Take a scoop out of your carbon footprint

Kicking off a series on summertime treats for the climate era

Today we’re kicking off a three-week miniseries on summertime treats for the climate era. They may be frozen, sticky, or heavy on nostalgia, but they all can bring a better food future to life. And we’re starting the way my family always rang in sweltering Florida summers—with an ice cream float.

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Illustrated for Pale Blue Tart by Amelia K. Bates

Take a scoop out of your carbon footprint

Summer is prime time for tunneling into the 20 pounds of ice cream the average American will eat this year. And there’s no better time than scoop season to consider the cow. 

The world’s appetite for dairy is expanding fast, which is tough news for the climate. Dairy products—including milk, cheese, ice cream, and yogurt—contribute three percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, which is less than beef (six percent) but more than the entire airline industry (two percent). Most of that impact comes from the 270 million dairy cows raised worldwide to keep up with the global demand for milk. All those cows require huge amounts of feed, water, and land, and they also emit methane, a greenhouse gas warming the planet 25x faster than carbon dioxide. Low-carbon alternatives to our favorite dairy delights have proliferated, but not all hit the mark on deliciousness and availability.  

Some, like plant-based cheeses, are abundant on grocery store shelves but stuck in the culinary minor leagues, too often tasting unconvincing or just plain gluey. Other replacements, like the plant-derived protein rubisco, may make exceptional substitutes for milk products, but are just beginning to tiptoe into commercial bakeries. Ice cream, on the other hand, is the dairy-alternative Goldilocks. It’s here now, and some of the flavors are approaching moo-raculous.

There’s a wonderland of plant-based options in the frozen aisle if you know how to navigate it. I tend to zig past slightly vegetal coconut-milk ice creams and zag past any brands with a “frosty” mouthfeel (this guide can save you from that fate). I beeline instead for oat-based ice creams. I find them reliably soft and scoopable, often with a flavor remarkably like dairy (looking at you, Trader Joe’s Okie Dokie Swirl).

The carbon savings for plant-based scoops are significant. According to data from Carbon Cloud, Oatly’s oat-based “frozen dessert” has about a third the carbon footprint of dairy ice cream¹. Olive oil-based ice cream may have even lower emissions, according to a study commissioned by the brand Wildgood. But let’s stick with the Oatly numbers for the sake of some math: If every American met their annual ice cream quota with oat-based scoops instead of dairy, it’d be the carbon equivalent of taking 1.6 million gas-powered cars off the road for a year². 

The climate isn’t the only environmental and human impact to consider. A close look at the alternative milks commonly used in ice creams found that almond milk guzzles water, while coconut milk production can exploit workers in tropical nations. Oat and soy milks are gentlest on both workers and the planet—usually. The tradeoffs are complex, but a University of Oxford study has a helpful rule of thumb: any plant-based milk is a better ingredient for the planet than dairy milk.

But ice cream tends to cultivate die-hards, and close-enough flavor won’t always do. Scoop aficianados might prefer a new, moo-less option: ice cream from lab-grown milk.

As reported by Grist, startups like Perfect Day and Imagindairy are using precision fermentation to make whey and casein proteins identical to those produced by cows. Ice cream brands Brave Robot and Coolhaus then churn those proteins into ice creams that company numbers³ suggest have emissions similar to plant-based options, and water and energy savings, too.

Coolhaus sells ice cream sammies, cones, and more (store locator), and Brave Robot offers pints in many flavors (store locator), including a chocolate chip cookie dough I snagged from Stop & Shop and found to taste exactly like dairy ice cream—because cow or no cow, that’s exactly what it is.

These ice cream alternatives still command a couple-dollar premium over cow-based varieties, but perhaps it can all even out if we opt for less and better. It’s difficult to picture my 2023 going better if I eat 20 pounds of ice cream, but I can picture a summer much improved by a low-carbon scoop plopped into a glass of soda, a hiss of fizz and froth in its wake. Try it out with the recipe below.

