The Milk of Almonds: A Dark History

 

I was sitting in one of those fancy coffee shops off Main Street in a small New England town—you know the kind, where the baristas have more ink on their arms than a stack of old Reader’s Digests—when the kid behind the counter asked me something that stopped me cold.

“Would you like to substitute almond milk in your latte? Just two dollars extra.”

Two bucks for nut juice. Christ on a bicycle.

But I said yes. Because that’s what we do now, isn’t it? We pay extra for the privilege of drinking something that’s traveled a darker road than most of us could imagine. Something with secrets.

And boy, does almond milk have secrets.

Most folks don’t know it, but that innocent-looking white liquid in your overpriced coffee cup has been around since before the Crusades. Before electricity. Before refrigeration. Before a helluva lot of things we take for granted.

The ancient Iraqis—Baghdad, if you want to be specific, and I always do—they were drinking this stuff back in the 10th century. Not because it was trendy or because some Instagram influencer told them it would make their skin glow like the dashboard lights in Christine. No. They drank it because sometimes survival means making hard choices.

See, back then, regular milk went bad faster than a teenager’s mood. No fridges meant your cow’s milk turned to poison by noon. And those medieval Christians—the ones praying to their God while watching their neighbors burn at the stake for witchcraft—they had these periods called Lent where their holy men forbade them from consuming anything that came from an animal.

Desperate times, desperate measures.

So they ground up almonds, mixed them with water, and pretended it was milk. And you know what? It worked. Didn’t spoil. Stayed fresh in the ungodly heat. Could be made into soups. Into sauces. Into things that kept body and soul together when the alternative was starvation.

But here’s where the story takes a turn, as stories often do.

By the 13th century, almond milk wasn’t just survival food anymore. It had become a status symbol. The rich folks, the ones with the big houses on the hill (every town has one of those hills), they started serving almond milk to show off. “Look at us,” they might as well have said, “we’re so wealthy we can waste perfectly good almonds on fake milk.” It’s in this old recipe book called Kitab al-Tabikh, compiled by some fella with the impressive name of Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq. The rich and powerful always did like to document their extravagances.

It wasn’t long before the medicine men got in on the act. Ibn Sina—Avicenna to Western folks—he was the Stephen Hawking of medieval medicine, and he claimed almond milk could help with breathing problems. Later they said it was good for your heart, your skin, your bones. Maybe some of that’s true. Maybe some of it’s horseshit. The line between medicine and superstition was thinner back then, like the membrane between our world and the ones we pretend don’t exist.

(And let me tell you, those membranes can get mighty thin sometimes, especially around three in the morning when you can’t sleep and the darkness outside your window seems to be watching you.)

The milk spread across the world like a virus. Trade routes carried it from the Middle East to Europe, then to India and Sri Lanka. In India, they incorporated it into religious ceremonies. In China and Japan, it became so expensive only the emperor’s court could afford it.

Sound familiar? Some things never change, no matter how many centuries pass.

Fast-forward to modern times. The 20th century was when almond milk shed its elite status. Mass production made it available to regular folks like you and me. Companies with names like Silk and Califia Farms started churning it out by the tanker-load. Suddenly everyone was drinking it—vegetarians, vegans, the lactose intolerant, even regular Joes who just wanted to feel like they were doing something good for the planet.

Because that’s the thing about almond milk—it’s supposed to be better for Mother Earth. Takes less water than raising dairy cows. Smaller carbon footprint. All that jazz.

Except…

(There’s always an “except,” isn’t there? Just when you think you understand the rules of the game, they change on you.)

Except 80 percent of the world’s almonds grow in California, a state that’s been drier than a popcorn fart for years now. And each little almond—each single nut—needs about a gallon of water to grow. That’s right. A gallon. For one almond.

And the workers on those almond farms? They’re not exactly living the American Dream, if you catch my drift. Long hours under a merciless sun. Wages that wouldn’t keep a church mouse in cheese. Safety measures that wouldn’t pass muster in a kindergarten class.

Then there’s the pesticides. Mountains of them. Valleys of them. Enough to kill every bee that dares to pollinate those precious almond flowers. And when the bees die, folks, we’re in trouble deeper than the Mariana Trench.

Yet the industry keeps growing. Five-point-nine billion dollars in 2024. Projected to hit fourteen-point-two billion by 2034. Numbers so big they stop making sense to regular people like us.

Here in Indonesia, where I’m writing this, almond milk is still the drink of the elite. The beautiful people. The ones who pretend not to see the darkness that surrounds us all. It started showing up around 2014, along with fancy coffee shops and yoga studios and all the other trappings of what passes for civilization these days.

But Indonesia’s no stranger to plant milk. They’ve been drinking soy milk since the 1600s, thanks to the Chinese traders who brought it over. The difference is, soy milk became the drink of the common man. Almond milk remains out of reach, like a castle on a hill.

Maybe that’s for the best.

Because sometimes, the things we desire most come with the highest price tags. And I’m not talking about the two extra bucks at the coffee counter.

I’m talking about the environmental cost. The human cost. The bee cost, for Christ’s sake.

So maybe—just maybe—we ought to leave almond milk on that high shelf. Not because we can’t afford it. But because, in the end, none of us can afford what it really costs.

The darkness always finds a way to collect its due. Always has. Always will.

That’s what I think about now, whenever some smiling barista offers me almond milk in my latte.

And these days, I just stick with regular.