark et al. compare this against five environmental metrics: acidification potential, eutrophication potential, GHG emissions, land use, and scarcity-weighted water use. The study finds that unprocessed and processed red meat is worse on both; animal products like chicken, fish, and dairy are healthier but bad for the environment; and plant-based foods like nuts, legumes, vegetables, and grains are healthier and better for the environment. There are some really cool charts in this study for the nerds out there, so I would definitely recommend taking a look.

 Land Use

 Animal agriculture uses up a lot of land: approximately 26% of Earth’s ice-free land is used for livestock grazing. And beyond that, 33% of croplands are used for livestock feed production. So, the land footprint of animal agriculture is huge. 

 We have talked about land use on the podcast before. Essentially, you want land use to be as efficient as possible because we have a finite amount of space. The more space we put toward animal agriculture, the less we have available for carbon sinks like forests and wetlands. Climate Nexus estimates that replacing beef with plants in your diet reduces the land footprint of that food by 90%. This report has cool maps on land use change in the American heartland.

 Greenhouse Gas Emissions

 Animal agriculture is a major contributor to climate change: it is responsible for an estimated 18% of human caused emissions are from animal agriculture. Animal agriculture is also responsible for 44% of methane emissions and 44% of nitrous oxide emissions, two particularly bad greenhouse gases (GHGs). A total of 26% of emissions are from food more broadly (58% of which is from animal products, and 50% of which is from just beef and lamb).

 Why are emissions higher for animal agriculture? GHG emissions in animal agriculture result from the methane that is released from the digestive processes of animals, as well as animal manure. When land is converted to animal agriculture, this results in a loss of stored carbon. And we also have to include the fossil fuels used to produce mineral fertilizers for feed production. Climate Nexus estimates that replacing beef with plants in your diet reduces the GHG emissions of that food by 96%.

 Water Footprint

 We’ve talked about this before on the podcast: most of our water footprint comes from the indirect water usage that it takes to make our food. And generally speaking, meat is a lot more water-intensive to produce than plant-based food. Per calorie, beef is 10x more water-intensive than vegetables, and 3x as water-intensive at nuts. Nuts are the most water intensive category of plant-based food. Chicken is actually slightly less water-intensive to produce than nuts (per calorie), but the difference is fairly minor.

 Air Pollution

 Animal agriculture is also really bad for the air, and that is making us sick. In addition to the release of GHGs, animal agriculture produces particulate matter.

 Ambient air pollution is responsible for about 8% of all deaths annually, according to the WHO. Particulate matter is harmful to human health – it affects lung function and can aggravate other conditions (such as heart and lung disease), even leading to death. In many places like the US and Europe, the biggest source of fine-particulate air pollution isn’t cars; it’s agriculture. That fine particulate pollution comes from dry manure, feathers, bits of feed, and animal dander. When those break down, they’re released into the air.

 Eutrophication

 Animal agriculture also pollutes our waterways, leading to eutrophication. Climate Nexus estimates that replacing beef with plants in your diet reduces nitrogen fertilizer use by 94%.

Sources of eutrophication in animal agriculture include: nitrogen fertilizer run-off and leaching; manure run-off and leaching; and aquaculture. Aquaculture farms generate concentrated amounts of nitrogen and phosphorous from excrement, uneaten food, and organic waste (dead fishies).

 In addition to polluting our freshwater, this is creating something called “ocean dead-zones”. Basically, run-off of nitrogen and phosphorous creates low-oxygen areas that affect fish reproduction or even kill fish. There are more than 400 ocean dead-zones worldwide. The size of ocean dead zones has quadrupled since 1950. And most of that increase has been in coastal areas proximate to agricultural production. Coastal eutrophication from animal agriculture also contributes to ocean acidification.

Kyla’s Notes

Cheese rennet makes her sad.

Episode 02 - Alternative Milks

What Are Alternative Milks?

Alternative milks are milk and milk products that are made from plants. They are also sometimes called vegan milk, plant-milk or non-dairy milks (or schmilks, if you’re a Science VS fan). The market for alternative milks is growing rapidly around the world. US non-dairy milk sales increased 61% between 2012 and 2017, according to a study by Mintel.

The most popular alternative milks are almond and soy milk (80% of market share in 2018). Soy milk is the traditional non-dairy milk. It was first sold in the US in the 1950s. But there are lots of alternatives (e.g., coconut, pecan, cashew, quinoa, hazelnut, rice, coconut, pea). Non-dairy milk alternatives can be cereal-based, legume-based, vegetable-based, seed-based, or nut-based. Oat milk is a relatively new entrant, but it ascending quickly in the alternative milk market.

Globally, the alternative milk market reached about $18.5 billion USD in 2018. By 2024, it is expected that the global alternative milk market will reach $38 billion USD, according to market research. Although this is a widespread trend, demand is growing the fastest in the Asia-Pacific region

Major alternative milk brands include Silk, Almond Breeze, and Rice Dream. Some newer entrants include Oatly, Califia Farms, New Barn Organics, Ripple Foods, Innocent, Mooala, and Malk.

Which Alternative Milk is Best?

Health

A big portion of the market for non-dairy milk is driven by health concerns. While this is a perfectly good reason to choose one product over another, we didn’t focus on it because it isn’t an ethical consideration. Non-dairy milks are not nutritionally equivalent to cow’s milk (although some vegan milks are fortified with nutrients like calcium, vitamin D, and vitamin B12 to make them more comparable).
Kyla mentioned a couple statistics on global lactose intolerance, including that “65% of the human population has a reduced ability to digest lactose after infancy”. You can read more about that at the US National Library of Medicine website.

