It's an early spring morning in Helsinki. You've washed up and decide to head for the local supermarket to fetch some groceries.
As you walk the isles of the store your path inevitably crosses with the massive dairy section. You check the prices and smile.
The price of milk has gone up with inflation, sure, but it remains remarkably cheap. Just 90 cents a litre.
You then take a detour from your usual path on a whim and arrive at a strange section of the store.
There sit cartons of milk substitutes like oat milk, almond milk and soy milk; all unrefridgerated.
"I heard they're healthier," you think as you browse the selection. As your eyes scan the rows of colorful cartons they lock onto the price tag.
Most of the options are almost twice as expensive as your beloved cow's milk.
"Wow, they're really ripping off those vegans. That's awesome," you think and leave the store with a renewed love for udder extract.
Fancy milk for idiots
The cheapest varieties of regular non-skim milk hover around 90 cents per litre, while the absolute cheapest soy milk you can get is 1 euro 50 cents.
This same pattern carries over to meat substitutes and their prices relative to actual meat.
You might gloss over this thinking that healthier alternatives should naturally be more expensive.
Sometimes this is inevitable: less processed foods are often harder to preserve and have a shorter shelf life.
Less demand also means a smaller scale of production and therefore none of the benefits that come with scale.
Even accounting for these something just doesn't add up. Soymilk is shelf stable at room temperature and doesn't need to be refrigerated like regular milk.
There's demand enough for most stores to stock an entire shelf of them.
The processing method from raw soybeans, while more complex than pasteurization, doesn't seem too labor intensive (especially compared to animal husbandry).
Are soybeans just expensive to import?
Down the rabbit hole
That would make a lot of sense. They're like, exotic or something. Probably grown in a rainforest. Super exclusive.
The meat and dairy industry in Finland imports most of it's animal feed and a good chunk of that is soybeans. Almost ninety percent is genetically modified (GMO), which in
the EU would require a separate label if they were used in food products.
At this point it's good to remind you of how convoluted and inefficient the process of rearing an animal is.
You need to breed them, which is often done through artificial insemination for improved genetics. They need to be raised and fed.
If they're a male they might require castration. They need vaccinations and sometimes antibiotics to treat disease.
Sometimes they die for no good reason like all living things tend to do.
Living things also excrete wastes that you need to clean up. I'm curious about how labor intensive this is, but I'm definitely not looking that up.
The conversion rate of feed to milk must be abysmal. We curse at lamps when they lose a little energy by producing heat, meanwhile these things are farting actual methane.
And at the very end, the product of your labor is a liquid that in most cases has to be refridgerated and only lasts a couple weeks before spoiling. No sale!
So we have all that pit against soybeans soaked, ground and boiled in water, and the latter is almost twice as expensive? What the fuck?
No amount of accounting for scale, byproducts or genetically modified soybeans (a relatively new phenomenon) can explain that massive and
seemingly nonsensical discreptancy. Why is soymilk so expensive?
Wrong question.
The livestock empire
The government and the EU grant subsidies to industries that are deemed in need of protection for a variety of reasons. Especially when they relate to functions that are essential in times of
crisis, like food. Farming is an obvious target for subsidies, since a year of bad weather conditions could financially cripple a smaller farm otherwise. Farming is also strictly necessary to sustain
the population. I like agricultural subsidies since they level the playing field and benefit the vast majority of taxpayers.
The livestock industry also enjoys the benefits of significant subsidies.
Eläinpalkkiot are premiums paid to farmers by the EU. This is the most straightforward of the bunch. Just straight cash per animal similar to most other agricultural subsidies. For areas further north there is instead
the Pohjoinen kotieläintuki paid for by the Finnish government. Both range from 600 to 1000 euros per dairy cow.
Fun fact: The only true vegans in the European Union are those who don't pay taxes
Eläinten hyvinvointikorvaus is paid by the EU contingent on a list of requirements. Companies can choose any number of things from the list, and there's an associated payout for each per animal
(linked source uses eläinyksikkö, which is 1:1 for cows). These can be tens or hundreds of euros per cow.
It's hard to knock on this one too much, since many of these, like sedatives for pigs during castration, aren't functionally required and yet require a paid professional to implement.
Even still, I have a hard time believing that some companies aren't stretching the penny here and pocketing the surplus. The compensation is a lump sum and not based on cost after all.
Alkuperäisrotueläinten kasvattamissopimus is a little niche, but amounts to some two million euros a year paid by the government to support farmers that choose to keep endangered species of cow. I didn't know
farm animals selectively bred by humans were entitled to stuff like this but I guess you learn something new every day.
So that's cool. Our tax money is being used to support the livestock industry whether we consume animal products or not. But since a large portion of the population still believes that meat is a
requirement for a balanced diet, you could argue that these subsidies are just answering demand.
That logic is a little backwards when you consider that price is the key issue for most consumers.
I argue more people would be willing to switch to more efficient forms of protein if they knew that a portion of their paycheck is what's keeping the meat prices down.
So you get hefty subsidies for keeping livestock including dairy cows, and that's what's caused this distortion in prices. There's still some risk to keeping animals so it's not like there's no justification at all.
Most of these are EU directives so there's not much we can do about them.
Mystery solved. Time to go home and enjoy some warm...
Milk
Would you be surprised if I told you that we also have multiple subsidies specifically for milk?
Remember those posters across the school cafeteria and nurse's office with the smiling little tooth guy swimming in milk?
There's a reason for that. Koulumaitotuki (here's Valio's service
that takes advantage of this) is paid to schools when they stock milk, which essentially guarantees that all schools do. Learning to consume cow's milk is practically part of the curriculum.
Conclusion
I don't even pretend to understand all the reasons behind these subsidies. As a consumer, all I see is that the healthier, more eco-friendly and efficient alternative is and remains twice as expensive on the store shelves.
Meanwhile we have to pay these companies incentives so they don't abuse the animals too much.
Valio, the company that sells the most popular varieties of both dairy and non-dairy milk substitutes (under the brand name Oddlygood), is majority owned by dairy cooperatives whose every incentive is to keep their livestock farms profitable.
This sucks plain and simple. I have the financial leeway to make the switch, but there's many who don't. That litre price adds up when you're making breakfast cereal for an entire family.
I also hate that my tax money is funneled into the livestock industry to maintain this monopoly. The very core of a welfare state like Finland relies on taxpayers having confidence that their money is well spent
on caring for the population. I'm not confident that these subsidies are doing that.
There's no call to action at the end here in case you were hoping for one. What are you going to do? Storm a dairy farm? You know, those cows are way bigger than they look in the pictures.
Just go home and drink your government-mandated milk.
