So margarine is an industrial product that manages to seem somewhat like butter while being made in a process completely different from butter. While it’s not a perfect substitute, it’s a pretty good job of reverse engineering butter and creating it from it’s constituents parts again.
My question is, why can’t we do the same thing to milk? It seems like we pretty much understand the major components of milk and we should be able to make all of them from artificial sources. Why not just figure out a way to stick them together and mix them in such a way that they get homogenized and now you have artificial milk.
I know there’s soy milk and other milk substitutes but they don’t taste the same and the market for milk substitutes is so large you would think there could be quite a market for an artificial milk that actually tastes pretty much like milk.
Pretty much every living thing can produce oils and fats. You just have to find the right mix of plant oils to blend together to mimic the fat that makes up butter. Milk proteins, on the other hand, are unique to mammals. Also, milk contains lactose, a unique (afaik) kind of sugar.
Just looked at a box of margarine in my refrigerator and note that one of the ingredients is whey.
Whey is the liquid leftover from milk that has had the fat and solids removed from it. I’m guessing it contributes to margarine’s somewhat buttery flavor.
Of course you can take the leftover solids and make nonfat dry milk, which fills most of the demand for a milk substitute.
I’m with matt_mcl. Please don’t encourage this crap. If you want milk, drink MILK. If you want something not milk, don’t try to make it look and taste like milk.
I’m sick to death of the vegetarian phony-isms of making their Soy crap look like meat and milk. If you want to eat Soy, eat f-ing soy. Stop trying to pretend that it is anything but soy.
Wow, what incredible intolerance to something that impacts your own diet not one whit. Do you also object to egg substitutes used by people due to cholesterol problems?
Soy-based and other dairy substitutes aren’t just for people who voluntarily adopt a vegan or ovo-vegetarian diet. Intolerance to lactose carbohydrates to varying degrees is found in a substantial percentage of the adult population (especially people with ethnic hertiage from East Asia or Africa), and milk allergies and milk protein intolerance are found in a non-insigificant segment of the population. In addition, people with chronic intestinal disorders and those with religious prohibitions (i.e. kashrus) may not be able to consume dairy products with other foods. For these people, soy-milk and other non-dairy alternatives (rice milk, almond milk, cultured cheese substitutes) can provide some simulacrum of typical cultural foods like cheeseburgers, pizza, milkshakes, et cetera, without the attendent health and GI problems. In addition, these products lack the saturated fats and cholesterols of dairy products, making them suitable replacements for people who are on a reducing diet or have other health considerations.
Of course, there are nutrients found in animal milk that are not found, or found in much smaller quantities, in unfortified dairy substitutes. And there is no question to the gourmand that no soya or other dairy alternative product approaches the taste and richness of real dairy milk and cheese, especially in their full (saturated) fat varieties, nor are many dairy alternative substitutes suitable (in my experience) for baking or reduction sauces. But for people who can’t or won’t consume dairy products, the subsitutes provide at least a marginally agreeable and inarguably healthier alternative.
And for the record, even the best margarines don’t taste anything like butter. Better to cook with olive and canola oil than to use that “I Can’ Believe I’s Not Budder!” stuff.
Obligatory Life of Brian quote:
JESUS: They shall have the earth…
GREGORY: What was that?
JESUS: …for their possession. How blest are those…
MR. CHEEKY: I don’t know. I was too busy talking to Big Nose.
JESUS: …who hunger and thirst to see…
MAN #1: I think it was ‘Blessed are the cheesemakers.’
JESUS: …right prevail.
MRS. GREGORY: Ahh, what’s so special about the cheesemakers?
GREGORY: Well, obviously, this is not meant to be taken literally. It refers to any manufacturers of dairy products.
Stranger
Soy milk, nut milk, and the others, BTW, aren’t something the new agers thought up. They’ve been around for thousands of years and have always looked like milk. They’re white liquid and water. What else would you have them do with it, dye it bright blue? Chauvinist ignorance.
The answer to the OP is that there are lots of milk alternatives. And they are very little different from modern margarines, as most margarines just substitute a plant-based oil for the milk fat, just as these alternatives substitute a plant product for the milk. Shalmanese puts forth a false premise that margarine is made from artificial sources. It’s not. It’s made from plants. No difference.
Food scientists can build up a substitute if they want, but they also have to start with plant oils and not something artificial. The ingredients for Coffee-mate are:
I’m lactose intolerant and I use Coffee-mate in cereal. Works perfectly well for me. But I don’t think I’d want to drink glassfuls of it, though when it came out - early enough so that soy milk was still an oddity - there were lots of reports of people drinking it straight.
Why not a big commercial brand? Taste and cost. Coffee-mate and Coffee Rich and their competitors are designed to be creamers and to be used in small doses. There’s no sizable markets for artificial milks because the real thing is plentiful and packed full of a zillion nutrients that would probably be difficult to properly duplicate. Infant formula makers have huge R&D departments that work on the problem constantly. Who needs that? And most soy and rice milks provide substantial nutrients of their own naturally, and are palatable in large doses so that niche is already full of healthy competitors. Their sales are large and growing by leaps and bounds every year.
I’ve used substitutes, yes, including I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, for years. Just as people who are on salt restricted diets come to find regularly salted foods unpleasant, I’ve found when eating out that tasting mashed potatoes with cream gives me a weird greasy feel and butter sauces are like a film of motor oil. You can pity me for what I’m missing, but I represent millions of people who have fully adapted and simply don’t care what you can have as long as I’m happy with what doesn’t make me sick.
