Like, wtf is almond milk? When I was a kid, almond milk was super tasty, and it was basically normal milk mixed in with sweet almond sherbet. What's wrong with calling the vegan almond milk "almond-based milk alternative" if it's not actual milk? If you asked me for almond milk and I gave you actual "almond milk" (i.e. the dairy kind) and it turned out you were vegan, you'd be pissed off, right?

What makes that the actual version? Almond milk as an animal milk substitute made from almonds dates back to the 1300s[0]. It's not new.

I hear where you're coming from, but I also question what does and doesn't count as an "authentic" name, and I suspect a lot of it comes down to people thinking that the names they used growing up or the names they ran into first are the "real" ones and everything else is a new fad.

When people are arguing about confusion I'm a little bit sympathetic (although I'm doubtful consumer confusion is actually the serious problem they make it out to be). But when people start to argue about needing to use proper words, I usually check out, because usually they have a very narrow view of what word origins count as proper. They're rarely tracing the etymology of the word, they're usually just saying that everyone should adopt the same definitions that their specific parents used.

So let me flip your question around on you: almond sherbet already traditionally contains milk. What would be wrong with calling almond sherbet... almond sherbet, or an almond milkshake if the balance of milk is increased. That would be helpful anyway, because you could make vegan almond sherbet using a vegan milk as a base, and then what are you going to call it under your system?

My take on this is that vegan cheese/milk is substitutable in nearly every single recipe I make. Many people dislike the taste of vegan cheese, which I understand and think is completely valid, but many people also dislike the taste of brie and I don't see a general campaign to classify brie as a non-cheese. So part of why I call those products vegan milk/cheese instead of "cheeze" is because I think if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, and if I can use it in all of my duck recipes often without any additional thought or research, then for all practical purposes it's a duck.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almond_milk

So, e.g., given your 'quacks like a duck' theory, I could happily cook a "mushroom risotto" with mushroomy chicken instead of actual mushroom, and that would still be a perfectly fine mushroom risotto, right? Except serving that to a vegan claiming it's a "mushroom risotto" would probably make me an ass, and all linguistic subtleties of what constitutes 'mushroominess' in chicken would probably fly out the window.

Note I'm not arguing about what ingredients are substitutable for others and thus comparable. I'm arguing about naming, and specifically about naming intended to produce confusion and blur the definitions for the purpose of marketing. So while I partly agree with the 'quacks like a duck' thing, I think a big part of why it's fine to have non-dairy 'cheese', but not fine to have chicken-based 'mushrooms' comes down to which direction of duck-quacking feels more 'defendable' than what constitutes acceptable substitutes in terms of flavour.

How is it intentional misnaming to use a term like "Almond Milk", which has been used in English back to the origin of the language? Care to look up how long "rice milk" in Japanese has contained the Japanese word for milk? ミルク and ライスミルク.

> Except serving that to a vegan claiming it's a "mushroom risotto" would probably make me an ass

To be clear, the jerk part here would be serving non-vegan food to a vegan, not the name. If you made a mushroom risotto and slathered butter over it, it would be just as much of a jerk move. This is actually something that comes up a lot with vegan food, it's why we need to read labels. There are multiple artificial meats that are made with milk and eggs and are vegetarian friendly but not vegan friendly. It's rarely safe to assume something is vegan just because vegetables are the primary ingredient or because it's "plant-based".

If you want to think of it from another perspective, I would say the same thing is true of allergens. If you made a mushroom risotto and incorporated a peanut sauce or glaze, I don't have an issue with you calling it a mushroom risotto, I don't think anything fundamental has changed about the food. But it would definitely be a jerk move (and potentially negligent homicide) to feed it to someone you knew had a peanut allergy, and you would need to make sure that if you sold it in a store that it showed peanuts prominently in the ingredients.

