With that said, I doubt I could ever bring myself to stop drinking ethically sourced milk. All of these plant based milks are overly processed, expensive, and fortified with a bunch of nutrient junk that is lacking.
You can make your own very easily. Oat milk, for example, requires you to:
1. Put rolled oats into a blender
2. Put water in blender
3. Blend
4. Pour through a strainer into a container
5. Drink up
It’s dirt cheap, easy as can be, tastes great, and has no “nutrient junk”. And if you’re so inclined, you can usually buy rolled oats in the bulk bins in most grocery stores, so you can cut out unnecessary packaging too!
ETA: Putting a pitted date in for every ~2 cups of water also adds just enough sweetness to mimic the big manufacturers like Oatly and whatnot. Adding coconut flakes and/or cashews can also bump up the fattiness a bit, which is handy for a frothable “barista” style.
Food is labeled based on its culinary classification. Something can be culinarily milk without coming out of a teat.
"milk" is more of a visual descriptor than a culinary classification.
The FDA[1] would certainly love to hear all about it.
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=165f903bfaa729843a...
Milk is still understood by default as cow milk. It will change when and if cow milk is not as widespread as today, and then the word milk will keep reflecting the reality, as today.
The FDA, as in many parts of the world (in EU too, for instance), forbids calling such plant-based drinks milk because they are bribed and receive aggressive lobbying from the dairy industry [1].
How are we supposed to call them? Plant-based drinks that are white and look like milk? They are not always used as drinks since they can be used to cook, and are not the only plant based drinks. Yes, this makes it difficult to speak about them. Yes, this is possibly the point, along with avoiding that people think them as alternatives to cow milk.
When you are telling people that "this is not milk", you are spreading this lobbying. What is your point? People saying milk for plant based drinks will not be convinced by this prescriptive approach anyway.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/02/10/the-s...
"Oat milk", "almond milk" etc aren't really making any effort to imitate anything as far as I know, they are what they are.
I neither object to your fallacious assertion, nor find personal shame in supporting its cause if the objective hammer countinues to drop hard on the class of uncritical marketing wank that you've just demonstrated.
You do know why animals (including humans) produce milk, don't you?
ETA: The Mahābhārata, a book dating back to 400BCE, refers to making rice milk. So...
https://books.google.com/books?id=ivQ6CwAAQBAJ&pg=PT14&lpg=P...
That excerpt is talking about deceiving someone with dilute pounded rice served as milk.
You don’t get grape milk and or orange milk for example.
[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=165f903bfaa729843a...
They all use the word "milk", yet none of the manufacturers get in trouble with the FDA. It must be because the code you linked only tells part of the story.
I'm guessing that only the word "milk" in isolation is legally required to be from a cow, and that "[blank] milk" (almond, soy, oat, goat, camel) is regulated by different statutes.
If I look at, for example, https://www.amazon.com/Almond-Breeze-Original-Milk-32/dp/B07... the picture shows that on the product carton, it's run together as "Almondmilk", but the Amazon listing calls it "Almond Breeze Original Almond Milk".
Attention to detail: "([a-z]+) milk" != "\1milk"
> It must be because the code you linked only tells part of the story. I'm guessing...
The entirety of CFR is public domain, readily accessible, regularly maintained, and conveniently searchable at great expense to taxpayers. Care to explain why your speculative assertion isn't supported by proper citation?
What's the point of linking to the FDA definition anyway? Apart from it obviously being a result of lobbying, it's completely irrelevant to the question of whether or not plant milks are, well, milk. It is overly specific as is, for starters, nobody would deny that mammals other than cows give milk.
The only result following from the regulation you linked is that people selling milk can legally only drop the specifier "cow's", but not "donkey" nor "almond", before the word "milk". Plant milks will keep being milks, as they have been in the English language since at least the 13th century.
Saw this and had to moan, sorry but this particular trend is a pet peeve of mine. You know dates are sweet because they have sugar in them right? Getting an equivalent amount of sweetness from regular table sugar instead wouldn't be any less healthy, and would be much cheaper and less perishable.
I guess you get a bit of dietary fiber and trace amounts of nutrients from a date too, but that doesn't seem relevant when using them as an ingredient with other things.
Dates have potassium, fiber, and make anything taste great. But dates aren’t the end all fruit for all your nutrient needs. Nutrition facts and moderation is the key.
A major point is that most fruit isn't sweet enough to dramatically sweeten a product. Most people would over-sweeten their food significantly compared to using fruit. It is in fact difficult to over consume fruit from a sugar perspective, while it is comparatively trivial to over consume sugar from added refined sources.
Another benefit to fruit is that instead of being pure sugar like sugar, there are a wide variety of other more complex carbohydrates
I'll point out that fruit consumption is inversely correlated with obesity [0] while sugar consumption is positively correlated with it [1]
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5084020/
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23594708
Fruit and vegetable intake is also positively correlated with basically reduction in all cause mortality but specifically heart disease and cancer https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/46/3/1029/3039477
There is more to fruit than an overly reductive idea of "sugar + fiber" and there are a lot of compounds in there from vitamins and minerals to other things. The science is clearly showing us that fruit is much more healthy for us than refined sugar, because of a variety of things including how much less sugar there is in most fruit compared to foods with added refined sugars.
