cjeam t1_jd8do99 wrote on March 22, 2023 at 3:56 PM

Reply to comment by Fryceratops in Have your cake and print it: the 3D culinary revolution is coming by TurretLauncher

Yes it is. There is no reason to arbitrarily claim that only dairy products can be cheese. Anything cheese-like is cheese.

Fryceratops t1_jd8kc2h wrote on March 22, 2023 at 4:37 PM

That's not an arbitrary claim. Historically cheese is dairy as is milk. It is more arbitrary to claim that non-dairy cheese or milks exist given that historically "milk" and "cheese" have always been dairy. They are different substances chemically speaking.

cjeam t1_jd8qgd3 wrote on March 22, 2023 at 5:16 PM

Coconut milk. “Milk of the poppy”. Milk of magnesia. Milk is a general term, as is cheese.

ArguesWithWombats t1_jda0s6e wrote on March 22, 2023 at 10:12 PM

Hi! Here, have a historical manuscript from the 1300s containing a recipe for almond milk. And here is a pair of historical food recipe blog posts describing how and why it was popular and common and mentions that it appears frequently in all the recipe books of the time.

Biochemically speaking, modern pasteurised homogenised bovine milk is basically fatty protein juice, barely digestible(＊) by most adults, isn’t magical, and doesn’t particularly qualify for privileged status over other milks. It just happens to be what we’re used to.

＊(65%–68% of human adults (and most adult mammals) downregulate the production of intestinal lactase after weaning)

Culinary ingredients usually have the common names they do because of the culinary roles they fill. Tomatos and eggplants are culinary vegetables not fruits, eggplants are not eggs, and almond milk is culinary milk. It’s easier if we don’t overthink these things.

Fryceratops t1_jda6aqu wrote on March 22, 2023 at 10:50 PM

And yet they don't call it milk. At least I can't see where they call it milk. Perhaps my six years of Latin are failing me but I don't see any variant of "lac" there.

Animal milks are very different from plant "milk". There are a ton of chemical distinctions between them but the most obvious is animal milk has very different fats and proteins. Suggesting that plant milk is the same is ascientific.

Your argument amounts to "plant milk is milk because I say so". Mine is that historically milk is an animal product and cheese comes from it. Vegan alternatives aren't the sane and frankly in the case of a "cheesecake" they bear so very little resemblance to the real thing that it is odd to even use the term.

ArguesWithWombats t1_jdbacbn wrote on March 23, 2023 at 3:49 AM

Your six years of Latin are failing you, because I’m afraid it’s in Old French. But check out 1.recto line 201 for a reference to lait d’amandes in the oldest surviving copy: https://i.imgur.com/lc6gf62.jpg However the almond milk recipe itself is in one of the other three surviving copies, the newer one held by the Vatican: https://i.imgur.com/64aYmhX.jpg There is this and other historical evidence that milk has definitely not “always been dairy”, which was your position, and I object to.

Of course animal milks are different from plant milks. I did not say otherwise. Nor was I even comparing them to plant milks. If you read what was actually written, I was arguing that there really isn’t anything special in the composition of modern cow milk that isn’t in the rest of our diet, and that therefore I don’t feel it really should have any privileged linguistic claim to ‘milk’ on the basis of chemical composition, any more than goat milk or coconut milk or platypus milk.

My argument definitely isn’t “because I say so”. My position is firstly that you are incorrect regarding historical usage, therefore plant milk is milk because its a common culinary usage; and secondly that descriptivism>prescriptivism and therefore we should just let people call things by whatever convenient terms that they want to use, whether or not they are technically scientifically correct.