Time to stop calling nondairy products 'milk'

My workplace features a stocked kitchen, which is a pretty nice fringe benefit, especially for all the 20-somethings who eat cereal there each morning and gobble up the bags of chips and guzzle free sodas.

I also use the kitchen, but the most frequent use for me is to get coffee. I fill my cup, add sweetener and then open the refrigerator and search for the half-gallon of half-and-half.

I have to move the almond milk. The soy milk. That gawdawful-flavored nondairy creamer. Finally, way in the back, unused by anyone younger than 40 since I last used it, is the actual half-and-half. Half heavy cream, half milk.

A dairy product!

I have no problem with the popularity of dairy alternatives nor does it bother me that my co-workers like other types of milk (actually, it does. But only in an old-man, back-in-my-day-we-drank-what-they-gave-us way). However, I have loved milk and milk products my entire life and stand with America’s dairy farmers on one issue.

Those other items should not be called milk. Because they’re not milk.

Fortunately, the Food and Drug Administration may feel the same way. The FDA recently said it’s considering instituting federal standards that define milk as coming from the “milking of one or more healthy cows.”

Now I’m not sure the definition needs to include “one or more healthy cows,” because even “coming from a cow” would suffice. Because in a world where we embrace “alternative facts” and label anything that doesn't fit our narrative as “fake news,” there should still be some standards.

Peanut butter should come from peanuts. Coffee should come from coffee beans. Pickles should come from pickle trees. Pancakes should be cakes baked in pans.

Milk should be . . . milk.

Instead, we have soy milk, almond milk, cashew milk, coconut milk, rice milk, oak milk, hemp milk (Hemp milk? Hemp milk.), flax milk. Everything but Harvey Milk . . . and that's only because he was assassinated before he could market himself as a dairy product.

Here’s what all those items have in common: They are liquid and they are not milk.

They’re nice substitutes for milk for those who can’t or don’t want to drink milk. But they're not milk.

Listen, I put artificial sweetener in my coffee and the folks who make Sweet-N-Low, Equal and Stevia don’t claim to be sugar. Because they’re not. They’re artificial sweeteners or sugar substitutes.

Milk is milk and we’re heading down a slippery slope when we label any willy-nilly product milk. Milk comes from a lactating mammal.

“There’s no way for a nut to be lactating and giving natural milk; you can’t milk a nut,” said a farmer quoted in an article about the issue in the Lubbock, Texas, Avalanche-Journal. (A quote brings to mind a famous exchange about cats in the first “Meet the Parents” movie.)

Here’s what makes it really unfair: According to current FDA rules, if a dairy farmer adds a vitamin enhancement to milk, they can’t call it milk. It has to be a dairy drink or something similar. But a rice farmer or a hemp farmer can call a drink “milk."

I say we keep those items in the refrigerators of America’s offices. But call them “soy drink” and “almond drink” and whatever other noun you want to put before the word “drink.”

Because if they’re milk, I’m going to start calling water “hydrogen and oxygen milk” and I’m going to call orange juice “orange milk” and I’m going to call my coffee “coffee bean milk.”

Stop the madness.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@hotmail.com.