Well, I'm not much of a fan of milk, unless it's chocolate, HOWEVER I am becoming increasingly disenchanted with soybeans. I read that the quality of protein from soybeans is much lower than the quality of protein from cow's milk, and now I'm finding out about the added sugar and calcium? I've tried Silk Vanilla Soymilk, and you can keep it.

As for the environment, there are so many things that have a greater impact on the earth than cows milk - like plastic bags and milkjugs. Finding ways to cut our dependance on foreign oil without harming the environment could be as simple as going back to paper bags and glass jugs. Maybe we should do that instead of worrying about the food energy it takes to produce cows milk.

Why does environmental improvement need to produce mutually exclusive alternatives? Why not cut down on milk AND cut down on producing plastic?

And more importantly, what criteria of environmental damage are we using? Green house gasses? Landfill increases? Plastic may increase landfill space but paper produces a lot of greenhouse gasses and can't be recycled efficiently.

And I don't think the article is suggesting that we all stop drinking dairy milk- rather that if you're indifferent to drinking milk and soy milk and are concerned about the environmental impact, than you should drink soy.

"Why does environmental improvement need to produce mutually exclusive alternatives? Why not cut down on milk AND cut down on producing plastic?"

Just because I'm not that fond of milk doesn't mean that I think we should cut down on milk production - especially since there are starving people around the world. BUT I agree that, with some forethought two goals don't have to be competing. Right now we seem to have the environmentalists pitted against the energy independence group, and as I said both goals could be realized. I support preserving the environment AND becoming energy independent, so this article is interesting in that respect. When it comes to food I think good energy efficiency can be achieved by buying local as much as possible, which means cows milk over soy milk. I just saw a newsblurb that says plastic can't be recycled very effectively, either, but we can grow more trees. Oil is alot harder to develop, but what if we cut down on plastics? As I said, paper bags and milk jugs could help, and since dairy can be bottled in glass just as easily as plastic then maybe that's what we should do.

What if we took the waste products - milk jugs - plastic bags etc and used them in thermal-depolymerization? Then, we would have less waste - and have liquid fuels to use oveer again.

Couple that with cellulosic bio-fuels, and hey! We may actually have one leg of the multi-plexed solution to the energy problem.....