A> But it does negatively impact my diet. I am one of the rare individuals who are sensitive to Soy. My doctor recommended that I avoid it wherever possible. So when someone tries to foist tofu based faux food on me, or give me soy milk, it’s a big negative.
What that means in a larger context is that I tend to dislike the idea of artificial food creations that are something other that what they appear to be and/or may be filled with “surprise” ingredients that are not necessarily as safe for certain consumers.
B> No, I don’t object to egg substitutes, or most other substitutes. What I object to is stuff like refusing to eat meat or other animal products, but for some reason, insisting on making your vegetables look like meat or other animal products. It always strikes me as some odd form of hypocricy.
And in response to Chimera’s retort, sometimes you just like something with a meat-like texture. Last Thanksgiving my Sister-in-Law (who’s ovo-lacto vegetarian) had procured a tofurkey* for her part of the feast. I’m not a big fan of turkey anyway so I had a token amount of that and a nice-sized slice of the tofurkey. It was actually pretty good. It didn’t taste anything like turkey – for that I suppose they would have had to use turkey broth or something, which would negate the whole purpose – but the texture was reasonable and the wild-rice stuffing in the middle was really yummy.
*She was grumbling about how she had to go to three Trader Joes before she found one that hadn’t run out. I laughed. “You live in hippy-dippy land. I’d bet the one in East Mesa still has 'em stacked up to here.”
Isn’t milk basically blood without blood cells but with milk… um, blobs, I guess you’d call them? ISTR reading somewhere that the milk solids were in cell-like ‘containers’ suspended in a clear liquid. So to make a milk substitute you’d start with a fluid like blood fluid, then add blobs of milk solids.
Have you been abducted by and ovo-anarchist commune, live in the middle of a Monty Python skit, or what? I live in Southern California–practically the epicenter for any radical militant vegetarianism craze–and I can’t say that anyone has ever tried to “foist” tofu or soya products on me. I’m genuinely curious, despite my above sarcasm, what kind of restaurant or public food service venue that attempted to coerce you into accepting a soy-based substitute for milk.
Even stranger. Soya milk is hardly an “artificial food creation” insofar as it has been a staple of diet in East and Southeast Asia for millenia. Similarly, amygdalate (milk of almonds) has been used in Arabic and Mediterranian diets where it serves as a drink that is not as perishable as animal milk and is suitable for adults who have lost lactose tolerance. The same can be said for other nut-, pulse-, or grain-based milks. As previously noted, there are a substantial portion of the population who suffers from gastrointestional distress or adverse reaction to “natural” (i.e. animal) milk and find it “not necessarily as safe” for their consumption. At any rather, there is nothing inherently “artificial” about such drinks in the sense of being abiological or chemically synthesized, and they are certainly less unnatural in origin than breeding and hormonally manipulating a species for milk hyperproduction.
I can see how you would find this an “odd form of hypocricy[sic]” insofar as it isn’t hypocritical from either a nutritional or vegetarian perspective any more than reading Don Quixote in a modern English translation rather than the original Castilian Spanish. The natural processed form of soy curd has little flavor and a gelatinous texture, and thus is given variety and appeal to the human senses of taste and touch by the inclusion of various adulterants and processing. I’m not clear how this is manifestly different from tenderizing, aging, marinating, and cooking meat to make it less like the taste and texture one would find in nature. And whereas vegetarians who adopt the that diet for ethical reasons regarding the husbandry or butchery of animals are consistent about their choice, meat-eaters who oppose hunting or refuse to identify their veal cutlets with the calf from which it comes or a dime a dozen in suburbia, a reality that is of great amusement to those of us who grew up on and around farms.
Your statements are nothing more than unmitigated bigotry borne of utter ignorance regarding the origins and history of soy- and other pulse-, nut-, and grain-based products. Please make the effort to educate yourself before wantonly and pointelessly insinuating deliberate offense and aggressive hypocrisy.
There are times when I read posts here in GQ and want to run screaming from the room. This is one of them.
Milk is water with fat, protein, and sugar. The fat is in colloidal suspension.
Blood is also water with cells of many sorts and kinds in it, and can be called a colloidal suspension.
Both start with water, and both have colloids. This is the start and end of their similarities. Cigarette smoke is also a colloid, to show how loose and all-encompassing a term it is.
But, yes, to make a milk substitute you start with a fluid like blood fluid. It’s called WATER. :smack:
Not just water. Isn’t it more similar to lymph? (That’s the word I couldn’t remember last night.) I was reading up on milk last night, and the wiki article states that it isn’t just a colloidal suspension:
So presumably, to create synthetic milk, we’d have to duplicate these protein structures as well.
Reading further, it seems that milk glands originated as modified sweat glands, so it’s less similar to blood than my first thought. I was imagining starting instead with the intracellular fluid. All of us are wrong on occasion; there’s no need to be insulting.
Chimera and Stranger. This is General Questions. Both of you take it somewhere else. Additionally, telling someone they’re on your ignore list isn’t done on the Board.
And, to the others who have posted with nothing more than your personal distaste for artificial foods, please refrain. If you have something useful to add that might help the OP, then by all means go ahead.