> intended to produce confusion and blur the definitions for the purpose of marketing

I don't particularly care about marketing purposes, I don't think the term "almond milk" is any more deceptive than the term "turkey pepperoni" or "black bean brownies". And I do not believe that when the meat industry lobbies to get stuff renamed to "almond juice", they're doing it out of concern for confusion, they just want to create certain connotations in the exact same way that vegan companies want to do.

But if you wanted legislation that required food to clearly indicate whether or not it contained animal products, it would make my life a great deal easier, I would be able to stop reading individual ingredients to find out whether or not a loaf of bread was vegan.

Right now you can indicate whether a food is vegan/vegetarian, and many products that are marketing to vegans do, especially imitation meats and plant based cheese/milk/butter which I've found to be pretty prominent. But there's no requirement to do so, and many animal products (esp less 'palatable' ingredients like shellac) are allowed to be listed in ingredient lists with no other information at all. I often have to not just read ingredients but look up new terms that I'm unfamiliar with on my phone. Some ingredients don't even have a clear answer, they might be derived from animals or they might not be, and there's no obligation for food manufacturers to indicate which version they're using.

An easy way to solve this problem would be for labeling purposes to treat animal by-products and meat more like an allergen, require a line after the ingredients stating "contains ingredients derived from animals".

I don't agree with 'turkey pepperoni' and 'blackbean brownies' as being comparable to 'fried chicken (vegan)' or 'ham and cheese toastie (vegan)' (though, ok, they were just examples, perhaps unfortunate, like my almond milk one). The difference is these are primarily recipes, not base ingredients. Obviously, the distinction is not always clear (is cheese an ingredient or a recipe? Is bread? But I would argue in most people's head these are ingredients, not a family of recipes). It's one thing to talk about recipe variants (vegan or otherwise), it's another to talk about a Costa vegan ham and cheese toastie (as welcome as it may be as a dish). It's just begging for confusion. And, I have zero clue what crap I'm eating when I order one.

I sympathise with the ingredients listing thing though. I'm effectively vegan-eating slightly more than half days of the year, and not having to carefully read through ingredients just to spot the errant 'whey powder' at the end would be very welcome.

Feeding someone food that they don't want to eat is a jerk move regardless of what direction you're going.

I do think part of the reason why people take the vegan direction more seriously is that many vegans have strong preferences against eating those foods, and most non-vegans don't. To pull it out of the vegan world and offer a different perspective, this is the same reason why it's more of a jerk move to sneak a Muslim pork than it is to sneak them a black bean brownie. But of course, if you know someone has even a mild preference against eating any food, sneaking them that food is a jerk move. Don't do that, not even for minor preferences.

My only disagreement on this front is that I don't see how respecting those people requires forcing general food names to have one-to-one correlations to a specific ingredients list. And I say that as a vegan who does not get offended if a restaurant puts butter on their green beans and still calls them green beans, or if someone calls cricket flour "flour" even though it's not made from grain. I'm not trying to reclaim the word "salad" or anything. All I want is for the restaurant to be able to tell me if something is vegan or not if I ask, or to label it one way or another. And that labeling can be useful for non-vegans as well.

> It's one thing to talk about recipe variants [...], it's another to talk about a Costa vegan ham and cheese toastie (as welcome as it may be as a dish). It's just begging for confusion. And, I have zero clue what crap I'm eating when I order one.

I'm not sure. I somewhat get what you're saying, but I think there are two reasons I'm skeptical about this argument:

First, if you have a preference/allergy regarding products like soy and corn, buying meat-based products already isn't safe. The meat industry has been using soy and other ingredients for filler, flavoring, and preservatives for years and their labeling on that front is not particularly great. A good 5-10% of taco bell meat you buy will be additives like thickeners. So the "meat" word isn't protecting people who really want to avoid common vegan ingredients or processed foods. That's a problem that can only be solved with labeling.

