Some of the post ideas I haven’t responded to because I don’t have strong opinions either way and it’s a little boring to make a lukewarm post. I could potentially go either way on this issue too. On one hand it’s silly to call almond milk “milk”, it’s…not milk at least not in the mammalian sense of the word, but on the other hand it might be so obvious it doesn’t really matter what we call it because consumers already understand that it isn’t mammalian milk even if it isn’t explicitly labeled. I lean a little harder on the side of not labeling plant milk and meat as “milk” or “meat” because I don’t have as much faith in American consumers or in American companies to make the distinction from the marketing if it wasn’t explicitly legally required to do so. In my opinion, not having distinct labeling is a recipe for having a deceptive relationship between consumers and the company, or in other words a legally endorsed version of food fraud.
I’d like to use olive oil as an example of how this could slide into customer dishonesty. Before 2010 olive oil was often mixed with cheaper oils like soy and other vegetable and seed oils but then still marketing it as “extra virgin olive oil.” This caused a problem for several reasons. Cooks like to use olive oil because it is a traditional ingredient in many ethnic foods and because it has a high smoke point. Chemically, olive oil is different from other oils because you can use it at high temperatures in cooking without destroying the flavor. Cooks would have their food reduced in quality because they were scammed into using adulterated olive oil. Cooks who wanted to make ethic foods the correct way would have to pay very high prices to get real olive oil. Another reason why this was a problem was because of allergies. If you mix olive oil with a common allergen like soy, people can have allergic reactions and potentially die. Additionally, having non adulterated food even if you could legally get away with it is simply and issue of honesty with the costumers and pride in the quality of the product. In 2010 the government made this practice more explicitly illegal and raised the standard on olive oil production and marketing.
This is something that I think could happen to the milk and meat market: if the foods are not labeled explicitly in the product’s marketing, almond or soy milk companies, for instance, might change their marketing strategy to look more like conventional dairy milk and costumers with almond or soy allergies could get tricked into buying almond and soy milk believing that it was dairy milk. Similarly, people could get fooled into buying a bean burger or something like that when they expected real meat. They would obviously still have to list soy or almonds or beans on the ingredient list but that’s irrelevant because most people don’t read ingredient lists and can still be fooled into buying something that they don’t want.