I'm not big into vegetarian substitutes but oatmilk is legitimately delicious. It's good for lattes, cereal, whatever. I guess maybe not good for baking?
I am a bit surprised that oat milk is as popular as it is, given that, nutritionally, it's a very poor substitute for dairy as it's mostly just more sugar and carbs with very little protein.
In terms of non-dairy milk, soy milk is basically the only one that gets close to the nutritional value of dairy (and a lot of the fear mongering about endocrine effects of soy are just wrong). Even almond milk usually only has a teeny amount of actual almonds in it, as it's primarily just added water and sugar.
I drink milk because a) I prefer flat whites to espressos and b) to make my cornflakes wet. In both cases I prefer oat milk and in neither cases do I care about nutrition. I’m guessing that’s the reason.
> and a lot of the fear mongering about endocrine effects of soy are just wrong
Amusingly (and unlike soy milk), farmed cow's milk contains enough oestrogens, progestogens, etc. that academics have argued (e.g. in the 00s) over the extent to which cow milk consumption affects human health. The macho crowd seem to think that the juice of a bean is more feminising than the mammary secretions of calved female mammals selectively bred to have massive udders. I don't understand this, but I do find it very funny. (From a distance. I like having teeth.)
While I support their efforts to shift their industry toward human-consumption-grade vs animal feed-grade oats and more sustainable agricultural practices, they will have to also learn how to shape tastes (literally). I'm not sure that Americans are willing to shift their consumption from oat-fed animals toward oat-derived products. Realistically, they should plan on a generational scale project.
As this article indicates, the oat-consumption health fad has come and gone before (in the 1980s)- but it didn't make a significant shift in Americans' meat consumption. Arguably the only thing that will is higher prices of meat - which are now here, but for different reasons (drought, war-spiked energy and fertilizer costs, and now screw-worm).
This is one of those little things I’ve had trouble putting my finger on: the US eats surprisingly few oats. The U.K. eats more than three times as much on average. Which is probably one of the reasons I find US cuisine slightly uncanny valley.
Southern Europe doesn’t really consume much either, but most US food is closer to Northern European food.
I thought this was a fantastic read! In a time when I get nauseated by all the AI posts, the section about how the author's father rejiggered the supply chain to import oats from Canada was an excellent example of hacking to get a better solution and perfect content for Hacker News IMO:
> Connecting Canada’s oat supply with U.S. mills was where my dad entered the story.
> In a business that measured volume in millions of tons, squeezing even a few cents out of the supply chain could be extremely profitable. My dad, a gifted mechanic, excelled at finding creative ways to move oats cheaper than the other guy. For example, Canadian rail lines could deliver oats cheaply to Thunder Bay, Ontario, but rail freight across the border into the U.S. was expensive. My dad realized that instead of paying the high rail rates past Thunder Bay, oats could instead be loaded into a Great Lakes freighter designed to haul iron ore pellets (like the ill-fated Edmund Fitzgerald). Lake freighters typically unloaded their cargo in Thunder Bay and had to sail empty to pick up more iron ore on the U.S. side of the border. If you could fill them with oats in Thunder Bay, deliver the oats to Duluth, Minnesota, and then load the oats on U.S. rail lines, you could substantially cut shipping costs.
> The problem was that Duluth’s elevators were built as a one-way spigot to ship grain out. Moving grain from a freighter into the elevator required a McGyver-esque solution. The grain company cut a hole in the side of the massive elevator bin so the lake freighters could pour oats into them, reversing the flow of grain from export to import. These kinds of fixes were how my dad made his living, and it’s how a supply chain was built.
USDA[0] says that the US produces 1 million metric tons of oats per year, or 4% of global production. Sure, that is not the best, but clearly still in the game.
In many ways, it's a story about far more than just oats.
US Ag policy is so, so screwed up. But with more entrenched interests than the US has Congressmen, and probably 10X that number of full-time lobbyists - good luck trying to fix it.
> In many ways, it's a story about far more than just oats.
Sure, and the story is about how Americans look at how they became the richest large country on the planet and endlessly ruminate on how they can have their cake and eat it too.
Oats declined as an American crop among farmers because there were more lucrative uses for the land. Literally it wasn't some grand conspiracy or external force, but simply that the crop preferred different climates and without needing it as a feedstock you could make more money growing soy or corn or countless other things.