Secondly, I'm skeptical because over the years the actual legal arguments being made in this debate have taken on an element of absurdity to me, even when dealing with non-recipe foods. As a specific example, the US FDA currently defines "milk" as coming purely from a cow. But that's just ridiculous, nobody would argue that goat milk or breast milk isn't real milk. Nobody would argue that consumer confusion is a good reason to call goat milk something like "lactation" or "juice" instead. And seeing what the industry actually lobbies for, I just don't believe confusion is what the industry cares about. It makes me wonder what's going to happen when lab-meat becomes a thing, and whether the meat industry is still going to have the exact same debates about a food product that is chemically identical to what they're selling.

I think sometimes the distinctions between two foods are small enough that they should share the same name even though the distinctions might matter to some (even many) people. The difference between 2% and whole milk matters nutritionally and labeling should reflect that, but they're both still milk. The difference between breast milk and bovine milk definitely matters, and you'd better not give me brownies made with breast milk or I am never visiting your house again and I am telling all the neighbors to avoid you. But they're both still milk. The difference between brie and cheddar cheese is huge, involving both taste and texture -- but they're both still cheese. So we're in a situation where vegan milk/eggs/cheese and animal milk/eggs/cheese are used almost exactly the same way in most recipes, they look the same, they accomplish the same goals in most meals, and while they're distinguishable when eaten, the taste difference between vegan cheddar and regular cheddar is not (imo) as large as the difference between cheddar and, say, cottage cheese. The differences do matter, particularly nutritionally, and they should be clearly labeled, but do they matter so much that they need completely separate words? I would argue that putting them in the same category of food is the least confusing way to talk about them, and nutritional/ingredient labeling is a separate concern from etymology.

That it's milk with almond. Like "chocolate milk" is milk with chocolate and "milk coffee" is coffee with milk.

From medieval and Renaissance-era recipes, religious rules appears to be the main reason almond milk is used. Because it's not dairy.

Because that would be crippling for an advertising perspective. It sounds like something out of a satirical sci-fi dystopian environment. The goal is to encourage people to choose it as an alternative to dairy milk, not to use the most precise label.

It seems totally feasible to require a new product to have a new name, even if it's kind of like an existing product. Think: ice cream. Ice cream is a regulated product with a formal legal definition. Places making cheaper ice cream substitutes were forced to come up with names to distinguish their products: soft serve, Frosty, FroYo, etc.

It takes the consumer all of 10 seconds to get the gist.

Everyone should be okay with truth in food. Especially vegan, who certainly would NOT be okay with products that mislead them into believing a product is vegan when it is not.

Lots of foods are regulated by the FDA or USDA. Mayo, yoghurt, butter, bread, etc, etc. If you search the FDA or USDA site, you'll find the requirements that must be met for a company to use such terms. That's why Miracle Whip is called a "dressing," in the USA instead of Mayonnaise.

The CFR contains a subsection specifically for frozen pies (though, one of the Trump administrations last acts was to gut this). Lemon bars must contain lemons, per food labeling regulations. Peanuts have a section too.

And yeah, industry lobbyists are largely the creators of legal definitions for foods. If you're a beef producer, you certainly don't want other companies to be able to sell ground up bugs as "ground beef" and undercut your prices or give consumers a bad impression of your product.

I will concede, tacos are not regulated.

This has little to do with the stop confusing the names of things argument.

I concede that almond milk was a bad example, but if anything that strengthens the point.

I bet even back then people had the same discussion in fact :p

E.g. lactose-free dairy milk is marketed as 'delac'. It's not that hard.

Fun fact: lactose-free milk still has all the sugars that made up its original lactose content (you could even argue it still has all its lactose, if you wanted to be really obstinate). Glucose in particular registers as sweeter than lactose and for this reason many "lactose-free" milks have messages on the packaging informing consumers that they have "no sweetener added".

Lactose-free milks also tend to be Ultra Heat Treated, which enhances the sweet taste by means of the Maillard reaction. See wikipedia.

Costco does this. They don't call it almond milk but "Almond beverage". I think they do similar with other vegan products.

