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“Milk” is used for many kinds of suspension liquids. Milk of Magnesia did not come from a magnesium cow.


In the US, the legal description of "milk"[1] is not only regulated but well specified.

[1] https://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?SID=165f903bfaa729843a...


A counterexample to that is that you can walk into any chain supermarket and see "almond milk", "oat milk", and "soy milk" advertised on the shelves.

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 you look closely, these alternatives are all labeled "almondmilk", "oatmilk" and "soymilk" for specifically this regulatory hurdle.


Interesting... do these regulations apply only to labels on the actual packaging of the foodstuffs, and not to advertizing, etc?

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".


Or "almond drink" as I saw in a store last week.


The dairy industry has been agitating to get the FDA to put an end to the unwanted competition. I can't entirely blame them since tofu juice is in no way a milk.


> A counterexample...

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?


Attention to detail would be noticing that that is exactly what they state in their last paragraph.

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.


This is not evidence against the above point.


But it has got a weird system to it. As far as I can tell, a fake “milk” is generally white (or white ish) and it has to be used in situations where milk would usually be used.

You don’t get grape milk and or orange milk for example.


You probably could if you ground up the seeds and added water, though I'm sure it's not economically practical.




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