But endlessly there are these sorts of "the children yearn for the mines" sorts of stories where Americans view anyone else producing literally anything as somehow unjustly depriving Americans. The rest of the world settled on putting the center of technology and arts and media and finance in the US, to hugely lucrative benefits for the US, with liberal free trade and IP protections and patent monopolies and a very healthy profit for Americans, but oh no someone else is making that low value crop and that needs to be undone.
"Data from the Ag Census cited by NAMA offer a compelling reason for the switch away from oats. Returns per acre are far higher for corn ($604) and soybeans ($544) than for oats ($111)."
Americans have some romance with the notion of "millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones". It's bizarre stuff.
> Americans have some romance with the notion of "millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones". It's bizarre stuff.
Screwing in little, little screws to make stuff used to be a pretty decent job in the US. Most people can be trained for assembly work, which really isn't the case for tech, arts, media etc.
Most of that work is super repetitive and some of it is dangerous and etc, etc. Lots of reasons not to like doing it, but having it available as an option was pretty nice. That's why there's romantic feelings.
> Screwing in little, little screws to make stuff used to be a pretty decent job in the US
Sure, I get the "romance about the past" notion, but it will never, ever be a decent job again. The clock isn't turning back, and the perverse thing is that in pursuing that "make it the 50s again" political agenda, Americans guaranteed your oligarchs are going to take ever more of the pie.
That isn't because Canada grows a low value crop. It's because people like Musk, Bezos and others are completely running away with the country while people vote against themselves chasing an absolute myth.
Fun fact -- the US goods trade deficit is literally the worst it has been in history, and every indication is it's going entirely in the wrong direction. But hey, at least Trump got a lot of bribes and you got your first trillionaire.
Look, my fathers and their five fathers were all tech/EECS/radio guys; I learned PCB and soldering and schematics informally.
If I had my druthers, I would've trained early and diligently for a lifelong career in Electronics Assembly, because that should have been a solid and stable industry/job market.
But I did not, and it is not, in these United States. Pity.
Why didn't you just research and actually provide the answer? Because you would find, quite quickly, that it's less than 1/10th of the difference, so instead just post some vague hand-wavy "but what if..." kind of open question.
And of course oats were subsidized as well. The US agricultural industry is basically soviet russia, and the entire system is hugely backstopped by the government, and an endless recipient of government welfare.
I realize you were provoked and FWIW your GP comment did not sound like genai to me (and we do a lot of pattern matching these days). Still, please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.
Also, one of the very, very many examples of strong, necessary, and useful collaboration between Canada and the United States.
Happy Fourth of July, neighbours down south. I'm eager to be buds again.
In terms of non-dairy milk, soy milk is basically the only one that gets close to the nutritional value of dairy (and a lot of the fear mongering about endocrine effects of soy are just wrong). Even almond milk usually only has a teeny amount of actual almonds in it, as it's primarily just added water and sugar.
Amusingly (and unlike soy milk), farmed cow's milk contains enough oestrogens, progestogens, etc. that academics have argued (e.g. in the 00s) over the extent to which cow milk consumption affects human health. The macho crowd seem to think that the juice of a bean is more feminising than the mammary secretions of calved female mammals selectively bred to have massive udders. I don't understand this, but I do find it very funny. (From a distance. I like having teeth.)
I'm skeptical that this was a factor, because in total only 5% of oats are used for human consumption. 95% is used for animal feed: https://oklahoma.agclassroom.org/resources/agricultural-fact...
I doubt it was that much different back then. This relates to the "Oat Mafia" that the article responds to:
https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/provi...
While I support their efforts to shift their industry toward human-consumption-grade vs animal feed-grade oats and more sustainable agricultural practices, they will have to also learn how to shape tastes (literally). I'm not sure that Americans are willing to shift their consumption from oat-fed animals toward oat-derived products. Realistically, they should plan on a generational scale project.
As this article indicates, the oat-consumption health fad has come and gone before (in the 1980s)- but it didn't make a significant shift in Americans' meat consumption. Arguably the only thing that will is higher prices of meat - which are now here, but for different reasons (drought, war-spiked energy and fertilizer costs, and now screw-worm).
