Soy 'Milk' ≠ Milk

Random Thought of the Day:

Soy milk is not milk. It doesn’t really look like milk. It doesn’t taste like milk. So how can soy milk’s marketers get away with calling it “milk?”

According to Webster’s Online Dictionary, milk is either “a fluid secreted by the mammary glands of females for the nourishment of their young,” which soy milk most definitely is not, or it can also be “a liquid resembling milk in appearance,” which is a stretch in the case of soy milk.

It could just as easily, and accurately, be called “soy juice.” But since soy milk is touted as a healthy substitute for the real thing, calling it juice wouldn’t do. Who’d buy it? Soy juice sounds disgusting. It sounds, in fact, like what it is—soy beans soaked in water, ground and cooked before being “processed into a milky liquid,” according to the soy milk section of the Hormel Foods website.

The good people at Hormel also point out that soy milk needs no small amount of alteration before it can be passed off as “milk.” To wit: “Soy milk is often thickened to appear more like common milk (in other words it’s more juice-like in its normal state) and flavored with honey, vanilla or carob to alter a mildly bitter taste that would be noticeable without the flavoring.”

Not that milk isn’t altered chemically before it reaches your local store, but at least at its heart it’s milk, not bitter bean juice.

And another thing: Milk shouldn't be packaged in a box and stored at room temperature for five months, like soy “milk.” The Indignant Citizen was in his local Starbucks today and saw boxes of Silk soy “milk” with a “Best if Sold By” date of April 2006. That ain’t right.

(Of course, in Italy the Indignant Citizen saw milk sold in boxes and somehow stored at room temperature, but it was still real milk, and besides that's just Italy. Italians have espresso bars in their truck stops.)

There’s an old saying about how putting lipstick on a pig doesn’t change the fact that the animal wearing the lipstick is still a pig. Likewise giving a bean a face transplant and an enema doesn’t change the fact it’s still a bean.

Soy milk will never be milk, no matter how hard its backers work to make it so.