Consumers are increasingly wary of lactose contained in cow’s milk liquid : its sales fell by 27% between 2006 and 2021 (IRI data). In fact, the world market for plant milks has really exploded in the last decade, going from 7.4 to 16.3 billion dollars between 2010 and 2018, and this growth is not slowing down. Sales exceeded 6 billion euros in the United States and are approaching 4 billion euros in Europe. Mainly in Germany and the United Kingdom, and to a lesser extent in Spain, Italy and France, where we could still exceed 400 million euros in 2022 (Xerfi data).
Vegetable milks are increasingly replacing cow’s milk.
The milk of cow is less fashionable for many reasons: health, in particular because of lactose intolerance, or difficulty digesting the bowl of milk in the morning, or even by taste. But also among some because of a degraded image of breeding, for reasons of animal welfare, environmental or climatic reasons. Or the feeling of industrialization of this activity, with herds deemed too large, too confined, fed with soy and But Latin American, sometimes GMO and won on Amazon forestand a final product which may contain various residues of pesticidesofantibiotics orhormone, etc This raises the desire to eat more or completely vegetarian.
Almond milk, which won the race, is not milk, but it is tolerated that it usurps this name
Those who wanted to gently change their diet started by switching to soy milk, rice milk andoats, then coconut milk, to finally move towards nuts, mainly almond milk, whose taste is pleasant and comes closest to that of cow’s milk. Almond milk now represents 2/3 of the consumption of vegetable milks. It also benefits from a super-food image, a source of proteinsfibers and magnesiumand D’antioxidant (the Vitamin E), while the name “soya” is now too associated with GMOs and isoflavones.
In fact, the term “milk” is very improper: it is a few almonds (barely 2 to 8%!) crushed and mixed with a lot of water… and sugar (often more sugar than almond!), and sold two to three times more expensive than “real” milk. The dairy industry also tried to prevent the use of the word milk for these increasingly dangerous competitors for it, but did not succeed: it was too late and the Court of Justice of the European Union European Union has decided to accept the word milk for almond milk and coconut milk. Fortunately, he still has dairy products and cheeses, in which these vegetable products have not (yet) succeeded in breaking through.
Warning ! These general public vegetable drinks are not indicated as an exclusive replacement for milk in very young children, as they risk causing malnutrition. It is therefore better to position them as pleasure foods for adults than as alternatives to milk… and to tirelessly continue to remind us that, in the first six months of a human’s life, absolutely no drink can really compete breast milk !
Almonds are everywhere…
Milk is not the only way to consume almonds: they are also pecked, grilled or salted as an aperitif, spread in the form of butter or mashed potatoes, can be incorporated into confectionery (such as nougats or fancy chocolates) , cakes (like the galette des rois with frangipane, or almond cream), and all kinds of cooked dishes: trout with French almonds, Vietnamese almond chicken, Moroccan almond tagine, etc., or cosmetics, such as sweet almond oil, etc. It all keeps growing!
…but they are almost all from California
This strong growth in global demand has mainly benefited Californian arborists, who now devote more than 5,000 km2 at this monoculturethe equivalent of a French department like the Alpes-Maritimes!
They alone produce two-thirds of the almonds consumed in the world, i.e. 2.4 million tonnes (compared to just over 1,000 tonnes in France!). Obviously, they grow it in their own way, not at all like the European sores imagine! This culture, suddenly, has become extremely intensive. Yields, which have doubled in 20 years, reach 4.7 tonnes per hectare, five times more than in Provence and ten times more than in Spain! All of this is obviously not without consequences, particularly in matter water consumption, pesticide use andpollinating bees.
Almond trees are drying up California
The almond is very greedy in water, six times more than the cereals : it is necessary to use four liters of water to produce a single almond, against a liter and a half for a strawberry for example. But California is beginning to seriously lackpure water and, with the global warming, this situation can only get worse. The almond trees currently consume 10% of all the fresh water in this state! Local conflicts can therefore only multiply in this region. Between the different farmers, for example market gardeners, cotton growers or cereal growers against fruit growers. Even if gradually the latter pass drop by drop. And between farmers and city dwellers (Americans are not yet used to rationing water for watering their lawns or cleaning their car !).
