John Band.

Vegans: "Oat milk is better for you and better for the planet." Great point. So instead of a cow turning grass into milk in a field down the road, we've developed a twelve-step industrial alternative. Step one: plough a field. Pasture is never ploughed; an oat field is turned over, sprayed and emptied of everything living in it every single year. Step two: spray the standing crop with glyphosate a fortnight before harvest so it dries on schedule. Step three: ship the oats from wherever the contract was cheapest this year, Scandinavia, Canada, the Baltic, to a factory that is almost never in the country drinking the result. Step four: mill the oats, stir them into water, and add enzymes to pre-digest the starch into sugar, which is why it tastes sweet and why a glass carries about 7g of carbohydrate and 1g of protein. Milk is the other way round. Step five: spin out the bran and fibre, which is most of the oat, and sell it as pig feed. Step six: look at what's left. 10% oat, 90% water, tastes of nothing. Step seven: pour in rapeseed oil, from a crushing plant, because the oat has no fat and the coffee needs something to foam. Step eight: add dipotassium phosphate so it doesn't curdle the moment it meets a hot drink. Step nine: add calcium carbonate from a quarry, potassium iodide from a mine, vitamin D2 grown on irradiated fungus, and B12 brewed in a bacterial vat, most likely in China. Four continents, to put back what the cow put in for free. Step ten: heat it to 140 degrees, homogenise it, and seal it in a six-layer carton of card, plastic and aluminium. Step eleven: load the cartons onto lorries and drive 90% water up and down the motorway network. Step twelve: print a picture of a field on the carton. Not the ploughed one. The cow: stands in a field that has never seen a plough, eats grass no human can digest, and makes milk that already contains the fat, the protein, the calcium, the iodine and the B12 in the proportions a mammal is built for. The herd is inside 30 miles of your fridge. The bottle came in a van. Better for the planet, though. Says so on the carton. Next to the field.