Southern Europe doesn’t really consume much either, but most US food is closer to Northern European food.
Brother, can I have some oats?
> Connecting Canada’s oat supply with U.S. mills was where my dad entered the story.
> In a business that measured volume in millions of tons, squeezing even a few cents out of the supply chain could be extremely profitable. My dad, a gifted mechanic, excelled at finding creative ways to move oats cheaper than the other guy. For example, Canadian rail lines could deliver oats cheaply to Thunder Bay, Ontario, but rail freight across the border into the U.S. was expensive. My dad realized that instead of paying the high rail rates past Thunder Bay, oats could instead be loaded into a Great Lakes freighter designed to haul iron ore pellets (like the ill-fated Edmund Fitzgerald). Lake freighters typically unloaded their cargo in Thunder Bay and had to sail empty to pick up more iron ore on the U.S. side of the border. If you could fill them with oats in Thunder Bay, deliver the oats to Duluth, Minnesota, and then load the oats on U.S. rail lines, you could substantially cut shipping costs.
> The problem was that Duluth’s elevators were built as a one-way spigot to ship grain out. Moving grain from a freighter into the elevator required a McGyver-esque solution. The grain company cut a hole in the side of the massive elevator bin so the lake freighters could pour oats into them, reversing the flow of grain from export to import. These kinds of fixes were how my dad made his living, and it’s how a supply chain was built.
[0] https://www.fas.usda.gov/data/production/0452000
Canada doesn't do any such subsidies so oats make a lot of sense. In fact, some years it's our most profitable crop, even outstripping canola.
US Ag policy is so, so screwed up. But with more entrenched interests than the US has Congressmen, and probably 10X that number of full-time lobbyists - good luck trying to fix it.
Sure, and the story is about how Americans look at how they became the richest large country on the planet and endlessly ruminate on how they can have their cake and eat it too.
Oats declined as an American crop among farmers because there were more lucrative uses for the land. Literally it wasn't some grand conspiracy or external force, but simply that the crop preferred different climates and without needing it as a feedstock you could make more money growing soy or corn or countless other things.
But endlessly there are these sorts of "the children yearn for the mines" sorts of stories where Americans view anyone else producing literally anything as somehow unjustly depriving Americans. The rest of the world settled on putting the center of technology and arts and media and finance in the US, to hugely lucrative benefits for the US, with liberal free trade and IP protections and patent monopolies and a very healthy profit for Americans, but oh no someone else is making that low value crop and that needs to be undone.
"Data from the Ag Census cited by NAMA offer a compelling reason for the switch away from oats. Returns per acre are far higher for corn ($604) and soybeans ($544) than for oats ($111)."
Americans have some romance with the notion of "millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones". It's bizarre stuff.
Screwing in little, little screws to make stuff used to be a pretty decent job in the US. Most people can be trained for assembly work, which really isn't the case for tech, arts, media etc.
Most of that work is super repetitive and some of it is dangerous and etc, etc. Lots of reasons not to like doing it, but having it available as an option was pretty nice. That's why there's romantic feelings.
Sure, I get the "romance about the past" notion, but it will never, ever be a decent job again. The clock isn't turning back, and the perverse thing is that in pursuing that "make it the 50s again" political agenda, Americans guaranteed your oligarchs are going to take ever more of the pie.
That isn't because Canada grows a low value crop. It's because people like Musk, Bezos and others are completely running away with the country while people vote against themselves chasing an absolute myth.
Fun fact -- the US goods trade deficit is literally the worst it has been in history, and every indication is it's going entirely in the wrong direction. But hey, at least Trump got a lot of bribes and you got your first trillionaire.
If I had my druthers, I would've trained early and diligently for a lifelong career in Electronics Assembly, because that should have been a solid and stable industry/job market.
But I did not, and it is not, in these United States. Pity.
How much of that difference is "natural", and how much is the Federal Gov't spending $billions to make it so?
https://www.fsa.usda.gov/news-events/news/04-08-2026/usda-an...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_policy_of_the_Uni...
And of course oats were subsidized as well. The US agricultural industry is basically soviet russia, and the entire system is hugely backstopped by the government, and an endless recipient of government welfare.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html