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Soon, your soy milk may not be called 'milk'
Soy and almond drinks that bill themselves as "milk" may need to consider alternative language after a top regulator suggested the agency may start cracking down on use of the term.
The Food and Drug Administration signaled plans to start enforcing a federal standard that defines "milk" as coming from the "milking of one or more healthy cows." That would be a change for the agency, which has not aggressively gone after the proliferation of plant-based drinks labeled as "milk."
FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb talked about the plans this week, noting there are hundreds of federal "standards of identity" spelling out how foods with various names need to be manufactured.
"The question becomes, have we been enforcing our own standard of identity," Gottlieb said about "milk" at the Politico event Tuesday. "The answer is probably not."
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday July 23 2018, @03:56AM (1 child)
I'll try yet again to say that I never implied the confusion was about its origin. The confusion is that some random white liquids are equivalent to "milk."
And yes, you can use these various products in some similar fashion to how you use actual milk, just like you can use artificial sweeteners in some applications similar to sugar. That's the point: the products have been engineered (often with added sugars and flavors, sometimes thickening agents or other additives to change properties) to be similar enough to confuse people about whether they are equivalent to milk (not again, not the same in origin as milk, but equivalent in properties).
Unfortunately, just as artificial sweeteners have some surface similarities to sugar, so the similarities are only "surface level" to "milk."
Sweeteners are not sugar, though they can sometimes be used in place of it.
Note again that I have absolutely nothing against almond or soy or whatever juices being used by whomever (I sometimes enjoy these products myself), and some may have good nutrition or reasons to be used. However, they are not "milk," as generally understood... And that term was again only appropriated by those who engineered these substances to play off the similarities to milk.
Also, if vegans don't care and don't want there to be confusion, why the heck would they argue to appropriate an animal-based term?? It's only for advertising purposes.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday July 23 2018, @02:52PM
So nobody is getting deceived or confused in any way, why again do we have the FDA throwing it's weight around and demanding an expensive redesign of all those cartons and associated re-branding campaigns? (ultimately paid for by consumers)
Next up, "Lucky Charms" haven't been shown to have an effect on probability and Cheerios haven't been evaluated for their value as an anti-depressant?