exactly, and "milk" is a good descriptor for consumers: a pale liquid with some viscosity and a mild taste that can be used in the same ways cows milk is used. Usually the only people who complain about calling it "milk" are people who sell dairy products (not saying OP is one of them).
Uh, no. The defining characteristic of mammals is the ability to produce milk. The word itself is derived from the latin word breast. There is a definition for the word milk as a verb in the mechanical sense as in to extract a substance from an object mechanically but the product from that extraction is not, in any sense, milk, as in the noun. The only other known animals to provide milk are a specific species of jumping spiders. But, as this is specifically a single species, or perhaps even a small genus of interrelated jumping spiders, it is not a defining characteristic of its entire class from an evolutionary stand point.
Milk is an important substance and the definition of which should be more regulated to prevent distortion or misinterpretation of its function by marketing. The only manufactured food substance that approximates milk is baby formula. It is time to stop calling all of these mechanical extractions that are marketed as substitutions something other than milk. This is important because there is a lot of misinformation and general quackery that is related to these mechanical extractions that endanger the lives of infants such as the parents that killed their 7 month old infant by substituting quinoa milk with actual milk or formula because it was "natural."
Yep. Just checked some corpus data and taking soy milk as an example, "soy milk" is used 76.5% of the time by real people not subject to legal shenanigans imposed by the dairy industry, compared to "soymilk" only 23.5% of the time, in the slice of data I looked at. Not the best data (skewed to a certain US locale home to high tech, cable cars, and some large bridges) but pretty overwhelming. And these are people who are being influenced by commercial labels forced by lawsuits to use "soymilk", yet they still separate the words. Usage ftw.
