Farmers have carpeted huge swathes of prime Central Valley land with serried ranks of almond trees. The annual budding of this sought-after nut and its burgeoning pollination needs means up to roughly nine out of every 10 commercial honeybee hives must be sent here from all corners of the U.S.
In addition to points made by others here, I wonder also about our general drop in bees and other insects.
I am astonished this one crop hogs so many resources and I don't know how to feel about it. I like almonds and would like to someday learn to make homemade marzipan like my mother made when I was a child (sweetened almond paste, basically).
Almonds get vilified for their water use in California and, meanwhile, people are also hating on the meat industry and promoting veganism. It seems to me nuts are an important part of a vegetarian diet and should be even more important to a vegan diet.
I have a lot of half formed questions but no real answers, questions that have rattled around my brain for some time without ever quite gelling.
I'm vegan and have given up almonds because I'm prone to kidney stones, and I was told that almonds have a much higher oxalate content than other nuts. Not everyone has a tendency to form kidney stones, but in my case it seems like I started to suffer from them right around the time that grocery stores and cafés started to switch from soy milk to almond milk, so I think that may have been the biggest problem. (I haven't had any more stones so far since switching to oat milk and starting to take citrate pills every day.)
I still eat a fair amount of nuts, often peanuts, which are lower in oxalate. I appreciate cashew (and coconut!) as an alternative to almonds that are still high in fat, like for making ice cream out of. I think one reason almonds and almond milk have been so popular is their pleasantly high fat content.
I don't have any particular intuition for how much water these other nuts take to produce.
In addition to points made by others here, I wonder also about our general drop in bees and other insects.
I am astonished this one crop hogs so many resources and I don't know how to feel about it. I like almonds and would like to someday learn to make homemade marzipan like my mother made when I was a child (sweetened almond paste, basically).
Almonds get vilified for their water use in California and, meanwhile, people are also hating on the meat industry and promoting veganism. It seems to me nuts are an important part of a vegetarian diet and should be even more important to a vegan diet.
I have a lot of half formed questions but no real answers, questions that have rattled around my brain for some time without ever quite gelling.