and debates like this are one reason I love this place …
I believe it takes ~143 gallons to make a cup of almonds … roughly 130 kernels (if thespruceeats.com is correct) and who knows how much waste is factored. … plus the ~125 ozs of filtered water to make the “milk”…
Homemade almond milk recipes evidently call for one cup of almonds to two to four cups of filtered water.
Formula existed but it was expensive and usually based on cow’s milk with additives, as well as the popularity of supplementing things like cod liver oil to make sure children got enough vitamins. In the related anecdote it wasn’t formula, it was not even condensed cow’s milk. It was a cheap substitute for actual dairy that dirt poor laborers made do with. I’ll quote the relevant sections:
fresh dairy products brought by rail from the East Slope would remain very expensive until summer, so poor people bought canned milk for their children. Susan wanted to tell them to save their money because canned milk was nothing but water, fat and sugar.
I understand that. But if the product that it was supposed to be was dairy then that would not have contained Vitamin C anyway, so it makes no sense for the plot to be that the fake product led to the kid getting scurvy. Perhaps it was just poorly researched.
Cream must be real cream by FDA standards. Creme has no definition and is used for things like Oreo filling.
Cheese gets even more detailed. There is a difference, for example, between “cheese”, “cheese product”, “cheese food”, and other variations. “Cheese” can only be real cheese. If there are a bunch more words around the name, or it’s not spelled “cheese”… it’s going to be something other than 100% cheese.
If there are pseudo-words for pseudo-products like “cheez”, I wonder if I can exploit that principle when I am marketing a product based on the absence of something?
Glooten-free. (May contain gluten.)
Less than 2% phat. (20% fat.)
Or “gIuten-free”. That isn’t a lowercase L; it’s an uppercase I. gIuten is our brand name for asbestos-based filler, and this product contains none of it.
I heard this from a comedian way back when. “Why do they call it almond milk? Because no one would buy it if they called it nut juice!”
Since then I have been referring to it as nut juice and I even write down nut juice on our grocery list on the fridge. Mrs. Geek started calling it nut juice too, but she still drinks it.
This whole thing reminds me of the big controversy over Pringles not being able to be called potato chips. They had to change the name to crisps. By the end of it all, no one really cared.
I think the only fair way out of this impasse is to apply the wisdom of Solomon. We must completely abolish the word milk. Henceforth we will make our cappuccinos with udder fluid or nut juice.
Cow sweat.
Almond milk has been called ‘almond milk’ since at least the 14th century. This whole idea that there is a need for gatekeeping on certain words is ridiculous and (in the case of almond milk in the EU, just a case of dairy industry lobbyists persuading the public that they’re being protected from some imaginary threat).
It also has to do with the marching morons who don’t understand the difference between animal milk and all the other things called milk. If we can’t actually manage to educate the majority of humans in this country then we should make food labels that are less likely to confuse them.
Also, noted, it’s a matter of truth in labeling. Beef is cow (or steer), but we don’t have pig beef, lamb beef, etc. All those things are different and have different names.
Aren’t agricultural subsidies and sucking the Colorado River and ground water aquifers to reduce consumer prices for a product fun?
Likely also a factor. But almonds come from trees which are a multi-year investment. It’s not like, say, corn where you can just not plant one year and then plant and harvest the next. Almond trees can take (based on a quick google) 5-12 years to start producing nuts. If you don’t water the trees one year they all die and it’s a decade before you’re back in business, so if the almond farmers intend to keep growing them they have to keep watering them.
Even so, a portion of the California almond orchards have been allowed to die due to water issues. Various factors may be leading to a surplus this year but I don’t expect that to last.
[not serious] That’s because the soy beans are in their drying-off period, they won’t provide milk again until they’re pollinated and each produce a soy-calf to start lactating again. [/not serious]
The term “almond milk” also dates back to the Middle Ages, at the very least. It features in cookbooks (such as they were) dating back centuries. I assume that it was called “milk” based on both appearance and use, but given that said Medieval people would have had to make it themselves they probably were very aware that it wasn’t like cow (or sheep, or goat) milk.
Those who have never made it (or milked a dairy animal) and purchase it in a carton much like animal milk may not be so clear on the difference.
There is a term - “nut butter” to refer to those items. Which probably sounds better than “nut paste”, which is what they actually are.
Um… sort of.
