On Soy Milk 🥛
Is it the cool milk now? Could it be?
I have a years-long obsession (apparently) with people thinking it’s somehow hip or interesting to drink whole milk. It’s this absolute nonsense perspective on the world that comes from people being in little urban bubbles of irony and demographic inertia, where they seem to believe plant-based milk or veganism generally have gotten such a firm grasp that what’s truly interesting is… cow’s milk. This is what I mean when I say regressive political nihilism is “in” among tastemakers: They’re interested in listening to people with money and against listening to anyone who gives a shit. These aren’t often traits that overlap.
It is true that consumption of plant-based milks had been on the rise, mainly because they’re accessible, now go well in coffee, and tend to be lighter on many people’s digestion. There’s also been controversy around processed oat milk and how it can spike one’s glucose levels—this is negligible for most folks, but it’s going to be significant for others’ health. This bad press might be why dairy industry reports suggest cow’s milk is indeed making a comeback. Grist recently reported on the dairy lobby’s pushes via butter boards (an idea that’s consistently credited to Justine Doiron on TikTok, though she’s always given the credit to the 2017 cookbook Six Seasons by Joshua McFadden).
All signs point to the end of oat milk’s reign as plant-based champion. But does that mean a thoughtless return to cow’s milk?
What I’ve always advocated for is a diversity of milks, an array—a bouquet of milks for different purposes and for different biologies, as well as ecosystems. No one way is the way forward.
That said, as a person for whom milk of all sorts has historically been fraught—lactose intolerance, a lifelong distaste for white foods that aren’t coconut, and a taste for black coffee—I’ve only really used milks in my baking. Last year, I did an experiment to see whether a perfunctory scratch-made oat milk had better results than store-bought in the same exact vegan cake recipe, and indeed it did.
Now, though, I’m a smoothie drinker, and that has changed things for me. My milk of choice is soy, and that is because it has the most inherent nutrition, including a good amount of protein, and the most smooth (to me) flavor of all. I now bake with it. I use it wherever milk is called for. I adore it. I might even make it myself one day—writer Clarissa Wei has written about how much better it is than boxed—but I don’t want to get carried away… I have a very small kitchen, after all.
This is why I was so happy, so filled with verve, to read this in the winter 2024 issue of Spike from Document editor Drew Zeiba, on the subject:
“Since I’m a grown-up and an ex-vegan and not a regressive weirdo, the whole ‘hot girls for whole milk trend’ never enchanted me.”
So, is soy milk back, or is it just back for grown-ups and ex-vegans?
I wrote in No Meat Required about how funny it is to me that people who would use “soyboy” as an epithet are eating up lots of soy via their steaks: Soy is mainly grown for livestock feed. To this purpose, it’s usually grown in monocrop, which is devastating to biodiversity and soil health; this is causing a lot of trouble, especially in Brazil.
Organic soy has been on the rise: “U.S. farmers harvested about 170,074 acres of organic soybeans in 2019, up 37% from 2016, according to the USDA.” While the U.S. is the world’s No. 2 exporter of non-organic soybeans, the country imports 70 percent of its organic soy. This is to keep up with demand for organic chicken, though: It’s not because tofu and soy milk are hot commodities. Unless we make that happen!
Right now, a bird flu is being found among dairy cows, marking another moment when zoonotic disease should be causing a broad reconsideration of human relationships to animals: “We have to take industrial animal agriculture seriously because of its scale. It’s hard to describe how vastly disproportionate our use of food animals is compared to other uses.” (And organic dairy isn’t a beacon of good animal treatment, either, as a recent report from The Atlantic has shown.)
It was, in 1912, a question of hygiene that first brought soy milk into the U.S. government’s consciousness. “Swill milk,” according to Matthew Roth’s Magic Bean: The Rise of Soy in America, with dirt and bacteria, had been killing children. “This quandary of milk being both dangerous and indispensable led some to search for a less risky but otherwise equivalent substitute, with the federal government playing a side role by granting patents,” writes Roth. Soy milk was sold by folks who “foregrounded the sanitary advantages of their products.” Do we need to foreground the hygienic nature of soy milk once again?
Soy being a staple protein source for those who eschew meat and also a significant part of livestock farming—this is one of many odd conundrums that occur in a profit-driven food system. But if we weren’t eating so much meat, what could soy do for us? In the meantime, it’ll be the milk of choice in my house.
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This Friday for paid subscribers, it’s The Monthly Menu, a roundup of where I’ve been eating, what I’ve been cooking, a wine recommendation, and links galore to recipe and cookbook inspiration.
If you’re looking for cooking inspiration, remember to scroll through The Desk Cookbook.
Right now, the Desk Book Club is reading Longthroat Memoirs: Soups, Sex and Nigerian Taste Buds by Yemisi Aribisala. The first discussion thread will take place on May 31. Buy it from Archestratus for 20 percent off!
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My book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating will be out in paperback on June 25. Please consider a preorder!
Soy, organic soy and its use in animal feeds is something I think about ALL the time. We work with a local organic farmer who grows the grain for our pigs and have worked with him to develop a feed mix that doesn't include soy. This is actually surprisingly hard to do and still have a high enough protein content but it is possible to replace soy with cow peas, field peas, sorghum etc. It's a tiny movement but over the past decade I've noticed more and more farmers attempting to switch to a non soy based feed for their animals. Soy is cheap and subsidized so this is difficult to do while still keeping prices down. And don't even get me started on the skyrocketing prices of grain & animal feed post-Covid 😵💫🫠
Thank you for pointing out the high nutritional value of soy milk. I've always wondered why in the frenzy of almond milk (such an environmental NO) and oat milk (for me, a gut ecosystem NO), people weren't discussing the relatively high protein content of soymilk. For a while, I felt like soy milk was the dowdy old aunt who was included in the plant-milk party out of obligation. Now maybe people will start to realize she's pretty awesome.