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Choosing plant-based milks over dairy is always the best choice we can make, no matter how you look at it!
India, the biggest consumer and producer of dairy in the world, is home to 300+ MILLION dairy cows and buffaloes. The damage that dairy consumption and production is wreaking is massive and multiform, yet the dairy industry continues to distort the truth and misinform the public, keeping us in a nosedive toward ill-health; environmental breakdown; climate chaos; food insecurity; economic and social stress for farmers and animal abuse. To put it simply, dairy is bad news.
The great news, though, is that we have the power to change this tragic situation by choosing to Drink Positive – choosing plant-based milks and other dairy alternatives. Drinking Positive is not just easy, it’s far better than dairy for a host of reasons:
It’s hard to believe, seeing how prevalent dairy is in Indian cuisine and holiday treats, but did you know that 2/3rds of Indians are lactose-intolerant? It’s true! 65% of Indians are unable to digest lactose (the sugar contained in dairy) and show symptoms of lactose-intolerance like cramps, bloating, gas, nausea, diarrhea, etc. (Lactose tolerance in the Indian Dairyland)
Dairy, like all animal products, contains cholesterol, which causes deposits to form on the walls of the arteries, narrowing them and hindering blood flow. Cholesterol is a major cause of atherosclerosis, strokes, heart attacks and other cardiovascular diseases.
Dairy, like all animal products, contains saturated fat, which exacerbates the damage cholesterol does to the walls of the arteries, leading to atherosclerosis. Saturated fat also increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, inflammation and certain types of cancer (Seven reasons to keep saturated fat off our plate)
Dairy, like all animal products, contains no fibre. Dietary fibre shields us against constipation, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), heart disease and digestive cancers (including bowel).
Cows produce milk during pregnancy and lactation when an increase in the hormone estrogen naturally occurs. That estrogen makes its way into the dairy milk you drink; numerous studies have shown that it can increase the risk of breast, uterine and prostate cancers.
There are so many more reasons plant-based milks are healthier than dairy! For a more thorough investigation, click here to watch the Drink Positive health videos with Dr. Rupa Shah, MBBS.
The land required for grazing and housing a large number of cows contributes to deforestation, soil degradation, desertification and loss of biodiversity. This is particularly concerning in a country where land resources are already under pressure due to population growth and urbanization. In a nutshell (pun intended) growing plants prevents soil erosion and desertification, promotes biodiversity and does not cause deforestation.
Cows require a substantial amount of water for drinking and cleaning, making dairy production one of the main drivers of water scarcity in India today. The effects of climate change – intense heat, drought and floods – only worsen the water crisis, and many dairy farmers in India have had to sell their animals because of severe water shortages. All over the world, but particularly in a water-stressed country like India, it is sheer madness and recklessness to continue raising dairy animals instead of growing crops. (For example, the production of 1 litre of soy milk uses 20 times LESS water than the production of 1 litre of dairy.)
A cow or buffalo produces significant amounts of waste daily. 300-plus million cows and buffaloes – the population in India – generate a staggering amount of waste (a conservative estimate of 10 kg of dung per animal per day leads us to 300 million tonnes each and every day!). While small amounts of cow dung can boost soil fertility, this amount of waste is too great to be managed properly, and it invariably leads to pollution of the soil, contaminates drinking water with dangerous pathogens and causes eutrophication of water bodies (which in turn caused harmful algal blooms, dead zones and fish kills.)
Interested to know more? Check this out: Dairy vs. plant-based milk: what are the environmental impacts?
India is the third-largest greenhouse gas generator globally, and like the rest of the world, India has promised to cut down on its greenhouse gas emissions and achieve net-zero by 2070. In India, again like the rest of the world, most of the conversation has revolved around carbon emissions and fossil fuels.
We are ignoring, however, an even more lethal contributor to greenhouse gas emissions: methane. Methane (CH4) is an extremely potent greenhouse gas and is more than 84 times more powerful than carbon dioxide at warming the Earth. Cattle emissions – from manure and gastroenteric releases – account for roughly 32% of human-caused methane emissions.
