Reply #25: Coconut milk is also technically juice...but nobody drinks coconut milk by itself as a beverage

[eyesroll]

(at least not in the U.S. -- it's at most mixed in with other beverages) and it comes in shelf-stable cans so nobody's looking at it to substitute for cow's milk.

I never said soy milk wasn't OK. Of course it's OK. I like soy milk. I like coconut milk in recipes (not so much by itself). I like some nut milks (hazelnut, especially in coffee). (Rice milk = icky, but that's just a personal preference.) I'm not going to cry to the government that we can't call it milk, lest people get confused and the Got Milk? campaign's trademark get diluted. Call it what you want. But MonkeyFunk (and Lewis Black, I suppose) isn't wrong -- it's technically juice. Nothing wrong with juice, either. Juice is good for you.

I'm not making a value judgment...just a marketing judgment. Call it "milk" and put it in a carton that's identical to the one cow's milk comes in and plaster comparisons between it and cow's milk all over the carton and some people expect it to taste like cow's milk and then deem it nasty when it doesn't. (Which it doesn't.) I wonder if some of those same people might be more inclined to drink it if it was called something else. That's all.