Almond milk

 

Sama Hoole

@SamaHoole

Almonds are an environmental catastrophe. People hear that and assume you mean in some abstract, projected, 2050 kind of way. No. Present tense. Happening now. Today, while someone posts about their oat-and-almond-milk morning ritual and refers to it as 'conscious consumption.' - 1.1 trillion gallons of water used annually in California alone - 1,900 gallons required to produce a single pound of almonds - 10% of California's entire water supply consumed during historic drought conditions - Approximately 50 billion bees killed per year from pesticide and fungicide exposure during mass pollination events - Entire Central Valley sections converted to monoculture desert requiring permanent irrigation infrastructure - Fungicide cocktails applied during February bloom, peak bee vulnerability, routinely implicated in colony collapse - Almonds provide essentially no complete protein, moderate oxalate load, and require industrial processing to make palatable - Virtually every almond ever eaten has been shipped internationally at least once The person drinking almond milk in a reusable cup is, on balance, responsible for the deaths of more living creatures before 9am than a British beef farmer manages in a fortnight. But the cow breathed out, so.