I was interested so I started reading the link. From what I understand their main point is that crime is committed when someone is unable to meet their needs and that the best way to prevent crime is to adress those needs by social programs. But what if ones need is sexual frustration and they want to commit rape? I’m guessing we are not talking about giving out government mandated GFs here. Every need can’t be met especially if someone happens to simply be a sadist who specifically enjoys the feeling of causing harm. How are you gonna prevent these kinds of crimes with social programs? Mental health resources only work as far as the people who need them actually want to partake in them.

You can do it but the effort is tremendous for very little food. First off finding a way to dehull would be mandatory as hulless varieties only exist for a few heritage varieties. Pretty much no farmer is growing that anymore. For the rolled oats you would have to soak in water, steam, hand crank to roll them and then dry them? And dry them where? Not many kgs of rolled oats would fit in a normal dehydrator.

That’s why the toasting in the oven process is by far one of the best traditional methods. We have, probably independently, invented that method here where it’s called skrädmjöl and in Finland where it’s called talkkuna. Not only do you get a kind of cooked flour that can be eaten raw with milk or yoghurt/fil, the toasting process itself dries out the grain and if you had grain that was too wet for storage this would make it fit for storage. However the result is a very peculiar product. It has a unique taste that could be an acquired taste for some people. Also how it traditionally is eaten results in a brown paste. I like it but I grew up eating it during yearly vacations to Finland. It’s not suitable for baking as it’s already cooked as a flour. It’s like trying to bake bread with bread crumbs instead of flour.

But of course in a survival situation all methods to survive are worth it. But here we talked about a farmer selling raw grain direct to consumers. And I would imagine very few are ready to get through all this to save a bit of money on their carb source, the cheapest part of most people’s grocery shopping.

Unfortunately raw grain can be surprisingly hard to make edible. For oats for example every single individual oat has a shell that’s inedible. This is different from the bran that is edible. You would have to ground the oats up and sift away the bran. And then you are left with oat flour and not rolled oats. I would say rolled oats are impossible to make at home.

Most people want to buy pasta, bread, white rice, not raw grain. Unfortunately for the farmers the processing of grain is a more profitable business than actually growing the grain.

Not only farmers. Consumers as well. Farmers can only grow those crops for which there exists a buyer. In many areas, even in farm dense Europe, you can physically only sell like 3-6 crops in bulk. Now a farmer can sell directly to consumers but then that farmer runs a shop business next to his farming business and that’s not realistic for everyone. Especially if you grow over a thousand tonnes of a certain grain.

It may well be that, for example, sorghum or millet is a much better climate adapted crop to a certain region than bread wheat. But that won’t matter at all if there is no local buyer of those crops. In my own country for example we have successfully shown that quinoa is excellent to grow here because the Andes mountains and Sweden surprisingly have similar climates. But if you go into a shop you can still only buy Peruvian quinoa. No local buyer exists and local consumer demand is too low for an infrastructure to be built up around it.

So I say don’t put all the pressure on the farmers themselves. They are working in a system that forces them to grow certain things a certain way.

When the reverse was true it really rubbed me the wrong way. Soybeans are dirt cheap and soybean meal (the defatted version) even more so. On agricultural markets soybean meal is around 300-400 dollars per metric ton. That means it’s traded for less than a dollar per kg. Yet soy based vegan products were for years more expensive than the meat alternative, and lots of these animals would have eaten more than 1kg of soy containing feed to produce each kg of meat. It makes no sense to me. Yes processing the soy meal into a tasty meat alternative is not cheap, obviously, but are you telling me the soy meal to meat conversion is cheaper than the soy meal to faux meat conversion? Really put me off from vegan products.

Same is true for things like oat milk. Oats in bulk cost pretty much nothing yet they managed to sell it for more than cow milk. What am I paying for? Marketing? Corporate profits? And don’t bring up the whole “animal proteins are subsidized” bit. I don’t know about the US but in the EU the subsidies are based on agricultural area. 1 hectare of soy plantation gets the same amount of subsidies as 1 hectare of any other animal feed crop. That’s not the explanation.

I see this as a huge improvement and if plant based products are to really take off they have to be an affordable alternative even to the non vegan.