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Fryceratops t1_jda6aqu wrote

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

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.

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ArguesWithWombats t1_jdbacbn wrote

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.

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