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Comment by at_a_remove | Hacker News Reader

A couple of years back I had a rather abrupt dietary change due to some health issues. One of the key parts was the total elimination of cheese from my diet. I began to say to myself, "Props to those National Dairy Council guys," because cheese was everywhere I looked. It is kind of impressive, really.

I am not against labels like "fake milk." If anything, I find myself increasingly annoyed by products that are not what they actually claim to be: silk that is not really silk, milk that is not actually milk. I'm quite okay with linguistic prescriptivism when it comes to product names.

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> I am not against labels like "fake milk."

I agree, anything other than full fat human milk that is non-homogenized and unpasteurized, with no additives (vitamins or otherwise) should be labelled fake milk.

Call me an anarchist, but as long as it comes from a mammal I have no problem with it being labeled "milk".

I detect an anti-marsupial bias.

Marsupials are mammals.

Me and my wife were actually joking the other day that at some point there's going to be a human milk industry. We envisioned something similar to the places you can go to sell your blood plasma.

There already is a network of sorts where lactating moms will donate milk to hospitals and mothers that can't nurse for whatever reason. [1]

[1] https://uichildrens.org/mothers-milk-bank-iowa

There was that human-milk ice cream in the UK around 2011:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Gaga

I don't know how well that turned out.

I am anecdotally aware that human milk for infants goes for $5/oz (which seems crazy when you tally up how much milk an infant can drink in a day).

Yep. Labeling things milk that resemble milk is not a recent trend and I think it's a shallow excuse for people to attack non-dairy milk. Those people have no problem with milk of magnesia, milkweed, or milk thistle.

Is coconut milk OK?

As a product, I am sure it is useful or tasty or whatnot, but I don't think it is milk.

Is it labeled as milk? I always see coconut water, which is closer to the reality of coconut juice

Yes. Coconut milk is both the water and coconut oil/flesh. Common for cooking.

That is a different product. coconut milk is thick, creamy, fatty and used in Thai cooking. I know no other word for it.

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