Globally, India is the fourth largest methane emitter, where agriculture accounts for 61% of total methane emissions in the country. The huge population of cattle raised for dairy is the main source of methane emissions in India, and negatively impacts both local air quality and global warming.
But although methane in the atmosphere is tremendously more potent than carbon dioxide, it does not linger as long: just 10-12 years. So, reducing methane emissions now would yield quick reductions in the rate of warming, while also delivering air quality benefits. How do we reduce methane emissions? It’s simple! We stop producing dairy and instead cultivate crops: all of which – with the exception of rice – emit no methane whatsoever.
Take a look at this chart from the GHG Platform India!
Though it is often touted as contributing to food security, dairy production does quite the opposite, for dairy farming in India has led to the overuse and depletion of natural resources such as land and water (see above). In current times – when extreme weather patterns due to climate change are putting even greater pressure on our natural resources than ever before – this depletion has been exacerbated, and more and more dairy farmers are finding the cost of feed and forage to be prohibitive, creating financial stress and anguish. On top of all that, increasing spells of heatwaves hurt milk productivity and raise production costs for farmers.
In some cases, cattle are fed with imported feed, leading to a dependence on external resources which compromises their ability to control their own agricultural systems and negatively affects local food sovereignty.
It is important to reiterate that cattle are extremely inefficient converters of food, meaning they consume much more food than they produce (in both calories and protein). They are also highly resource-intensive, requiring much more land, water, and energy than eating plant-based foods directly (see above). By growing fodder for animals (instead of crops for human consumption), we are effectively reducing the amount of available food by driving up the price of basic food staples for those who are most in need.
Redirecting resources from dairy farming to other agricultural activities contributes to food security and sustainability, as resources can be more efficiently utilized to address nutritional needs. The resources used to feed cows could be redirected towards crops cultivated for direct human consumption, helping to alleviate hunger and malnutrition.
Follow up with a more thorough assessment of Scarcity vs. Distribution.
Because dairy is the single largest agricultural commodity produced in India, about 70 million farmers are tied to the industry, with smallholder farmers making up the great majority of that number (80% have fewer than 8 animals). In turn, the government has provided a slew of schemes and subsidies aimed at boosting dairy production.
Yet these schemes, while creating better supply chain management and infrastructure development, provide no real assistance to the farmers themselves; in fact, they often do the opposite, incentivizing the purchase of young heifers but then leaving farmers in the lurch to pay for everything else, like fodder, artificial insemination, veterinary fees and animal care (for keeping dairy cattle healthy can be challenging due to the prevalence of diseases like mastitis and foot-and-mouth disease). These high costs strain the finances of the farmers and often lead to debt and financial insecurity.
Dairy farmers often face price fluctuations in the market. The prices they receive for milk can be highly variable due to factors like oversupply, lack of price transparency and the influence of dairy cooperatives. Added to that, many small-scale dairy farmers have limited access to direct markets and often have to sell their milk through intermediaries who may exploit the lack of alternatives and offer lower prices than what farmers deserve. And since dairy is highly perishable, farmers do not have the luxury of waiting to find a better sales opportunity; once collected, milk must be sold immediately.
As we have seen above, dairy farming requires significant land and water resources for grazing and growing animal feed. This can contribute to land degradation and excessive water usage, leading to conflicts over natural resources. Furthermore, dairy farming has negative environmental consequences, such as soil erosion, water pollution from manure runoff and the greenhouse gas emissions produced by cattle. These environmental damages impact first and foremost the farmers themselves, their families and the communities where they live and operate.
