In the Middle Ages, the Upper Class Went Nuts for Almond Milk
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
Where I live, with the exception of oat milk, all soy, rice or almond milk comes with tricalcium phosphate and sometimes sugar, some flavour and even vegetable fat. Same for yoghurt.
This tendency to add stuff (particularly sugar and fat) to food is becoming more frequent in bread and other vegetable products that were healthier once.
Maybe if there was a good word that quickly described what rice, soy, or oat milk was it would be OK. But simply calling them "juice" seems to be even more of a culinary misnomer.
like in, "look, kids are eating this for breakfast, we need to fortify it vitamins and stuff to prevent deficiencies"... nevermind that those extra vitamins will just increase the risk of cancers or stuff in adults. it's becoming hard to find the "un-enhanced" sortiments of many products.
...despite the study that got very popular on HN lately this is far from a clearly agreed upon theory. There's still only retrospective data and with enough confounding factors to make drawing any inference on the causality of things very very hard. Until we all start wearing blood-analyzing implants for a generation or so, >50% of nutrition related studies will continue either being bullshit or not meaning what we think they mean,
I don't know about cancer, but food additives aren't always a good idea.
Extra calcium is not really absorbed without vitamin D3 (more specifically, calcitriol), but I imagine that if one has a kidney condition one would have to avoid such food additives.
Even the addition of iodine to salt is not without consequences.
The same thing happens here: soy yoghurt is 'soy dessert', soy/rice/* milk is '* beverage'.
I'm not sure this is actually enforced, or brands are just covering their asses.
I'm on both sides of this. I think it should be called milk, and the public should understand that the nutrition is very different, but perhaps for public interest not calling it milk is better because cow milk does offer more bang-for-buck and nutrition (particularly protein and vit D fortification) and the public could easily overlook this. I lean toward not calling it milk, because everyone who wants almond milk knows what to buy or can figure it out quite easily, even if it's not called milk any more.
AND you have to feed the calf a milk substitute because we're stealing it's meal.
If you must have milk, drink dairy substitutes if you care about drought.
Even today, they eat grass for the bulk of their lives. They are 'finished' with corn/soy to add marbling.
It's a massive system beyond simply "eating the grass which people couldn't eat". People consume many times more dairy and eat many times more beef than in history.
There's not enough land for all of the cows to free graze. It was estimated we would need something like 7 Earths to feed the world on the Western diet.
So when counting the grain used against the cost of meat, include the dry material as well for a fair comparison.
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/06/how-ameri...
Of course the total consumption has gone up because of the massive increase in population.
cf: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2015/oct/...
http://veganstart.org/wp-content/uploads/vs-graphic-truthord...
Sourced PDF: http://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2013/02/ca_ft...
They have calcium and thickeners added though.
Not sure what you mean by "currently" and "the dairy industry" and "litigating", but a (the?) relevant case was decided by the ECJ back in June. Press release: https://curia.europa.eu/jcms/upload/docs/application/pdf/201...; full judgement: http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&doc...
For whatever it's worth, the lawsuit was brought by a German society that aims to ensure fair competition by truth in advertising. (Were they bought by the dairy industry? Possible.)
The judgement is clearly based on the definition "The term “milk” shall mean exclusively the normal mammary secretion obtained from one or more milkings without either addition thereto or extraction therefrom." from EU law made by the European Parliament and the Council. (Were they bought by the dairy industry? Possible. But given this sentence that is part of EU law, the court didn't have much choice.)
I say this because most meanings are lost in translation if we're to use them literally.
Take the english word 'oil'.
- In Spain, oil would be translated to 'aceite': olive oil is 'aceite de oliva'; engine lubricating oil is 'aceite de motor'. The same thing happens in French, but a literal translation would sound weird in Portuguese, because
- In Portugal, olive oil is simply called 'azeite', a word that is not used for sunflower seed oil, called 'óleo de girassol', or motor oil, called 'óleo' or 'óleo de motor'.
A similar thing happens with the word 'cream', translated to 'natas' if it refers to the solid phase of cow milk, or 'creme' if it refers to some form of paste, be it an edible spread, a soup, or some body lotion.
So the very fact that they translated 'cream' as 'natas', in the portuguese version, means that the context is everything and that people are not unquestioning automata.
/drinks from his sunmilk
I blame champaignians for kicking it off.
In addition there is the whole question of IP for names of cities/regions. I mean if a place makes efforts to ensure that good quality products are made there, it becomes like a brand that needs to be protected.
So for me protecting Parma Ham is just the same as protecting Coca Cola, just that the moral person is the community living in the place instead of a multinational company.
Nothing prevents you from making of copy of Parma Ham and building your brand, just like you can copy Cocal Cola or any other product. Just don't use the name.
