What's the definition of milk? 

Twenty years ago, the Soy Foods Association filed a petition with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for the agency to clarify its stance on plant-based milk naming. The agency has yet to respond.

"I know patience is a virtue, but at some point everyone has a limit," The Good Food Institute says. "At The Good Food Institute, we’re certainly tired of waiting. That’s why our policy team has stepped in to ask the FDA to finally take a position and respond to SFA’s decades-old request."

But the National Milk Producers Federation says the petition "is as inappropriate today as it was when it was filed in 1997 and the Good Foods Institute is mistaken for trying to revive those old arguments today."

GFI is not only asking the FDA to allow the term “soymilk” to stand. It's asking the FDA codify its existing practice of allowing food producers to use common names that consumers recognize to describe plant-based milk, cheese, and yogurt names.

“The efforts of GFI and other groups to alter food standards that have been in place for decades – allowing manufacturers of imitation dairy foods to append a plant name like almond, soy, hemp or quinoa in front of legally defined dairy terms such as milk, cheese, yogurt and ice cream – falsely suggests that the products are nutritionally equivalent. They are not," the NMPF said in a statement.

Source: Good Food Institute, National Milk Producers Federation