Obviously searching for the various possible terms gives results mostly from recent times, about the vegan almond milk.

Soumada is very tasty, a bit like amaretto but without the alcohol. I haven't had it in years ...

A similar and very popular drink along similar lines is "rose milk", which is stirring up some rose sherbet in milk.

It was a popular way of getting kids to drink milk back in my day (slightly less popular these days).

But I admit, if a vegan "rose milk" comes out as some milky alternative made of rose petals and I have to repurpose "rose milk" as well, I'm going to be quite upset :p

[1] https://www.mycretangoods.com/article/16856/Soumada-traditio...

"Αμυγδαλόγαλα"; I confess I've never heard that word but maybe it's just an old word?

Yet, for God knows what reason, whenever some vegan is trying to convince me of the merits of their diet, they hand me some godawful dry sausage made of hydrolysed soy protein and say "see, it's just like a real sausage. Did you know she's Paul McCartney's daughter?". Or some fermented cashew nuts smeared on a piece of bread that they think is anything remotely like cheese. I have never understood this and have since reached the conclusion that most vegans are closer to paleo, gluten-free (not coeliac) and other alternative diet folk in that they just don't "get" people who derive a massive amount of pleasure from food.

There is an epidemiological experiment that has been going on for over a million years. It resulted in a population of 8 billion homo sapiens. That is not actually good for the Earth, but if you want to know what to eat, to maximize your health as an individual, look that way.

Not with modern food science. A lot of people consider cornsyrupy sugar water to be satisfying because companies have collectively spent billions and decades in R&D and marketing to make it taste and look as satisfying as possible.

It works because our sense are not infallible, they can be tricked and purposefully mislead. Just like taste expectations are often built from childhood on.

Mainly it's the language that is used by people who adhere to diets such as this. There is more reference to the health properties of various ingredients than there is the art of cooking, and this feels alien to people like myself. Of course, there are paleo foodies (just as there are vegans), but they are in the minority.

I'm not saying the way you see things is wrong (if anything, the fact that you're almost certainly healthier than me is strong evidence to the contrary), but for evangelists of alternative diets there is a cultural barrier to overcome that vegans especially seem to just not be aware of.

We also have lots of vegan "cheese" type products with funny names like "Keese" and "Cheez" and some are pretty good.

I like keeping the names clear because no one gets confused and buys the wrong thing.

https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFR...

Maybe it’s the case in Your Country but it’s far from being a pan European thing.

"The European Parliament has voted in favour of an amendment (no.171) which would place further restrictions on the use of dairy food labels for plant-based products. The use of dairy terms, such as "cheese", "yoghurt" and "milk", for non-dairy products is already banned within the EU, following a decision by the CJEU in 2017, however, under the new amendment, these restrictions would go one step further by also prohibiting terms that liken plant-based products to dairy, eg "yoghurt-style", "butter alternative" or "cheese substitute"."[0]

0. https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=588638a6-879c...

EDIT still ongoing and not yet legislated you can still buy “vegan cheese” for now https://m.foodingredientsfirst.com/news/amendment-171-34-pol...

It’s interesting that your jurisdiction is so proactive in this area!

Between that title, and it having been posted on April the 1st, I find it difficult to take that article serious.

Eggs, in particular, need a valid vegan substitute. As an aside, if we could veganize all the different incantations of an egg it would be ground-breaking. Alas, I fear we are doomed to have 5 different vegan products to replace those incantations of an egg. 1 for scrambled eggs, 1 for baking, 1 for emulsifying, 1 for adhesion, etc.

Because this is as much a political statement, and battle, as it is a personal dietary choice.

As crazy as it sounds, a certain segment of people love to change the definition of words. It is not enough to not want to eat animal products themselves, they also are not content to allow others to have these things to themselves unmolested by grotesque artificial imitations.

They want their non-thing to become the thing, replace it, and to the degree it disgusts and frustrates the normal crowd and impinges on their enjoyment of the normal version, the happier they are.