[exoji2e]

There are quite a lot of delicious vegan alternatives. Some cheeses seem difficult to reinvent as vegan options, but the rest that you mention definitely have great alternatives. Those alternatives were a lot worse 5 years ago. The dairy industry will probably not vanish completely or directly, but when the vegan alternatives are good enough for the majority, combined with a generational shift the dairy industry will start decreasing rapidly.

So the notion that "it would never happen" is a bit silly imo. I predict that the global dairy industry will be cut by half in 10 years.

[core-questions]

> I predict that the global dairy industry will be cut by half in 10 years.

I could have maybe let this go if you'd said "will have stagnant growth or have declining demand relative to the population", but cut in half? Where do you get such a grandiose proclamation from?

I wish we could bet money on that, because there's really no chance of this as long as the demand continues to exist. Where exactly do you think the demand is going to go?

As long as it exists, the industry will do what it can to ensure the product is inexpensive enough for us to buy; as long as it is inexpensive enough it will be the product of choice. The alternatives are not actually yet produced at sufficient scale to replace dairy, neither are they cheap enough, and there's no guarantee they're actually more sustainable at all (consider the long supply chain to get me some soy milk, vs the farm -> bottling plant -> grocery store pipeline that keeps the entire chain within a single city and its outlying agricultural areas in much of the first world).

Don't get me wrong - as someone who has become increasingly lactose intolerant as I age, I'm totally in favour of continued development of alternatives, but let's face it: it's not cheese you're eating, it's not milk you're drinking, and it never will be. You're fighting against thousands of years of co-evolving the dairy industry and our own bodies to be able to digest the bacteria in cheese and yogourt, no doubt helping the microbiome in ways we haven't begun to understand yet.

[onecommentman]

I’ve noticed this rhetorical device a few times on HN. A reasonable argument suddenly make a turn for the extreme at the very end. I think it is a desensitizing technique...you’ve bought everything else, let’s see if I can push you into a more extreme position at the end...the hook at the end, as it were. It’s annoying, and leads instead to a questioning of the argument at the beginning.

This whole discussion of this topic is veering into the “paper v. plastic” overthinking/overtalking discussions of the 1990s. It’s a non-trivial analysis to figure out the basic issues and their relative importance. Won’t be done here...