Moreover, like any monoculture activity, the use of pesticides is absolutely essential, and even more so when it comes totrees, for which crop rotations cannot be carried out. Especially since public opinion there is much less aware of these issues than Europeans. Almond trees are grown on bare soil, cleaned with force glyphosateand we spread a lot of fungicides and D’insecticides, even more than in our apple orchards, which are nevertheless renowned for this! The environmental consequences are obviously more and more disastrous.
Half of US hives travel to California in March
Almost all fruit trees (and flowering plants) need pollinators for their flowers to produce fruit. If we combine the quasi-disappearance of bees and other pollinators, and the creation of large orchards to produce enough fruit to satisfy urban demand, arborists obviously make agreements with beekeepers to install hives in the middle of their orchards at the crucial time of flowering, which only lasts a few weeks. This is also how you find dozens of honeys with very different tastes on sale: honeys of lemon treesorange trees, basswoodchestnut, coffee, avocado, almond, apple, lavendereucalyptus, thyme, etc.
Beekeepers are therefore great movers. A hive can thus be installed successively in five or six locations over the course of a year. We obviously transport them at night, exits closed, and we let a moment of rest before reopening the hive. Workers immediately set off to explore, return immediately to explain to their colleagues where the sources of pollen nearest ones, and labor begins. A bee can visit 250 flowers per hour, when they are close to each other. With tens of thousands of bees, a hive can “process” 30 million flowers in one day!
In the specific case of the almond tree, flowering is very early, at the same time as the last frosts (it has always announced spring and made poets dream), but it can therefore be very brief in the event of bad weather. So it is absolutely necessary to intensify this pollination as much as possible. In California, it is believed that in order to be effective, one must implant six to ten hives – some 300,000 bees – to pollinate one hectare. They are at 500,000 hectares and they therefore need 1 to 2 million hives at the same time over a very short period. Needless to say, they are going to look for them further and further, all over the United States and even in Canada! It’s a veritable noria of trucks criss-crossing the highways to transport between half and two-thirds of the hives of this immense country, rented for $220 each.
The competition is such that most American beekeepers now earn more income from renting their hives than from selling their honey. It is therefore now a question of hyper-intensive breeding: everyone suspects that transporting the hives over thousands of kilometers to put them to work one or two months earlier in the year than what they are used to, in monoculture fields sprayed with pesticides, without any biodiversitywithout fallow fields around which form a natural barrier with other productions in the region (such as cotton or the grape), themselves sprinkled with other pesticides, and return transport just after, at best considerably weaken these poor Hymenoptera insects!
The parasites like the mitesand in particular the infamous ” Varroa destructor “, are used without counting, but also killer bees and hornets. Diseases take advantage of the hyper-concentration of hives to easily pass from one to another. In total, we therefore deplore a mortality annual appalling, either on the spot or, more frequently, during thewinter following. It has gone from 5% of hives to 35 to 50% in a few years!
We are rightly scandalized by the cruel breeding conditions of many of the animals we eat, calves, pigs, chickens, rabbits, ducks, etc. We find ourselves in exactly the same situation, this time with the breeding of bees ! This is indeed forced labor and abuse!
The world that goes with…
It is not because a food suddenly finds itself in fashion, and adorned with many dietary virtues, that it is not produced with the methods of today’s world! As long as consumption is low, production can remain artisanal, even if the transport of tropical products over long distances, often by plane, remains a disaster for the weather.
But when consumption becomes very high, we obviously move on toAgriculture industrial, with all its quirks. It’s the same for theattorneythe quinoawhere the goji for example, or the rose. And we see here that the case of the almond is particularly emblematic. But what to do ?
The French consume twice as many almonds as ten years ago, but only 4% of them come from France. Provence will never manage to produce enough, even if its high-end almonds can sometimes cost up to twice the price of those imported from the United States.
Should we return to the sole consumption of local, artisanal and season ? This is a real social issue!
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