385
Rising Temperatures Are Threatening Italy’s Bank Reserves—Because They’re Made of Parmesan Cheese
(www.popularmechanics.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2026
385 points (99.2% liked)
Not The Onion
22312 readers
829 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, ableist, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Milk isn't sustainable.
If they're smart, they'll see the writing on the wall and switch to a plant based alternative. And maybe move their fermentation location to higher altitude
meanwhile the article literally mentions that this business has been going on for 800 years in italy.
well the thing is that there weren't 8.3 billion people in the past, and a shit ton of other pollutants
so what you're saying is that it's the population density that's unsustainable? not the milk itself?
also do you have a link that it's unsustainable? because i'm not so sure about that. the world can currently produce about 2-3x the amount of food that we actually need, i don't see that declining by more than 60% any time soon.
unsustainable for the environment, here's the source that you wanted. milk's greenhouse gas emissions are very high compared to plant based alternatives, alongside land use and water consumption.
Milk has higher environmental impact than plant based milk ≠ milk is unsustainable.
Milk is in fact a very nutritious aliment and many parts of the world depend on it as base for nutrition.
sustainable means nothing if something that is killing the planet counts as sustainable
Is milk killing the planet? That's news to me.
The fact that there are more sustainable alternatives to milk is not evidence that milk is unsustainable.
it's one of the things that's killing the planet
i wouldn't call it sustainable if the end result is an unlivable planet, if nothing is done about the emissions
You could argue vegetable milk is also contributing to killing the planet. Doing that is clearly pointless.
Is the pollution produced by the production of milk significant, in such a way that reducing it would lead to measurable changes?
well it's killing the planet much less and we need some kind of nutrition to live
is the pollution produced by private jets significant, in such a way that reducing it would lead to measurable changes?
climate change is due to a combination of a lot of things. we need to tackle a lot of different problems. none of them is killing the planet on their own, but we need to look at the big picture
Work on improving the efficiency of the Haber-Bosch process used in the production of nitrogen just 1%.
That will probably have a stronger impact than removing all milk production and private jets from the planet.
There are places in which it is more efficient to optimize since that optimization will lead to a greater benefit.
Is reducing the production of milk potentially one of these important optimizations?
is this realistic? we can reduce dairy consumption right now
"will", "probably". we can reduce emissions right now by switching to plant based products, no need to wait for alternatives pop up when climate change is much worse
it's a combination of things, reduction of consumption and working on reducing the emissions from production of dairy, since there's some people that will struggle with switching to plant based alternatives due to intolerances, allergies and stuff
most people can reduce or stop consumption of animal based products and there's no real excuse not to at least work on making some improvements
Yes, industrial processes are optimized all the time. Sometimes investment is needed: there are nitrogen production factories which were built later and are more efficient than older ones.
Yes and no, you can stop consuming dairy on your own; worldwide reduction is quite a different thing to achieve. Not impossible, but definitely not going to happen right now. Milk production has indeed been increasing steadily throughout the years regardless of the higher share of people who became vegan around the world.
I like to eat cheese.
Thus I ask, if I make the effort to not eat cheese and to have other people not eat dairy and this leads to no milk production in the next 15-20 years. Does that actually lead to any measurable difference?
Or maybe I'd better focus on doing other things?
Do you think the amount of cheese eaten in Italy might have increased a bit over the last 800 years?
Oh, so we can all eat cheese that tastes like window caulk.
You could always eat window caulk directly if it's that important to you
But why do you need to eat cheese though? It’s incredibly unnecessary and only works to abuse the animals that produce it. Maybe step back and think about what you’re doing instead of assuming that “we all” need to eat cheese.
Sorry but that’s what always gets me about talking to non-vegans. Unless you’re somewhere like the Arctic Circle you’re consuming animals solely for the pleasure of taste — that’s an ugly look.
Edit: Keep downvoting you disgusting people.
Tell me you know nothing about veganism without saying it.
