Before I switched to oat milk, I was an ardent almond milk user, accompanying my daily Importers Coffee brew. With a great lack of research, I thought I was doing the right thing choosing almond milk.

Firstly, for my body (a temple), and also for the planet. Little did I know, I was contributing to the systematic slaughter of one of the world’s most important and precious little workers.

For the uninformed, almonds are grown in the United States more than anywhere else on Earth. Per WorldAtlas, “the United States dominates the global production of almonds.”

Indeed – in fact, 80% of the world’s almonds are produced in California, of which South Africa imports 3 000 tonnes a year (more on that here).

That’s great, but there’s a little detail people seem to have missed – almonds can’t exist without bees. They provide the essential pollination dirties required for almonds to become… almonds. And the higher the demand for almonds, the more industrial the bees’ efforts become.

Here’s where the carnage comes in. In their ‘Like Sending Bees to War’ article,  The Guardian revealed the plight of Arp, a commercial beekeeper in California.

Like most commercial beekeepers in the US, at least half of Arp’s revenue now comes from pollinating almonds. Selling honey is far less lucrative than renting out his colonies to mega-farms in California’s fertile Central Valley, home to 80% of the world’s almond supply.

But as winter approached, with Arp just months away from taking his hives to California, his bees started getting sick. By October, 150 of Arp’s hives had been wiped out by mites, 12% of his inventory in just a few months. “My yard is currently filled with stacks of empty bee boxes that used to contain healthy hives,” he says.

And he’s not a one-off case: “Commercial beekeepers who send their hives to the almond farms are seeing their bees die in record numbers, and nothing they do seems to stop the decline.

What’s causing it, you ask?

A recent survey of commercial beekeepers showed that 50 billion bees – more than seven times the world’s human population – were wiped out in a few months during winter 2018-19. This is more than one-third of commercial US bee colonies, the highest number since the annual survey started in the mid-2000s.

Beekeepers attributed the high mortality rate to pesticide exposure, diseases from parasites and habitat loss. However, environmentalists and organic beekeepers maintain that the real culprit is something more systemic: America’s reliance on industrial agriculture methods, especially those used by the almond industry, which demands a large-scale mechanization of one of nature’s most delicate natural processes.

With global almond demand growing at 250% over the past five years, the carnage doesn’t seem to have an end in sight.

I recently wrote an article about the expected oat milk trend for 2020, citing, too, the massive amount of water used to grow almonds. Something like five litres of water is used to grow one almond.

The Guardian also wrote about almond’s impact on the planet back in 2015. You can read that here.

Add to that the bee massacre going on, and it seems almost our public duty to stop people drinking almond milk. Or, at the very least, to educate people, so that they can make an informed decision.

Ok Ja oat milk is served at Cafe du Cap – 113 Loop Street, Cape Town – so give it a bash when you pop in for your tasty Importers cup in the morning. It’s delicious and contains no added sugar.

It’s also sold on Takealot – a 12 pack of one-litre for only R399.

Well done – you’re a better human being now.

[source:guardian]