 You may not like it, but it must be said, consumer veganism has an overpackaged and overpriced credibility issue. This is especially true with the consumption of plant-based milks, and the impacts of that, compared to the alternative, do-it-yourself options. In this part of an anarchist cookbook, I outline how to make one of the simplest plant milks, oat milk. It is so simple to make oat milk. For that reason, most of this part will be about the comparison between doing it yourself and buying from a shop, rather than actually making the oat milk. That's because plant milk is one of those products that exposes so many of the internal contradictions that plague the modern consumer vegan diet. I learned about being vegan at peace camps and activist squats in the mid-1980s. We were few, but wow, could we throw a party in any location with minimal resources? In the interim four decades, my view of this has become far more nuanced, but it hasn't lost the hunger that I had back in the early 80s. Thing is, when I see what people are buying and consuming as part of vegan culture today, it often makes me cringe. There may be a burging amount of vegan products to be bought in the shops now, but given their essential characteristics and the excess of packaging, do they actually represent any real change for the principles they claim? Almost 40 years on, the pattern of how veganism is, quite literally, sold today, presents the complete opposite of the deep green approach that inspired me. Modern veganism is not, as I perceive it, a practice rooted in seeking a connection to the earth and all life thereon. It's simply mainstream consumerism, with all its deleterious impacts on animal life, rebranded from more affluent audience. Oat milk is made for free things, water, oats and energy. That last part, the energy provided by your arm or the power socket or the manufacturing plant, is what changes the ecological equation. I know you do this is up to you, but bound up within that are the factors which tie your lifestyle to the broken and exploitative globalised food system. For me, the major issue with oat milk is price, as shown in this table. It shows the price per litre for different brands of oat milk, averaged from Amazon, Tesco and Waitrose. In comparison, below that, I show the costs of making oat milk from porridge oats, including the costs of the tap water and washing up. In other table shows, I can make oat milk for almost a fifth the cost of many brands available in the shops. For me, buying oat milk is prohibitively expensive, compared to the costs that do it yourself. Making a litre or two of oat milk takes an incidental 30 minutes over a day, alongside other cooking activities in the kitchen that are part of how I live as simply and cheaply as possible. More importantly, making oat milk yourself extends your personal choice. Take, for example, the consistency of the oat milk. The only oat milks that approach that are the more expensive brands, costing two pounds a litre or more, which contain a higher proportion of oats. I found most oat milks to be too watery and lacking in taste as a result. To make oat milk by hand or using an electric blender involves six steps. Step one, select your oats. Oats come in different forms. Traditional oats, as you might glean from local fields or grow yourself, are fibrous little lumps that need extra effort to process. Rolled or porridge oats have been put for a roller mill, removing the hard outer husk of the traditional oat, and then rolling the grain flat to make it easier to soak up the fluid added to it. Jumbo oats are a special cultivated variety of oat that are far larger and have a proportionally high quantity of flour in them. Finally, oatmeal or oat flour has been completely milled and sieved into flour and can be used to make instant oat milk without the need for prolonged soaking or straining. But I find oat milk based milk has a dry powdery rather than smooth taste, which to use is a matter of preference or taste or whatever is available. Step two, soak the oats. Theoretically, if you quickly douse the oats in boiling water, stand for a few minutes and then use a lot more energy you can skip this step. Practically though, soaking saves effort later and extracts more of the flour into solution. It takes about 100 grams or a mug of oats to produce between a half to three quarters of a litre of oat milk. Put the oats in a container, filter just above the level of the oats of water, then allow to stand for two to six hours while the oats soak up the fluid. It won't hurt if you soak them for up to 12 hours overnight or while you're out at work. If you're using oatmeal, you don't need to soak, blend or sieve, but it's a good idea after beating the oatmeal into the water to let it stand for 10 minutes or so until the flour becomes fully saturated. Step three, drain and blend. If you're using an electric blender, just tip the oats and water into the blender and press a button. Some people drain the water and replace it with fresh. Either way, you'll need to add some water to the blender to allow the massive oats to flow and get chopped into pieces. Run the blender until the contents are fairly uniform and any dark lumps have disappeared, which can take a minute or two, longer if you're using traditional oats. Finally, if the mixture is still fairly stiff, add a little more water until the mix becomes sloppy. If you're using a hand masher, drain any free liquid out, put into a hard, flat bottom metal container and then mash. As you pound the oats into pieces, add