"It's a bunch of poppycock," she says calmly, sipping on a soya-milk coffee in Peta's London offices.
A decade of global economic boom favoured Brazil's champion exports - commodities like coffee, soya, beef and oil.
After three weeks without milk - no coffees, soya gloop on cereal - I eat a Cornetto, followed by a Wall's bar.
Indeed, a large body of evidence indicates that different plant-based compounds, which showed positive results in the aortic ring preparation (e.g. grape and wine polyphenols, cocoa and coffee phenolics, soya isoflavones), have also been found to produce vasodilation and improve vascular function in whole animals and in human subjects.
It was also vegan and some customers resented not being able to get a regular milky coffee or non-soya ice-cream for miles around.
Monsanto has conducted extensive field trials in Brazil of genetically modified soyabeans, which might also make possible less use of chemicals.The economic benefits of commercial farming are indisputably large: soya products, for example, have overtaken coffee to become one of Brazil's biggest exports (worth $5.7 billion in 1997).
Starbucks in China has started serving soya milk rather than dairy with its coffee.
Brazilian production of rice, beans, manioc, maize and soya are all expected to decline, with coffee especially vulnerable.
Under kosher rules, meat and dairy can't be prepared or eaten together, but I don't register the absence of dairy until David quizzes our waiter about coffee and is offered a soya cappuccino.
Were all the bar staff occupied by one bloke getting in 27 Jägerbombs, a woman who had clearly never ordered a round before, and a stressed-looking misfit making them switch on the coffee machine for one decaf soya latte?