Animal Welfare

All of the alternative milks we’re discussing are plant-based, but they may not necessarily be vegan. Many of them are, but some use honey or other animal-based substances in some of their products.  Usually the company’s website will tell you whether their products are vegan or not.

Environment

Assessing environmental impact is complicated. No single indicator can give us a holistic impression of what is environmentally best. Some common environmental indicators include land use, water use, emissions, and energy intensity. Generally speaking, dairy milk fares poorly on all of these environmental criteria when compared with alternative milks. But it gets a bit more complicated when it comes to choosing which non-dairy milk is the best.

Land Use: It’s a Matter of L and D

Cultivating a crop takes land, and that means diverting land use from other purposes. Agricultural land use contributes to deforestation and climate change because it requires the conversion of existing ecosystems like wetlands and forests, which are carbon sinks. There can also be social justice issues when agricultural land use pushes people out of their communities. Agricultural land use is a big challenge because of its scale: agriculture covers about 40% of the world’s land area. So, if you are concerned about environmental issues, it’s best to support an alternative milk that requires relatively less land to grow.

On land use, all four of the mainstream non-dairy milks do pretty well. They are all substantially better than their dairy counterparts. And the four main non-dairy milks - rice milk, soy milk, oat milk, and almond milk - all require relatively similar amounts of land to produce. However, oat and soy milk are slightly worse than rice/almond milk.

There have been some recent reports about deforestation and the displacement of indigenous peoples as a result of soy farming. This is absolutely a concern, but keep in mind that 90% of soybean crops go into animal feed. So, most of the land displacement occurring from soy is actually consumed indirectly in the form of chicken, pork, beef, farmed fish, eggs, and dairy.

Land use is also connected to other environmental consequences. Fertilizer run-off can pollute drinking water and accelerate eutrophication.

Oat milk is an interesting alternative from the perspective of soil sustainability. Some experts argue that increasing biodiversity in crop rotations can help farmers to use less pesticides. Since corn and soybeans are the two staple crops in the typical rotation, some experts suggest that adding a third crop (like oats) to the rotation can introduce big improvements for water pollution, soil erosion, and crop yields.

Emissions: Cashews Don’t Fart

Food production is responsible for a quarter of all human-produced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Dairy milk produces more than double the GHG emissions of its non-dairy counterparts, per glass. Amongst the non-dairy alternatives, there are minor differences - with rice milk at the high end and almond milk at the low end - but in general emission rates are similar.

Water Footprint

Water footprints measure the amount of water used to produce each of the goods and services that we use. It’s an important measure to think about, because so much of our water usage comes from indirect sources - from the water that is used to make the things that we buy. And it is especially important when we’re talking about food: about 90% of the water a person consumes comes from the food they eat or the water used to make it. We might drink 3 litres of water each day, but the average water footprint for a Canadian is 6,392 litres per day.

Water footprint is a big differentiator for alternative milks. Although almond and rice milk still have a smaller water footprint than dairy milk, they are much thirstier than soy and oat milk. A single glass of almond milk requires 74 litres of water to produce - more than a typical shower. This is because of the water intensity of the crop itself: almonds require six times more water to grow than oats.

As with most environmental metrics, it matters a lot where a crop is produced. That’s another thing that puts almond milk on the negative side of the ledger: almonds are a water intense crop produced mainly in California, a region which is at high-risk of droughts. And unlike crops that can be left fallow, almond trees require water even in drought years. In contrast, oat production is a lot less geographically concentrated.

Energy Use

We weren’t able to find much about the relative energy intensity of making alternative milks, unfortunately.

Labour and Human Rights

 Most of the information out there on non-dairy milk focuses on health and environmental sustainability. It was difficult to find information on labour and human rights, even though we know that agricultural workers can experience some of the most difficult working conditions.

1.3 billion people - approximately one-third of the global workforce are employed as agricultural workers. Agricultural workers are often employed informally, paid poorly, and subject to unsafe workplace practices. They are, somewhat ironically, among the most food-insecure. More than 170,000 agricultural workers are killed doing their jobs every year. And the risk of a fatal accident is twice as high in food production than in any other sector, according to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. Although most of the agricultural workforce is employed in developing countries, working conditions are also a concern in wealthy countries, who draw on temporary migrant workers for much of the workforce.

Generally speaking, crops like almonds and oats are less labour-intensive to harvest than fruits like avocados. But there are still significant labour concerns. And this is an area seems to be largely missing from the alternative milk conversation. Having said that, there are a few alternative milk companies out there that have ethical labour policies.

Oatly, a Swedish oat milk producer, sources its organic oats (it also uses conventional oats) from Swedish oat producers that have KRAV-certification. KRAV is a third-party organics standard that meets European Union organics regulations. KRAV also has labour and human rights provisions, including housing conditions for migrant workers.

One newer brand called REBBL, which makes plant-based “elixirs”, claims to ethically source its primary ingredients -- although they don’t use a specific certification scheme.

The Winner: Oat Milk?

Oat milk has become the darling of non-dairy milk advocates. It has three times the protein of almond milk and twice the fibre (according to Mother Jones). It uses less water - and grows in more places.

Is it better to buy or to make your own non-dairy milk? For our money, we would choose to make oat milk. It’s super easy, uses less waste, and you can control what goes into it.