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.
And what about the word “milking”? Is it legal to use when you are not talking about mammaries?
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.
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.
your reasoning behind the law and it’s purpose is spot on, I think.
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.
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?Well, nut and grain milk are much more costly, so I doubt that
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.
I find this whole “it’s not milk if it’s not dairy” argument really hard ti take in good faith.
I’m not an expert at all, but when I’ve heard people talk about these kind if decisions, it sounds like it’s normally meant to come down to consumer benefits.
Who’s gaining here (aside from dairy lobbies)? I don’t think there’s any reasonable argument that UK citizens are confused by the term “oat milk”, and buying it because they were tricked into thinking it was a dairy product.
I know a person who thought that the “plant milks” are flavours of regular milk until it was explained to them. Like chocolate milk.
All people are at least a little stupid. We’re all stupid in our own way. Something that seems obvious to you and I may seem mind-boggling to someone else.
Law has a concept of the average idiot (cannot remember the real term). When applying confusion as a risk. Honestly milk has been used so much in English. (Coconutsand other things) I think that would fail.
I ANAL though.
Its more likely that oat milk is intentionally selling as a mamory milk alternative. That was made as an argument. But it is clearly a biased response from the court.
Tbf especially with “almond milk” I could 100% see that. Honestly it’s more logical than “they squeeze all the juice out of the almonds” (I have no idea the process for making almond milk lmao ykwim), someone seeing it and saying “Almonds huh? Crazy, what flavor will they think of next? I’d have chosen hazelnut” is really not that big of a jump.
Honestly I’m more surprised I didn’t think that, but iirc I was informed about it through a vegan friend before I even saw it in the store.
Would have been hilarious if big dairy brought them into the trial as an “expert witness”.
“Yes, that’s right ladies and gentlemen, I am a real life strawman.”
Yeah there are idiots, but what’s the harm? They may be shocked to find there’s 0 dairy, but his does that impact them? The nutrition info is on the label, as is the ingredients.
Dairy UK had argued that it was unlawful to use “milk” in a trademark relating to “products that are not mammary secretions”.
I think consumers need to argue that all milk should be accurately labelled as “mammary secretions”
I don’t like oat milk but it’s more milk-like than skimmed UHT (bleurgh…). But I guess the line had to get drawn somewhere…
Shout out to how much UHT ruins milk.
I love porridge water.
RIP coconut milk.
Funny that before oats and soy started gaining in popularity they had no problems with coconut milk.
And milk of magnesia!
Yeah. And it is clear the court is not being unbiased. Given your comment.
It seems likely that parliment could be convinced to rule on this with enough negativity. No legal restrictions exist on the name. The dairy industry has no trademark or claim of unique use or confusion.
Parliment has the right to rule against this by act. if they agree. IE basically passing a law restricting courts from bias against long used language terminology.
Honestly it would require folks to write to MPs pointing out the stupidity ans bias. But enough may be annoyed by this that such a movement can be formed.
Courts don’t define words, people and dictionaries do. And this was in the telegraph which means it BS anyway. Ignore and don’t click
Laws and consumer protection agencies can and do define words in the context of consumer goods.
Yoohoo is chocolate “drink” not “milk” either, this tracks.
This is karma for saying it works in tea.
The barista grade stuff works pretty well in builders tea, honestly.
You just have to get in the habit of shaking the carton.Oatly oat cream is a staple in my fridge at this point. It’s basically better than cream (or milk if diluted) in many recipes because it’s more heat resistant and flavour neutral.
oaty tea eh? sounds a bit over the top to me.
Honestly prefer it to milk in tea. I still use milk at home since I can’t be arsed to have fancy milk for porridge and tea only but at the office I’ll go for the oat milk by preference.
Taco bell calls its beef-like offering “beefy”, like a “beefy 5 layer burrito”.
I’d have some Oat Milky.
I looked into the high price of plant milks. It’s essentially because the industry is new and still investing in R&D and new factories. The dairy industry has very little innovation now, just court cases.
Don’t forget the dairy industry takes lots of health subsidies in many countries too.
Easy enough, go with “oat mealk”
Call it MlLK where you replace the capital i with a lowercase L
Oat klim.
Gosh that’s good
I just call these oatly
Feeling a bit insecure are you, dairy industry?
They see younger generations using less milk and this is their tantrum.
Meat industry does this too, but aren’t as successful most of the time.
They see younger generations moving away from dairy, and claim it’s because non-dairy stole the words.
When in my case at least, it only took a week milk-free to realise that having mild discomfort in your stomach all the time isn’t normal.
And that drinking MOMA instead left me feeling lighter and happier.I switched to oat milk simply because it lasts longer in the fridge. Cow’s milk is not designed for any kind of shelf life at all.