a little more water as you go to keep the mass fluid, but not sloppy. Eventually, when most of the lumps have gone, add more water and pound until the mix becomes a sloppy soup. Step four, strain off the milk. Some recipes advise straining through a muslin cloth. Others suggest using those very expensive nut milk bags. Personally, I find a very fine mesh metal sieve works just as well, but more importantly, it's a whole lot easier to clean afterwards. All straining does is remove the remaining fibrous lumps from the mix and create a smooth fluid. Whether blending or mashing, it's a good idea to mash, then sieve. Then add more water to the sieve's leftovers and repeat those steps again to extract as much milk from the oat mass as possible. Most importantly, don't throw away the discards from the sieve. They make an excellent thickener for stews or can be used in flapjacks or lembas scones to add fibre and protein. Step five, dilute the milk. One of the great benefits of making your own oat milk is that you get to choose how thick you want it. It might be that you want a thicker mix to make custard, or you might want a thinner liquid to use for drinks or on cereal. Very simply, add water until the oat milk is the consistency you want for the thing you need it for. Step six, additives. When it's diluted to the required volume, you can add extra things to it. Sweetness, you can add sugar, brownies better. Although if you really want to add sweetness and nutrition, you can dilute a spoon of barley malt in a little hot water and then add that to the milk. Fortification, if you want to add vitamins and minerals, the easiest option is to take some fortified yeast flakes, dissolve them in a little warm water, and then add it to the milk. Flavours, once made you could whisk or blend the little cocoa or add a little vanilla essence, nutmeg or a flavoured syrup to create an oaty shake. Finally, I always make more oat milk than I can easily use, but I can't use immediately, I freeze into blocks. Pour into a small plastic container, freeze it, remove the block from the container, and then store in a bag or box in the freezer until it is required. If you want to freeze oat milk, it's better to do that before you dilute it, because it takes less space and takes less energy to freeze as well. When you pour it out, you can then add water to make the consistency for the recipe or use required. Shop-bought oat milk, of whatever variety, has something very important which my own made oat milk does not, packaging waste. A typical plastic coated paper carton for food use has one layer of card, one layer of aluminium, and three or four layers of plastic. Most people focus on the waste side of this problem, but let's look at a rarely considered issue in this debate, water use. According to Churchopac's Owned Life-Cycle Analysis Report, to create a one litre drinks package requires almost two and a half litres of processing water and almost one and a half litres of cooling water. Just to make this point more loudly, I'll repeat that in bold. Producing just the one litre plastic coated paper carton to hold the oat milk takes over three and a half litres of water. As the Life-Cycle Analysis Report says, that's still better than glass bottles, but what about the do-it-yourself option? Making it yourself from bulk-bought ingredients and then storing in a reusable container. That option is never explored because it challenges the core assumption of the consumer lifestyle, buying as much stuff as possible, throwing it away, then buying some more. Plastic coated paper cartons are theoretically recyclable, but the energy and resource costs of doing so on the low level of reclamation means the value of this is low. By any reason and measure, recycling these cartons is just PR greenwash to make consumers feel better about buying them. For me, making five to six litres of oat milk creates one empty two gram plastic oats bag as waste. I reuse all the discards from making the milk in cakes or stews. In contrast, six empty one litre containers to give away 65 to 90 grams, depending whether it has a plastic screw lid or not. Why do industry and government refuse to enact measures to control climate change, or ecological destruction, and drastically reduce energy consumption and pollution? Precisely because such measures would mark the end of the modern, affluent consumer lifestyle. More peculiarly, why do green consumers believe they can buy their way to ecological sustainability through using the right products, rather than changing that lifestyle of convenience for something simpler? The objective facts speak for themselves. I don't take milk in my drinks. I use oat milk for more culinary needs, like making custard, puddings or as a thickener. Milk into your coffee is an affectation. Why then do people expect to have milk in their drinks or on their cereal? Picking apart that history, certain trends arose only recently in industrial society, as their use was made possible by mass production and improved transport links, and the systems of often exploitative economic trade relations which arose as a result of these. As you move into a more uncertain future, where ecological overshoot and climatic change pretend to break down of that mass consumption system, do it yourself represents the simplest option to meet our needs. Learning how to do that, starting with the simple things like plant milk, is a means to learn these skills to prepare for that eventuality, as well as saving money in ecological impacts compared to the shop bought options.