Recipe: Ice cream float, hold the moo

On the left, a scoop of Oatly salted caramel bobs in a homemade ginger soda. On the right, Brave Robot chocolate chip cookie dough floats in homemade blueberry soda.

The genius of an ice cream float is the do-nothingness of pouring your favorite soda over scoops of ice cream. But when a stray do-something urge arises, meet it with a homemade ginger soda that’s heavy on the zing. 

Ice cream

• Use scoops of a plant-based or moo-less variety, or your favorite

Homemade ginger soda

• Seltzer water

Simple syrup

• 1 cup (240g) water

• 1 cup (200g) sugar

• 1 cup (130g) peeled ginger, sliced

Peel ginger using a spoon (if you’re not already doing this, you will be from now on) and slice it. 

Combine sugar and water in a medium saucepan and heat over medium high until sugar is dissolved and syrup comes to a boil. Add the sliced ginger then reduce heat to a simmer, cover, and cook for 20 minutes. Remove the lid and let syrup steep for three hours (be patient—the longer you give it, the stronger the ginger flavor will be). 

Strain syrup to remove ginger solids. If you’ve waited the full three hours, the pieces will have softened and lost enough of their mega-zing to be edible as an ever-so-slightly-planty candy.

To serve, stir three tablespoons of syrup into one cup of seltzer water, or as much as you like. Add scoops of low-carbon ice cream to the glass and let it froth. 

Leftover simple syrup keeps nearly indefinitely in the fridge, and can be used in cocktails, as a shiny glaze for fruit galettes, or brushed onto warm cakes fresh out of the oven.

Variation: Any-berry simple syrup

This same formula—one cup sugar, one cup water, one cup stuff—can be used to make simple syrups in fruit flavors, too. Near-mushy blueberries lead an especially vibrant second life as syrup, but any berry will do. Just swap ginger for one cup of berries, and leave the mixture uncovered while simmering (fruit bubbles up more). When you’re serving the syrup, use just two tablespoons per glass instead of three.

This fruity flexibility is a preview of next week, when something riffable this way comes.

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Keep slurpin’

• Scan this ranking of plant-based ice creams before you shop (via Tasting Table)

• Read more about how precision fermentation is replicating our favorite creamy things (via Grist)

• And even if ice cream is not your summer move, you’ll love this enchanting ode to London’s best ice cream: sheeryakh (via Vittles)

1.   Carbon footprints are calculated using a tool called life cycle assessment, which measures emissions and other impacts at each stage along a product’s ‘life,’ from farm to grocery store to landfill. I did my undergrad thesis on life cycle assessments (hey, Dr. Hess!), and learned that when you’re comparing the footprints of two foods, you have to make sure all the same ‘life cycle’ steps were measured—otherwise it risks being apples and oranges. Wanting to make sure these ice cream studies were sympatico, I wrote to the author of the dairy ice cream study and confirmed that it and the Oatly numbers do indeed sync.

If you’re interested in exploring the carbon footprints of foods on your grocery list, CarbonCloud is a good resource.

2. Here’s my ice cream carbon savings math:  

The carbon footprint of Oatly vanilla and chocolate ice cream clocks in at 1.4 kg of carbon dioxide equivalent (the typical unit of measure for these things) per kilogram of ice cream, while dairy ice cream is higher, at about 3.8 kg CO2-eq/kg. That’s a savings of 2.4 kg CO2-eq per kilogram if you opt for oat. Assuming every American swapped their annual 20 pounds—or 9.07 kilograms—of dairy ice cream for oat, we’d save 21.8 kg of carbon each, or 7.2 million metric tons if all 331 million of us went for it. 

You can plug big carbon numbers like that into this EPA calculator to get interesting impact comparisons.

3.  At time of publication, Brave Robot had not responded to my request to see their life cycle assessment study in full.