I’ll probably stick to asking for oat milk instead of “porridge water” or whatever the new mandated name will be. To be honest I do think calling it “milk” lets them inflate the price when it is essentially porridge water.
I’ll probably stick to asking for oat milk instead of “porridge water” or whatever the new mandated name will be. To be honest I do think calling it “milk” lets them inflate the price when it is essentially porridge water.
This is stupid on the surface, BUT “milk” in some jurisdictions is protected with legal standards. This prevents watering down or other issues.
I am not familiar with the UK, so I don’t know if this is applicable.
In the US, “ice cream” is protected and has to meet standards, otherwise it is called a “frozen dairy dessert”.
Additionally, in the US we recently had a massive butter recall from Costco because it did not label “dairy” as an allergen. Common sense indicates butter contains milk, HOWEVER, these allergen labels are the law and the allergens feed into downstream items. IE, if you use the butter to make brownies, then the brownies must be labeled. If you automate this process or whatever, you could miss this, due to it not being labeled correctly.
I’m not sure (but happy to be corrected) that there is a legal standard definition of what constitutes milk. There was a documentary on Radio 4 a few years ago that asked “What is milk?” and found that - in UK and Europe - it couldn’t be answered (other than it had some cow involvement somewhere). Some pateurised “milks” had barely any actual milk. From what I remember it was the lobbying of the dairy industry that prevented a standard definition.
your reasoning behind the law and it’s purpose is spot on, I think.
While oat milk is relatively new, almond milk and soya milk are older than the legal protections the milk industry is trying to use. Almond milk has been almond milk for near enough a thousand years, soya milk is close to twice as old. Basically the word milk hasn’t referred exclusively to mammal milk for as long as the word milk has existed.
Also, tinned coconut milk is actually labelled coconut milk just fine without a problem.
I wonder how many people might be be put off dairy, even if it’s just for a moment before putting it out their mind, if all dairy products were labelled mammary secretions.
Yeah, on the surface, it looks like evil cow farming lobbyists trying to force the competition to use a stupid name.
But on the other hand, without a protected name, what stops corporations from lacing their milk with 20% oat milk and hiding it in the ingredient list to save cost?
I’d buy that. If you want to replace 20% of my animal product with plants and can do an ok job I’m down.
As long as it’s labeled properly and you don’t have to do anything crazy, it’s at the very least something I’ll try.
Well, nut and grain milk are much more costly, so I doubt that