Eddie Urbanski

Vegans: "Drinking cow's milk is unnatural!" Great point. So instead of pulling on some teats for thirty seconds, we've developed a twelve-step industrial alternative. Step one: grow almonds in California, a drought-afflicted state currently depleting an aquifer that took twenty thousand years to fill. Step two: ship them to a processing facility. Step three: soak them in water. California water, specifically, because almonds need 15 gallons per ounce and California is already rationing. Step four: pulverise them into a slurry. Step five: filter the slurry through fine mesh, discarding most of the actual almond in the process. That was the bit with the nutrition in it. Gone now. Step six: add more water, because the resulting liquid isn't watery enough. Step seven: add sweeteners, because it tastes of nothing. Step eight: add emulsifiers, because it separates in six minutes otherwise. Step nine: add synthetic vitamins, because all the natural ones left in step five. Step ten: add seed oils, because we apparently learned nothing. Step eleven: homogenise, degas, pasteurise, and sterilise the mixture until it resembles no food that has ever existed in nature. Step twelve: put it in a carton with a picture of a field on it. The cow: stands in a field. Makes milk. Has done this for ten thousand years. No factory. No steps. No aquifer. Unnatural, though. Very unnatural.