Using “milk” in the name of something doesn’t make an “alternative milk” in any way that doesn’t apply to any other drinkable liquid.
All things being equal, my major issue with alternative “milk” isn’t the semantic debate though. The fact that they’re often high in sugar, low in protein and fat is a bad sign. The fact that many (especially almond milk) are mostly water isn’t promising, and the environmental impact of chugging almond milk should become clear to California within a decade or so.
Mostly it’s just another fad (in terms of scale), promulgated by people who should know better, and others trying to sell you their “milks.”
As for alternative milks being a fad, it's a fad that's more than a thousand years old -- for example, almond milk was important in Europe for meatless Fridays and during Lent. I'm not sure who "should know better" when it comes to religious doctrine affecting food choices.
If you wanted to focus on a single point I made, I’d suggest: All told drinking a lot of anything other than water is probably a bad move....
And if we want to talk water usage and environmental impact, any cattle/dairy product is consuming at least order of magnitude more resources and emissions than oats or soy beans.
Oat milk isn’t even a rounding error of total plant “milk” consumption.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/693015/dairy-alternative...
Almond dominates by an order of magnitude, and has grown a loooot just since 2013, while soy milk consumption has actually dropped. Worse, it is projected that consumption of almond milk will more than double, while all other types are effectively flat.
When we talk about this subject, it’s important to realize that to the first order, we’re just talking about almond milk, a trend which continue into the future.
Almond milk still uses less water and way less CO2e emissions than dairy to produce the same volume of milk.
Animal agriculture is horrendous for the planet, any increase in non-dairy milk at the expense of dairy milk is a definite win for the environment.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46459714
From the BBC calculator, which comes from University of Oxford researcher Joseph Poore, and Thomas Nemecek of the Agroecology and Environment Research Division in Zurich, Switzerland
1 glass (200ml) per serving almond milk daily
Over an entire year your consumption of almond milk is contributing 51kg to your annual greenhouse gas emissions. ... 27,042 litres of water
1 glass (200ml) per serving dairy milk daily
Over an entire year your consumption of dairy milk is contributing 229kg to your annual greenhouse gas emissions ... 45,733 litres of water 652m² land
Especially when looking at the graph on the page you linked to, it becomes clear that the CO2 emission question is spurious. Dairy is fairly efficient, but actually killing and eating the animal isn’t. Fortunately beef cattle are not dairy cattle, and while the industries are linked, they are not inextricably linked. Most of all though, I’ll say it again, All told drinking a lot of anything other than water is probably a bad move... To that I’d add that if your real concern is environmental, milk is the least of it, cheese being a far bigger offender. Cheese being effectively condensed milk means that your kilogram of cheese took 10kg of milk to make.
In comparison, soda is 11g/100ml, juice is 9g/100ml, iced tea is 8g/100ml.
Perhaps it is different in the US.
I am amazed though, when I see people buying "skinny oat(or whatever) milk". Pretty sure you can achieve the same at home by mixing regular oat milk and some filtered/softened water.
So, it appears to be quite similar to skim milk, which is milk with reduced fat (cream skimmed off), not watered down milk.
What amazes me is the strong opinions people have about this topic.
n. A fluid naturally contained in plant or animal tissue: fruit juice; meat braised in its own juices.
n. A bodily secretion: digestive juices.
n. The liquid contained in something that is chiefly solid.
They’re macerated and crushed, their contents mixed with water. Of course by the same token milk is also a subset of juice, of the type “mucosal excretion.”
By that standard, human breast milk should be considered unhealthy (0.8%-0.9% protein, 3%-5% fat).
Interestingly, the fat content of milk can vary drastically between species, from Holstein cows 3.6% (popular for high volume milk production, but less fatty), Brown Swiss cows 4.0%, Jersey cows 5.2% (prized for their rich creamy milks), Zebu cows 4.7%, goat 4.0%, up to buffalo 6.9%, yak 6.5%, sheep 7.5%, reindeer 17%, and even fin whale a whopping 42% fat and a similarly staggering 12% protein. (Source: _On Food and Cooking_ by Harold McGee, page 13).
https://www.imedpub.com/articles/biochemical-differences-in-...
Human milk composition is dynamic, and varies between mothers in the same and different populations. Breast milk content was also found to vary diurnally, over a feeding and in some species according to the gender of the breast feeding infant. This study aimed to determine if there are any quantitative differences in the biochemical constituents of breast milk according to the gender of the breast feeding infant. Forty eight breast feeding mothers participated in the study, 24 were breast feeding male infants and 24 were breast feeding female infants. Five ml of breast milk was collected from each mother then analyzed for lipid contents, carbohydrates, proteins and calcium. Carbohydrates, amino acids and calcium concentration were measured using colorimetric test of absorbance. There were significant differences in the concentration of lipids and calcium in breast milk of male and female breast feeding mothers (P-value<0.001 and 0.02, respectively). Our study indicates that breast milk is more dynamic than previously thought and concentration of breast milk contents should not be taken as fixed. This can lead to developing personalized formula feeding specific to the baby’s gender and age and matches his/her growth needs.
Biology is damned complex.
Astute as ever, America's finest news source turns this marketing-driven terminology on its head.
This has happened before, industries creating imitation products deceptively similar to the real thing. For example in the early 1900s, states fought back against fake butter, but were ultimately overruled by the Supreme Court: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/t...
> Margarine manufacturers, to better appeal to the public, wanted to tint their product yellow; butter producers objected, claiming that yellow margarine, fraudulently masquerading as butter, was a deliberate ploy to deceive the public. (Butter from corn-fed cows is also anemically pale, and is routinely dyed to turn it an attractive butter-yellow; this practice, however, butter makers argued, was simply a cosmetic tweak.)
> By 1902, 32 states had imposed color constraints on margarine. Vermont, New Hampshire, and South Dakota all passed laws demanding that margarine be dyed an off-putting pink; other states proposed it be colored red, brown, or black. The “pink laws” were overturned by the Supreme Court (on the grounds that it’s illegal to enforce the adulteration of food) but the ban on yellow margarine remained. (The last hold-out, Wisconsin, only repealed its margarine-color law in 1967.)