Soy milk, rice milk, almond milk, hemp milk, oat milk, etc.: they all have one thing in common in that they don’t come out of a nipple, and I can understand some of the dairy industry’s concern over so many “fakers” taking control of “their” word. Frankly, with the growing number of options out there I’m almost as concerned as they are about dilution of the brand and consumer confusion, because I can see a time where it’s not going to be clear if the “milk” in a product or restaurant dish came from bovine mammary tissue.
That said, I don’t think we needed Fox News’ help resolving the issue:
All kidding aside, I will gladly take the dairy industry’s favourite words and rip them to pieces for whatever purposes I’m in the mood for. We’re talking about a group who, in Canada, made it illegal for margarine to be yellow because it could hurt sales of butter (that law was finally lifted a few years back.) I can’t find mention of this anywhere, but I have suspicions that it took a long time for fortified soy milk to arrive here because of industry lobbying – I do know that they fought the addition of soy beverages to the “milk and milk products” quadrant of the four food groups, and at the end of the day, it’s a marketing issue, not a health one. I don’t know about you, but I’m suspicious of any group’s nutritional claims when they’d willingly withhold nutrients from consumers because they don’t feel that they can compete.
Still, we’d better come up with a better name for soy milk than what Fox suggests. And probably soon: chocolate milk seems to have been replaced with “chocolate dairy beverage” lately, so I suspect something’s up. Or maybe they were just worried we’d come up with new names on their behalves for brown liquid products from an industry that tries not to talk about its other brown liquid byproducts
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In Germany it’s mandatory to label soy/rice/oat milk as soy/rice/oat drink, because the dairy industry here owns the word milk. Moreover, plant based milk is subject to the full VAT (like cars and TVs), whereas animal milk gets the reduced tax rate (like all other processed food).
This, of course, is not only discriminating against vegans, but also against the 15% of all adult Germans who happen to be lactose intolerant.
By the way, I can’t wait for another Porncast episode …
Did she say “soy jism”?? OMG!! I really think we should take back words like “milk”, “meat”, “butter” – they don’t belong to the animal exploitation industry, and although I don’t have a reference, I’m pretty sure that all of them were used to describe plant foods either at the same time or before we ever used them for animal flesh & secretions.
Agreed, the porncast is way overdue! I blame the renovations and the loss of my desk – I’m currently recording in the hallway sprawled on my stomach, but it’ll get done!
And it’s not really a porn “cast” because it’s just a file sitting somewhere, so I need to rename that too. Porn jism? Er, no.
I vote we work on having cow’s milk re-branded as mammalian nipple juice. I bet that’ll make people real thirsty.
in the UK the word ‘milk’ was banned from use other than what issues forth from a mammals nipple. So soya milk became a soya drink!!!
For those easily confused I suppose, or more cynically the huge vested interests in oppressing cows…