Oats Do Not Have Udders…

Previously, I wrote a column called ‘To Meat or Not To Meat’ and as far as I know I haven’t received any death threats from either avowed carnivores or passionate vegans so either I’m doing something right, or no one really gives a shit about my little corner of the internet. Probably the latter.

Over IRL, I have been part of industry teams who brought both plant-based meat alternatives and plant-based milks to market. Call me crazy, but I always thought people having more and better food choices to support their personal nutrition journeys was a good thing. People choose plant-based options for a whole host of reasons: food allergy management; compassion- and climate-based ethics; religious adherence; medical advice to reduce or eliminate saturated fat in their diets. Or simple preference.

But the InstaTokBlueSkyXThreads universe is awash in people flaming one another back and forth with an awful lot of energy around whether plant-based ‘milk’ is actually ‘milk’ and why all these faux lactation products are contributing to the decline of (take your pick here: real masculinity, farm culture, western civilization, espresso bar culture, Olympic training table traditions, etc. ad nauseum). I’m super tired of all the hard positions people take these days. “Only Animal Fats! No Seed Oils”. “Meat Eaters are Murderers.” “All Processed Foods are Evil.” “Oats Don’t Have Udders!” “Ever Try To Milk an Almond?” At least make an effort to be clever? It’s exhausting, honestly. And it doesn’t need to be this way. Very few ‘absolute positions” are absolute. Well, except that last sentence. Sort of like: “Moderation in all things is best. Including moderation.”

And per my usual slant, allow me to take you back to the beginning of the “plant-based milk” phenom, or ‘vegetal milk alternatives’ as they were quaintly known 50+ years ago. Humans utilizing milk that comes from cows, sheep and goats (also yaks etc.) has been specific to dairy herding cultures for thousands of years, and those cultures have ranged from the Hindus Valley civilizations, across Eurasia and parts of Africa, eventually finding their way here to North America where Americans could finally include them in culture wars. Well, to be fair, a more civilized version of the ‘can they be labeled ‘milk?’ discussion is taking place in the European Union, and the ‘no, they can not be called milk’ side is winning there. More on that in a bit.

Back in the 60s when the natural foods movement was in its infancy, there were already ‘non-dairy’ alternatives to milk. Remember ‘Coffee Rich’? Rich Products Company was founded in 1945 by Robert Rich with their first product: Rich’s Whip Topping - a ‘miracle food made from the soya bean’ which was the first mainstream non-dairy alternative that spawned ‘Cool Whip’ as competitor and their ‘Coffee Rich’ competed with Coffee Mate and other non-dairy brands. Supermarkets today are still chock-a-block full of non-dairy coffee creamers, whipped toppings and similar vestiges of the ‘food laboratory’ explosion in post-WW2 America. These are the ‘Oldsmobiles’ of the non-dairy category. Kids! - if you’re missing the reference here, ask someone older than 50 what an Oldsmobile was.

But a cursory glance at the ingredients in these first generation non-dairy products will show why they were ripe for targeting as foods made by ‘the man’ when the hippies showed up and ruined everything good and righteous about the miracle of industrialized foods. Here’s a typical ingredient list:

WATER, CORN SYRUP, HYDROGENATED COCONUT OIL, CONTAINS LESS THAN 2% OF THE FOLLOWING: MONO AND DIGLYCERIDES, SOY PROTEIN ISOLATE, SODIUM STEAROYL LACTYLATE, POLYSORBATE 60, DIPOTASSIUM PHOSPHATE, ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, SODIUM ACID PYROPHOSPHATE, COLORED WITH BETA CAROTENE.

So water, sugar water, stabilized vegetable fat. The rest of the ingredients are to color it, make it taste palatable with a good ‘mouth feel’, keep it in suspension and create reasonable shelf life. So it’s fat and water and a little sugar. But guess what? Dairy cream is also just fat and water and a little sugar. They’re molecular cousins from different sides of the tracks.

So in the age of jello-molds and hot tuna casserole, people who chose or needed to avoid dairy products for whatever reason, had choices. Meanwhile, in the part of the world where dairy herding was not a part of the culture and a few billion people were living full and meaningful lives not consuming mammalian lactation secretions, there were also ‘milks’. And these milks were the first ones to break into the US natural food scene in fits and starts.

Asian cultures have been making ‘milk’ from soy beans since about the same time Julius Caesar was having a bad day in the middle of March. Earliest written documentation of soymilk is from around 1350AD in China. And the milk was used in much the same way dairy cultures used milk. It was scalded, skimmed, concentrated, cultured, coagulated, dried and frozen with snow to make treats. And Southeast Asian cultures have been making milk from coconuts for about 5,000 years. That’s five…thousand….years. So the only recent innovation is packaging. And of course there was always the ‘milk of the poppy’ as seen in Game of Thrones.

So ‘milk’ is a fungible term regardless of what language is being used.

