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  • Ah, no I mean dairy based products.

    I've been cutting down from carnivore to vegetarian, low carbon footprint diet. I don't drink milk any more but still have yoghurt / cheese. But how much milk am I still indirectly consuming?

    Asking here because presumably others have done a similar thing and vegans are generally brighter :)

    Assumed @Oliver Schick would have some stats up his sleeve

  • I have absolutely no idea of any milk-to-cheese ratios, I'm afraid. I wouldn't have cared about that even before I became vegan, as my approach was always entirely ethical and not in any way carbon footprint-based (or dairy footprint-based).

    (I think that consequentialism (the idea that the comparative amount of goodness in the consequences of your actions determines their rightness or wrongness) is sometimes helpful in teasing out issues, but not a sensible ethical position to take. While I'm not a pure voluntarist (the idea that right action depends on a good will, pace Kant), I certainly think that all animals have wills and that this is crucial in determining what one ought to do in respect of them, as I think it's wrong to try to break or dominate another's will.)

    I don't drink milk any more but still have yoghurt / cheese.

    Was milk the more major item for you or yoghurt and cheese? I ask because I used to drink an enormous amount of milk, litres every day, as I drank almost no water or juice. (I think in looking back that I didn't like water because it was considered the default where I grew up to drink carbonated spring water from bottles--back then, it would never have occurred to me to drink tap water, which I now do all the time--, and I've never liked the taste of carbonated water, so it was probably because of this that I turned to milk.) When I first wanted to go vegan, about two years before I actually did it, I at first tried to cut out dairy products other than milk, as I didn't consume very much of those, and I thought it would be easier to take that smaller step first. That didn't work--it was only when I stopped drinking milk from one day to the next that later cutting out cheese and yoghurt was extremely easy. For me, it took taking what seemed then the more radical, more fundamental step first.

  • Aha. Sorry for misunderstanding your question :)
    Danish dairy industry’s own numbers are that it takes 10 liters of milk to produce 1 kg of cheese, so 10:1.
    I’m pretty sure that number goes up the firmer the cheese, ie Parmesan.
    It doesn’t say anything about yoghurt.

    I too started out from a climate perspective, then came health and then animal rights. I support you in your efforts.
    Though, once you start to look into the health thing your reduce your consumption so fast it’s easy to cut it out completely. ;)

    https://nutritionfacts.org/topics/dairy/

    My girlfriend “could never give up on cheese” so we agreed not to buy it, and she could have it when she was eating out. A few weeks in she didn’t crave it anymore and now she rarely eats it (only when served).
    My best advice (I know you are not asking for it) is to find substitutes that you can tolerate. Try a soy yoghurt, see if it works for you. Try a plant milk and see what works on your cereal or in the coffee. Change habits and routines. Have porridge instead of yoghurt? Drink black coffee instead of flat white?

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