I'm not convinced that 'Welsh Lamb' is in any real sense a regional traditional food that differs from English lamb, but on consumer protection grounds I also don't reckon that you should be able to label random lamb as Welsh anyway. And some others ('Yorkshire Forced Rhubarb' is the one I know best) really are quite distinct from their equivalents elsewhere and really should be recognised as its own thing.
* https://www.thespruce.com/yorkshire-forced-rhubarb-history-4...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhubarb_Triangle
Interesting. I've only had the summer/outdoor variety.
People used to say "french campaign," they knew some of it was made elsewhere. I would wager more people knew that some champagne was made elsewhere than people who knew that champagne is a region. Same for Greek Yoghurt or feta cheese. These were considered types of products.
Good or bad, these are pure agricultural lobby initiatives, not consumer protection. IMO, it's not too different from Hollywood getting regional trademark protection for to word "romantic comedy."
Instead of this current racket, where food names become less clear, the regional food manufacturers should be forming associations that build brands. These brands can then utilize logos, trademarks, anti-counterfeiting designs and other enforceable IP to stand out as being "Original Champagne" or "English Cheddar," or whatever is needed.
I'm not sure that's the best example. In addition to being made in different places, Champagne and Prosecco are made from different grape varieties, and Prosecco is normally made using a different process (Charmat rather than 'traditionelle' - fermented in tank rather than in bottle). They're really quite different products. The generic term that covers both kinds is 'sparkling wine', and if you don't care which kind you get as long as it's good, that seems fine.
Well I do, because even if both taste good, they don't taste the same and I don't want to discover which one I have really bought only after having spent 50€ on my bottle.
If the name has no importance, then why insist on calling your product that doesn't come from Champagne, "Champagne"? And if it has a real importance, then it makes sense to respect it.
This way, when I buy a product named "X", I know that it follows a standard without having to look at all the details. If I think "X" is overrated, I will buy the lesser known "Y" that I know is just as good, because it has its own standard. Same as with name brands, really.
Speaking about Champagne, fundamentally, it is just a sparkling wine. No one forces you to buy Champagne if you want sparkling wine. In France, we have alternatives that can be just as good: Cremant, Blanquette, Clairette,... or even generic "mousseux".
The only thing that makes Champagne Champagne is that it has to meet a certain standard, and part of it is that it has to be made in the Champagne region.
I mean, it's like buying a Swiss watch that has nothing to do with Switzerland. It may be a very good watch, but don't call it a Swiss watch unless it is Swiss.
Like Port, or Madeira. There is no such thing as Champagne in Portugal. We too have sparkling wine, but we could not call it Champagne if we wanted.
Unfortugnately, we now have CETA. So if things go wrong, Canada will be able to export to the EU many protected products not included in CETA's (largely incomplete) Annex 20.
Lots of rural communities in Europe lived until the 50s or so not much unlike the middle ages (no fridges, no electricity, farming, etc) and they weren't harmed by their milk at all.
The risks of raw milk are more severe for children, and children are often not asked for, nor able to give, consent to engage in this risky behaviour. Many outbreaks of raw milk poisoning included a child under 5. (Some of these children needed kidney transplant).
> From 2007 through 2012, 26 states reported 81 outbreaks linked to raw milk. The outbreaks caused 979 illnesses and 73 hospitalizations.
> From 2007 through 2009, 30 outbreaks were linked to raw milk. This increased to 51 outbreaks from 2010 through 2012. Among outbreaks in which the food or drink linked to the outbreak was identified, the percentage associated with raw milk increased from 2% from 2007 through 2009 to 5% from 2010 through 2012.
[...]
> Probably no more than 1% of the milk consumed in the United States is raw, yet more outbreaks were linked to raw milk than by pasteurized milk.
> If you consider the number of outbreaks associated with raw milk in light of the very small amount of milk that is consumed raw, the risk of outbreaks linked to raw milk is at least 150 times greater than the risk of outbreaks linked to pasteurized milk. [...] E. coli O157:H7, which can cause kidney failure and death, was a common cause of outbreaks linked to raw milk. Relatively mild viral infections and toxins were common causes of outbreaks linked to pasteurized milk.
This seems pretty high relative to the number of people regularly consuming raw milk.
In any case, anybody who hasn't spent all their lives in western cities, but knows rural communities, can attest to millions drinking fresh milk with very low risk for ages...
[citation needed]
I'm sure people got sick buying hooky milk though.
https://www.cdc.gov/foodsafety/rawmilk/rawmilk-outbreaks.htm...
In Sicily (especially in the eastern part of the island) almond milk is quite a common beverage, it also makes for a killer "granita".