When I first started in the ‘health food’ industry, we had a few shelves of milk alternatives in the store. Some of these were ‘cow milk’ alternatives like powdered goat milk, but most were ‘vegetal milks’ either in cans like the way condensed milk was sold, powdered like the way protein powder is sold, and the very first iterations of ‘aseptically’ packaged soy milks imported from Asia, which were a staple in the small but growing Asian supermarket business just starting to emerge in the USA. So your average American shopper at the supermarket would see Coffee Mate and Cool Whip and International Delights (my favorite because that was just such a s-t-r-e-t-c-h of a brand name.) But shoppers in Asian supermarkets and health food stores could buy soy milk and coconut milk and powdered almond milk and a few other similar items.

By then, the aseptic packaging for low-acid foods such as milk and soup that had been started by the ‘Tetra-Brik’ from TetraPak Company and already in wide use globally found its way to the USA market with soy milk and soup broths. You’re familiar with them. They’re the rectangular boxes with spouts on the top and they were a breakthrough in food packaging as ‘flexible cans.’ Prior to this, hard-sided cans were the only safe way to package foods that were ‘low-acid’. You can still buy cans of chicken broth, but most sales are now in the resealable ‘brick-pak’. Also ‘juice boxes’ utilized the same technology and those invaded school lunchboxes around the same time. As for soymilk, it was all imported until TetraPak was able to open production facilities in the USA and aseptic (shelf-stable) milks were able to be produced here.

Which brings me to one of my favorite parts of the story. In the early 90s, the Euro-Dairy giant Parmalat attempted to conquer the US market by convincing US consumers they no longer needed to go to the refrigerated section of the supermarket to buy milk! Just like every other country in the world, the USA could now save all of that wasted refrigeration energy just by buying liters of shelf-stable milk and putting one in your home fridge whenever you wanted cold milk! Amazing!

Except… crickets. To Americans then and Americans now, milk is FRESH! And fresh means chilled! Euro-folks could keep their tiny milk cartons and tiny refrigerators that fit under their tiny counters in their tiny kitchens but HERE we buy big-ass gallon jugs of COLD milk. In fact, we’re going to make our refrigerators even larger so we can store two 1-gallon jugs of milk on the door!

Needless to say, Parmalat didn’t succeed or you would heading to your pantry right now to put that liter of shelf-stable cow’s milk in the fridge to dowse your bowl of Fruit Loops tomorrow morning.

And that shellacking taken by Parmalat showed a guy named Steve Demos that he needed to get his soymilk onto the supermarket refrigerator shelves if he was ever going to capture significant market share of milk sales in American homes. Steve’s company was White Wave foods and his brand of Soymilk was called ‘Silk’, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Since then, we’ve seen the growth of the category of ‘plant-based’ milks to include almond, cashew, macadamia, pecan, pistachio, yellow peas, oat, barley, buckwheat, rice, and multi-source plant milks. (Personal note: I worked for almost 8 years for a company trying to bring sesame milk to market but that wasn’t successful.)

Now, as to whether or not plant-based milks should be called ‘milk’.

Yes, I think so. If Coconut “Milk” has been around for 5,000 years, does it really matter that we want to identify only mammalian lactation products as ‘milk?’

But what I think doesn’t matter. In EU countries and in Canada, plant-based dairy alternatives cannot be called ‘milk’. In the USA, for the present, they can be. That may change in any of these locations in the coming years but the growth of the category won’t stop. Plant-based milks are perfect for what they are, regardless of what they’re called. and they’re here to stay. In the US alone, it’s a multi-billion $$ grocery segment.

What does matter, in my opinion, is that people understand the nutritional differences not just between dairy milk and plant-based milks, but between types of plant-based milks.

In the USA, Canada and the EU, dairy milk is considered the ‘benchmark’ for milk nutrition as a source of protein (8g per 8oz), calcium (25% RDA), and Vitamin D (15% RDA). Plant-based milks vary widely in comparison to dairy, and even when compared to other plant-based milks. Soymilk is highly nutritious, and if fortified with Calcium and Vitamin D, is nutritionally comparable to Dairy milk. Other plant-based milks can vary from as low as 0g of protein per 8oz up to 8g protein per 8 oz, or even more if fortified. Calcium and Vitamin D levels vary because they must be added as fortifications. But not everyone is looking for protein in their ‘milks’. Remember the ingredients above that were water, sugar water and fat? That product is intended to make your coffee creamy and delicious if that’s how you like it. No protein, Calcium or Vitamin D required.

So it is with plant-based milks. Looking for creamy foam on your vegan latte? There’s a plant-based milk for that. Want to add more protein to your vegan protein shake? There’s a plant-based milk for that. Want to add a creamy texture to your vegan ‘cream’ of broccoli soup? You get the point.

As always, read the labels. Read the ingredients. Read the Nutrition Facts Panel. Choose your plant-based milks wisely based on your personal preferences, food safety needs, or nutrition goals, and enjoy!