Making tofu has some parallels to making cheese, and in older cookbooks is referred to as a type or equivalent of cheese to housewives/home cooks unfamilar with the substance (I recall that from my mom’s cookbooks, only a few of which I retain and which I can’t be arsed to dig through right now). I’ve also hear it referred to as “soybean curd”, “curd” being a cheese-making term. But tofu has its own identity and the term “tofu” was abducted and dragged into English along with all the other foreign words.
Apparently, labeling requirements in the US are in flux regarding things like “vegan cheese” - a generation ago these things largely didn’t exist so there aren’t rules for them.
All the “milk alternatives”.
People are idiots.
Seriously, I have customers who don’t know that potatoes grow in the ground. I have customers that think salt can go stale or bad and are unaware it’s a rock. I have customers who can’t identify common vegetables in their raw state. Some of these people are (based on overheard conversations while they’re waiting to be rung up) college-educated. Educated in a lucrative specialty, true, but clearly lacking a certain broad knowledge about the world.
What are the graphical elements on the packaging? At the convenience store, the cow’s milk helpfully has a stylized drawing of a cow, the goat milk has a picture of a goat, the coconut milk has a picture of a coconut…
[I guess if the hypothetical idiot does not recognize a cow or goat or almond, there is not much to work with…]
The WIC program does, in fact, allow “soy beverage” as a milk alternative for adults who don’t drink milk for various reasons, and for children who are milk intolerant. This pdf is from Minnesota but discusses some of the rationale behind that decision, and why other “milk alternatives” are not covered by the program.
We do have some WIC customers who are non-dairy, also vegetarian/vegan WIC customers who also have alternatives to the standard program. Unfortunately, this apparently varies by state, but we have some of those customers, too. This is from a California woman using the plant-based WIC list. Which may be confusing to those who are not familiar with the program. WIC is not food stamps. Food stamps you can use to purchase any food item. With WIC you get a VERY specific list which you can not deviate from, specific down to brand names and sizes.
No. It’s not. Almond milk had a pedigree centuries old, with documented mention in southern Europe dating back a thousand years. It’s been known in Europe, India, and the Middle East for at least that long. First mentioned in English in 1390, in The Forme of Cury, a cookbook compiled by the cooks of King Richard II.
Or the parents are ignorant (curable) or stupid (not so much).
Baby formula did exist, but it often was not nearly as healthy as the modern version. Also, desperate people with little understanding of the nutritional content of foods who had the problem of a baby and no lactating human woman available to feed the infant would often try to whip up a milk substitute from what was available, with results that were often tragic.
Personally, I could live with the requirement that nut and grain milks also be prominently labeled as “dairy free” (which some already are). I’ll still get jokers who, with various degrees of seriousness, will want to debate why something dairy-free can still be called a milk, but compared to some of the other stuff I put up with from customers I can only wish that was the most obnoxious thing I have to deal with in a day at work.
This is wildly off-topic, but I really had hoped that this meant the English had invented curry before the Indian subcontinent did.
Alas, I was disappointed.
Hi bobot. That’s not really a perfect example. Nut butters make no attempt to look like dairy butter. They aren’t packaged like dairy butter and aren’t sold refrigerated. Also, unlike milk, butter is not an important source of crucial nutrients (protein and calcium). So confusion is effectively impossible — and unimportant.
(A more relevant comparison would be the long marketing history of butter versus margarine.)
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As for the argument that consumers couldn’t get confused about the nutritional differences among the various “milks”: Most nondairy milks are packaged and placed in the the store to suggest interchangeability (but not coconut milk).
This thread has intelligent posters making flawed arguments (starting with the OP, and likely including my own post here), but functionally illiterate shoppers couldn’t possibly feel that nut milks were nutritionally similar to dairy milk?
Heh. I’ve actually cooked some of those medieval recipes, and they’re a lot more curry-like than you’d expect traditional English cuisine to be! It’s a somewhat different flavor profile (less heat, more “sweet” spices like cinnamon), but they liked their spices a lot, and they tended to blend foods with contrasting flavors rather than similar ones, as modern-day South Asian cuisine tends to do.
And yep, lots of almond milk. (Recipes intended for “fast days” – Fridays, Lent, a good number of eves of various holidays – could include fish but were otherwise vegan, so they needed substitutes for meat, eggs, and dairy. Besides, making almond milk was labor-intensive and required an expensive imported ingredient, both of which were pluses as far as medieval nobility were concerned. It’s all about the conspicuous consumption…)
The almond milk has a picture of almonds on it, the soy milk has some soybeans… but if you want to know what’s the nutritional value you have to read the required-by-law info box on the back, or care enough to look it up online.