Naa I know plenty about it. As you militant vegans are all over lemmy. The joke here is that animals eat other animals....humans are no different, we're omnivores for a reason. You can act like plants can replace meat but the amount of nutrients from 4oz of meat vs 4oz of some plant is always going to be way out of proportion.
Plants require a lot of work as well. Most farms that produce meat, are not mega farms like you guys think. The majority of the farms here in the US are small operations, 1k or less head of cattle. They make up 90% of what is consumed. The cows drink, non-potable water. They eat mainly grass (you don't raise a cow on grain, shit is expensive when grass and roughage is free) and they don't require you to constantly fertilize the soil to grow something. On top of all this, the majority of what is fed to cows is grass/roughage, and then hay in the winter, which is just rolled up grass/roughage. The feed they finish cows with is non-eatable foods from plants you and I eat. Stalks, roots, stems...shit you cannot process. You think they take and just toss out the plant you're beans grow on? Hell no, it's turned into cattle feed.
So, yes I know a lot about this, because I own a farm and work closely with other farmers, who grow that plant based diet you eat... so be vegan all you want, no one is saying you can't, but don't come acting high and mighty because you don't want the rest of us to eat meat.
Enjoy your cult, but vegan preaching is very 2005.
When cattle are grazing unbuildable, unfarmable land, it is a fully renewable and sustainable system. Presumably the trees are the casualty but you could just as easily argue that timber products are not sustainable.
Absolute misinformation. Look at California and tell me there is such a thing as unfarmable land.
If cattle can graze there, you can grow crops there.
In fact, cattle require an enormous amount of more resources (eg water) than crops do
sure, you can even grow wheat in the desert, assuming you use enough artificial watering systems.
in fact many countries even do this.
this is egypt for example.
Have you traveled around? The foothills have a lot of very rocky slopes and terrain. Terrace farming is extremely expensive and labor intensive. Vineyards are the only crop grown on slopes at scale, and we already have too many grapes.
Them using land is not the only thing they do.
They drink water for example, a kg of cow meat requires 1000L of water. This is not a problem everywhere, but it can be.
They eat grass and there are many places where they have the space and the climate to walk around and eat the grass that is there, but many places they need additional food. Their biggest source of protein is usually soy. Most of that soy comes from south-america: first they burn down a forest to make space, then they plant genetically modified soy. This soy is modified to be resistant to pesticides. They spray the entire plot with these chemicals, so everything dies except the soy. This stuff travels beyond the borders of the farmers land, killing local wildlife and threatening the ecosystem.
Also not all cows are treated well. A cow only gives milk after birth, so each year a cow has to be insimenated and birth a baby cow. A cow can live for decades, but their body is working so hard many won't live over 10 years.
Another problem is that cows are given hormones and antibiotics, residues of which end up in consumer meat.
I'm not writing this because I believe we should go to a 100% plant-based society, but the current system of mass-production is a lose-lose situation for everyone except for the people making a (small) profit.
cattle are hardly fed any soy at all, but the vast majority of the soy fed to livestock is the industrial waste from pressing soybeans for oil. that's conserving resources.
I dont know how you've come to believe that, but it is not even remotely true. Cows eat parts that humans do not, but what they're fed is not a product that'd otherwise be wasted. Deforestation to feed livestock including cows is a real thing and soy is a big part of that. Feel free to eat as much meat as you want, but the least you can do is not share false information.
https://ourworldindata.org/drivers-of-deforestation
the treatment of animals is pretty bad in a lot of modern industrial setups. that doesn't mean that all milk products are bad, though. for example, things are very different if you look at italy, compared to the US.
True and inside those countries there can be big differences as well.
Wow I had no idea. Thanks, I’m vegan now.
Make sure you tell everyone and tell them how they are supposed to live. Make sure to use a lot of fake science.
I already started posting it all over NextDoor. Next I’m going to protest the meat, wool, and egg vendors at farmers market tomorrow.
You should probably look at bigger groups than literally who, but you've got the right idea!
Mountains.