Your six years of Latin are failing you, because I’m afraid it’s in Old French. But check out 1.recto line 201 for a reference to lait d’amandes in the oldest surviving copy: https://i.imgur.com/lc6gf62.jpg However the almond milk recipe itself is in one of the other three surviving copies, the newer one held by the Vatican: https://i.imgur.com/64aYmhX.jpg There is this and other historical evidence that milk has definitely not “always been dairy”, which was your position, and I object to.

Of course animal milks are different from plant milks. I did not say otherwise. Nor was I even comparing them to plant milks. If you read what was actually written, I was arguing that there really isn’t anything special in the composition of modern cow milk that isn’t in the rest of our diet, and that therefore I don’t feel it really should have any privileged linguistic claim to ‘milk’ on the basis of chemical composition, any more than goat milk or coconut milk or platypus milk.

My argument definitely isn’t “because I say so”. My position is firstly that you are incorrect regarding historical usage, therefore plant milk is milk because its a common culinary usage; and secondly that descriptivism>prescriptivism and therefore we should just let people call things by whatever convenient terms that they want to use, whether or not they are technically scientifically correct.

Hi! Here, have a historical manuscript from the 1300s containing a recipe for almond milk. And here is a pair of historical food recipe blog posts describing how and why it was popular and common and mentions that it appears frequently in all the recipe books of the time.

Biochemically speaking, modern pasteurised homogenised bovine milk is basically fatty protein juice, barely digestible(＊) by most adults, isn’t magical, and doesn’t particularly qualify for privileged status over other milks. It just happens to be what we’re used to.

＊(65%–68% of human adults (and most adult mammals) downregulate the production of intestinal lactase after weaning)

Culinary ingredients usually have the common names they do because of the culinary roles they fill. Tomatos and eggplants are culinary vegetables not fruits, eggplants are not eggs, and almond milk is culinary milk. It’s easier if we don’t overthink these things.