Food is very highly regulated. And for good reason.

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.

Im sure there is a happy middle ground here where nut juice could be called something both attractive and accurate, but not all foods are protected like that. Milk chocolate is not really chocolate, lots of things with "pie" in the name aren't really pie, lemon "bars" are not really bars, choco tacos are not really tacos, peanuts are not actually nuts, and numerous other examples. If they made it illegal to label nut juices as milk, it would due to lobbying from dairy and not from a general protection of accurate food labeling.

Chocolate, is in fact "protected like that." The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) contains a section on Cocao, and foods must meet the legal requirements to be called milk chocolate, otherwise, they'd have to be called something generic a "confectionery" or given a brand name, like "Meelk-Shock-o-Lock®".

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.

"new product", one that's hundreds of years old. Check out medieval and Renaissance recipes for Fridays and Lent.

Don't go there. E.g. Olive oil is considered an animal product for Lent purposes because it used to be carried in flasks made from animal hide. And whether to use almond milk ot not depends on permission from your priest, if they think you are simply mimicking the forbidden stuff it "imitates", and thus still worth avoiding.

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

Trader Joe's (and maybe others) uses the word "beverage" to describe a lot of its milk alternatives.

I get it. But it could have easily been a play on the word 'milk/milky', without calling it 'milk' per se. Like "Nilk" or "Plantmilk" or something.

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

Lactose-free dairy milk is milk with added lactase, an enzyme that is used by mammals to digest lactose in milk. Now, children, remember from dairy science class: lactose is a complex sugar made of two siple sugars, glucose and galactose. Lactase breaks lactose down to its constituent simple sugars so that they can more easily be absorbed by picky mammalian guts.

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.