> "A major point is that most fruit isn't sweet enough to dramatically sweeten a product."
Yes, dried dates are not like "most" fruit. They are sweet enough to "dramatically sweeten a product", that would be the reason they are used for that exact purpose.
Edit: I googled it; dates are anywhere from 40-80% sugar, depending on the variety (https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Sugar-content-of-fresh-a...). Even undried dates are at least 40% sugar, which surprised me.
Putting a date into your blended oat milk is, nutritionally speaking, very likely immensely different (and very likely more beneficial) than putting the equivalent amount of refined sugar. Then we havent even touched on the many other benefits - like behaviorally you are less likely to overindulge with dates than adding another teaspoon of sugar etc.
No, the studies I linked cannot be handwaved off as you attempted, and no, they do not support your reductive approach. I urge you to read them again if gaining a greater understanding of why whole food is healthier than refined constituents is actually a goal of yours.
Pretty much everyone should be fine with trace amounts as long as they aren't Celiacs.
I like to blend dates in my protein shake. I think -- just like if you added blue berries or strawberries -- it gives a distinct flavor to the drink.
I'm not sure if that's desired for the oat milk or not. I'd think people would want their milk to be somewhat plain.
Humans have been milking everything they can get their hands on since prehistoric times. There are a number of reasons to not eat/drink those things (taste, vegan, intolerance, etc) but that doesn't suddenly make yogurt, milk, and cheese "bad" for you.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/food-features/y...
This gives me confidence that it's most probably not fatally bad. Which is good enough for something so delicious as dairy.
I can agree that _some brands_ suffer the problems you mention, but other brands that are easy to find don’t differ significantly in nutrition profile or calorie density from cow’s milk. Unsweetened Oatly for instance matches up very well, with the most significant detractor being a bit less protein per serving than similar cow’s milk (but also the benefit of fewer calories per serving).
I do agree that plant based milks are often more expensive though.
Dairy milk is commonly fortified with Vitamin D. Some mushrooms, if left in the sun, also have vitamin D.
Vitamin D comes from the sun.
If you skip the simplification vegans are using to justify eating plants (they don't scream and run away when we're trying to eat them) you hardly can eat anything ethically.
>> Plants lack nerves or a central nervous system or the ability to directly react to their circumstances
Is the same as:
>> they don't scream and run away when we're trying to eat them
A pasture-fed cow kills approximately zero of the same.
Assuming your ethics give equal treatment to all mammals, the rural hobby farmer comes out far, far ahead of the urban vegan.
Sure, if we all had a cow and two acres and lived in a temperature environment where the animals could graze all year, we could have milk after the cow has had a calf. But who impregnated her? And what are you doing with the calf because it needs two acres of grazing pasture too. And then who impregnates her next year and what do you do with that calf? Another two acres? What about the harsh winter or summer? You're going to need to supplement with extra hay. Off to the agricultural supply who... ah crap, they farm. Farming kills fuzzy animals! Now we're terrible again!
Cows, like all mammals, aren't unending milk supply systems. They dry up because they lactate for a reason. Your imaginary hobby farm is an unsustainable system.
Source: I have a grazing pasture and grazing animals.
For example for the cow to lactate, it needs to be inseminated. Every 4 years I think. When the calf is born it's taken away from the mother. Does a cow mother suffer emotionally from having their baby taken away?
Cows are sociable animals so a single cow would probably feel lonely?
I don't have the answers. It seems like research uncovers more and more human-like emotions associated to animals so it doesn't seem completely out of question. Humans also have a tendency to objectify things so they can shut off empathy.
Another option is to pool several calves to one cow and foster them for more natural suckling behaviour. This is a bit more common.
Interestingly, apparently cows can choose to either give the milk or not which makes the logistics more complicated.
I can currently only find sources in German for this though ('muttergebundene Kälberaufzucht' / 'ammengebundene Kälberaufzucht').
But yea. I mean, let's gang up on cow farmers instead.
Perfect is the enemy of the good in our line of work, what makes diet any different? One should strive to do the best they can within their location, health, dietary framework and ethical choices. It's as simple as that.
If your options are cow vs almond and you want to choose the lesser of evils and only care about the negatives of the almond (water) it's still less evil than cow milk.
[1] https://phpa.health.maryland.gov/OEHFP/OFPCHS/Milk/Shared%20...
>> Although milk as it comes from the cow is a poor source of vitamin D, fortified milk is considered an excellent source, especially because of its calcium content. Other foods considered good dietary sources of vitamin D are relatively rare but do include fatty fish, eggs and liver. Vitamin D is a fat-soluble vitamin.
As for the "destroyed" part of my comment, I meant that both it and vitamin A are fat soluble. So when you "skim" the milk, you lose lots of the vitamins. You lose so much, that vitamin A has to be re-added. Again from your article:
>> As skim and lower fat milks became popular, the reduction of vitamin A levels with fat reduction became an issue since whole milk was considered a good source of vitamin A.
TL;DR - I should've said vitamin A but got lazy/greedy. Vitamin D, while subject to the same problem as vitamin A, is added as refurb explains.