Want Want Six Nuts Milk Slogan

It's 20 18, and the US Food and Drug Administration is trying to find out what milk is.

At a policy summit on July 17, Scott gottlieb, a spokesman for FDA, expressed disappointment at the random use of the word "milk" on the labels of non-dairy beverages such as soy milk, oat milk and almond milk. "Almonds don't produce milk," he said.

Gottlieb's position is not based on semantics. He believes that putting dairy products and non-dairy products under the same umbrella will deceive consumers and make them think that dairy products and non-dairy products are nutritionally equal. According to him, this may have potentially terrible consequences, such as rickets in young children. He wrote in the press release: "This public health issue is one of the reasons why we give priority to the labeling standards for dairy products.

Of course, a more cynical explanation for this situation is that large dairy companies are relying on the US Food and Drug Administration to question the feasibility of vegetable milk as a milk substitute.

This is the biggest demand of the industry. Nevertheless, the FDA's position on what is milk, what is not milk and what is the ultimate interest has puzzled nutritionists, food historians and even lexicographers. Marianne Nestle, emeritus professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Research and Public Health of new york University, explained that gottlieb's hypothesis was problematic. She said: "I don't know of any evidence that there is a serious nutritional deficiency in the American diet." . "There is no need to drink milk after infancy, and people who choose not to drink milk can easily get these nutrients from other sources."

Linguistically speaking, "milk" has been used to refer to "white juice of some plants" (the second definition of milk in the Oxford American Dictionary) for a long time. The Latin root of lettuce is lact, such as lacate, because of its milk, which shows that even the Romans have a definition of milk flow.

Ken Albala, a history professor at Pacific University, wrote in the podcast Food: A History of Cultural Cooking. It is said that almond milk "appears in almost every medieval cookbook." Almonds originated in the Middle East and came to southern Europe with the Moors in the 8th century. Their milk is yes. In the Middle Ages, Europeans called it milk in various languages and dialects, and it soon became all the rage among the nobles in Iceland.

At this time, most European Christians still abide by a law in the early Christian newspaper Doctrine, which prohibits eating animal products on Wednesdays and Fridays. Albala said: "Almond milk has become a nutritional substitute. With the church and its followers becoming more and more lazy in fasting, almond milk is no longer popular in Europe, but it can still be found in ajo blanco and other dishes. The white Spanish thick soup in Spain is thickened with bitter almonds. Its use gradually stopped in blancmange, and then it was a delicious chicken, mashed with almond milk and rose water, and now it is called panna cotta dessert.

At about the same time that almond milk reached its peak in Europe, soybean milk, the predecessor of soybean milk, became popular in China in the14th century. The liquid packaged in protein is hot scooped into a bowl for breakfast and eaten with crispy and delicious doughnuts. In the book "Food in History" published by 1973, the culinary historian Reay Tannahill reflected that dairy products "never really became popular in China, except in the Tang Dynasty". "Like other non-animal husbandry societies, China people also have their own completely satisfied dairy substitutes. “

There are a lot of non-dairy milk in many other cultures around the world: coconut milk is made of ground coconut soaked in water, which is the pillar of Southeast Asia, and cooking in Africa and India has a history of hundreds or even thousands of years. (Some languages (such as Thai, Filipino and Swahili) have a separate and specific word for coconut milk, while others (such as Persian, Hindi and Punjabi) use "milk" to describe plant and animal secretions. )

To this day, cypress nuts imported from North Africa to Spain are still the main ingredient of horchata, Valencia's iconic summer drink. Hazel and pistachio milk occasionally appear in medieval recipes, although little is known about their origins.

It was not until the19th century that people discovered drinking fresh milk or other drinks made from plants. Anne Mendelson, a food journalist and author of Milk: The Amazing Story of Milk in Past Dynasties published in 2008, said: "The milk trade did not appear until modern times." . "Where people can digest lactose, animal milk occasionally drinks it by itself, but it is easier to ferment, which makes it easier to digest and less friendly to harmful pathogens."

The perishable nature of milk is the main reason why more people don't drink these things; It is an expensive and complicated task to produce it on an industrial scale. Modern dairy industry needs live animals, expensive machines and refrigerated trucks, but this financial model has proved to be infeasible. Small dairy farms, once Monday, fall like flies in turn.

Demand is also a problem; According to a report of Mintel in 20 16, milk sales have been declining and will continue to decline until at least 2020. Mendelssohn explained: "The dairy industry is very troublesome now. Large dairy companies in the United States can survive because they are subsidized by the federal government. There is no doubt,

Factory milk is a threat to the dairy industry. Another report by Mintel shows that the sales of non-dairy products increased by 6 1% from 20 12 to 20 17, which may make major dairy producers feel uneasy.

"We have a department that is very sensitive to the interests of the company," Nestle told the new leadership of the US Food and Drug Administration. "If I run a large dairy company and see a bad way to whitewash the accounts, I will act quickly now."

However, if the naming method of plant milk is the best in the dairy industry, then the rice dream and vitamin cocoa in the world may stand out. The FDA may successfully remove "milk" from the label of non-dairy products, but it is unlikely to affect consumers' habits in a meaningful way. If anything, it may be the gospel of the vegetable milk industry, just as the Mayo War on vegetarianism in 20 14 finally spread to egg-free milk.

For example, unless the US Food and Drug Administration can finally prove that nut milk can cause rickets, consumers will continue to buy milk that they have been eating for centuries. "I spent money on nut milk," food historian Albala said of the recent naming war of dairy products.