Finally, let’s not forget zoonotic diseases – infectious diseases that “jump” from animals to humans (like Covid-19). According to the State of the World’s Forests 2022 report India is on track to be a hotspot for emerging zoonotic disease risk. Aside from pathogens like E-coli and Salmonella that are frequently associated with dairy animals, many other dangerous zoonotic diseases are present among cattle, like Brucellosis and Bovine tuberculosis. As a matter of fact, in a recent report called Zoonoses and Dairying in India and published by the NDDB (National Dairy Development Board) published a paper recently stating that “around 200 zoonoses have been described (WHO 2012), of which 45 of them are purported to be transmitted from cattle.”
Owing to their proximity to animals, farmers and their families are on the front lines of contracting a zoonosis. So not only are they the first to suffer from the environmental damages that raising dairy animals create, they are also the most exposed to the specific health risks that come from living and working so closely with those animals.
Though cultivating and selling crops still exposes small farmers to the vagaries in the marketplace and the unfortunate (but solvable!) corruption therein, it is far more sustainable and healthier than raising dairy animals as a source of income, no matter how you look at it. If we care about Indian farmers, if we care about their health and survival, if we care about their capacity to continue to feed the Indian population with nourishing food, we must incentivize their transition to a plant-based agricultural system…and fast!
Read a more in-depth article here!
In the “Land of Ahimsa,” we have made life hell for 99% (and that’s a low estimate) of the animals that we raise for dairy. In the “Land of the Sacred Cow,” we have reduced that animal to a mere commodity to be exploited until it is financially unviable to continue to do so…at which point we slaughter her. In the “Land of Gaumata,” we use and abuse and finally discard these gentle creatures whose only misdeed (if misdeed we can call it) is to have been born a cow.
The amount of harm that we inflict on cows (and even more so on buffaloes) is unfathomable, begins at birth and ends at death (which is almost never a natural death at a ripe old age, as we are wont to believe by myths and wishful thinking). In India, a cow’s or buffalo’s death is a violent one (in a slaughterhouse), an agonizing one (left abandoned to starve), a slow one (cast out onto city streets to graze on piles of plastic and hazardous waste leading to excruciating intestinal blockage)…apart from a handful of cows who, when they are no longer profitable, find their way to safety at a Gaushala, all will die brutal deaths at a young age.
But it is not just their deaths that are horrific, dairy animals all over the world are systematically brutalized and violated. In India, it is no different, despite the disinformation of the dairy industry and the self-deception the public voluntarily engages in, in order to continue to consume dairy with a clean conscience. Everybody seems to know a small dairy where “it’s not like that.” Indeed, in recent years we have seen a plethora of dairies spring up all over the country that claim that the milk they sell comes from “happy” cows or that the milk they sell is “ahimsa” milk; they tout the benefits of A2 milk (though there is no scientific evidence to that claim) from their herd of desi cows (though more and more dairy farms – small and large alike – have replaced indigenous breeds with European breeds because the latter are much more productive) that eat only home-grown organic fodder, drink only filtered water, are milked only by hand, are given no antibiotics…And while this may reflect the reality of the dairy farm, and while those cows may have a better life than cows on in a conventional dairy farm (whose lives are absolutely miserable), their babies are still separated from them shortly after birth (because they would drink all their mother’s milk; after all, that’s why a cow produces milk in the first place), the male calves are still abandoned or sent to slaughter at a very young age (they are useless to the farmer because they will never produce milk) and they are still sent to slaughter when their milk production declines (because it costs more for the farmer to care for them than what they can generate in profits) and replaced by one of their daughters (who will have the same fate as her mother).
We will not list here all the gruesome details of the lives of cows and buffaloes in a conventional dairy farm. But we can conclude that even in the best of circumstances, like at one of these aforementioned small dairy farms, cows and buffaloes have been reduced to no more than a means of making money. And though we all can agree that less suffering is better than more suffering, as long as we treat these animals as commodities, they will be harmed and they will suffer.
When we choose plant-based milks instead of dairy, we choose a third option for these animals: instead of more suffering or less suffering, we choose no suffering at all.
Want to see the bigger picture? Watch Maa Ka Doodh in English or in Hindi!