Why do they call almond milk, soy milk, etc. "milk" when the definition of milk says it comes from mammals?

Well, the nuts have to still be on the tree, but I suppose you've never actually looked for the teats on an almond, coconut, cashew or other nut. It takes a lot of time to milk each nut, because nut milking can't be automated. The milkers have to have small hands to milk a nut teat.

why do THEY call almond milk ........ ?

because PEOPLE learned how to LIE to other PEOPLE

or change the use of WORDS for personal benefit or DECEPTION

long before the invention of the word MILK

similar to the word DEATH

and then certain peoples BEHAVIOR is the

promotion and invention

of the word AFTERLIFE

now ASSOCIATION is how people learn or identify how

people describe what they DISCOVER

by what they already KNOW

that word people use frequently "LIKE"

ground up almond looks similar to or LIKE

cows .goat human mammary production

It's got to stop. Milk comes from the mammary glands of a lactating mammal. Period. The rest is nut juice. Some with meat. The impossible burger is not a burger. All these false representations have to stop.

It's a looong tradition going back almost two thousand years. There were almost certainly nut and cereal "milk" beverages before then, but almond milk called milk explicitly as a dairy substitute is linked to the fasting rules in both Christianity and Islam. Fasting is an odd phenomenon. On the one hand a society that practices it lauds it as being an exercise in humility and self-control while on the other hand coming up with all kinds of creative ways to technically follow the rules with elaborate dishes which definitely break the spirit of humility and self-control. Almond milk fits the bill here perfectly. I don't think it's worth getting all huffy about plant milks being called such as they've been around for so long. If you've ever looked at a mediaeval recipe collection you'll be struck just how often almond milk appears, even in far northern places. They never needed to explain what it was because people knew what it was. Western Europe suffered some kind of collective amnesia after the early 1800s when almond milk based dishes seemed to disappear almost overnight. Jane Austen would still have expected almond milk based meat soups and almond based blancmange, possibly containing both chicken and rosewater before those dishes became cow milk only based in the Victorian era.

Words get attached to new things all the time. It's just what language does. Your flour isn't actually made of flowers (same word spelling regularised differently). Nope, it's short for the "flower of the wheat," i.e. the best, just like the expression "cream of wheat" which doesn't contain any cream either and the rest of the English-speaking world just calls semolina. Did you know that "custard" originally referred to the pie CRUST the eggy mixture was baked in and all "puddings" were originally sausages cooked in casings be it it stomach or gut and that the words "toil" and "towel" come from the same root, "linen." "Toil" only came to mean "work" because it got detached from "chanson de toile," "song(s) of linen" or women's work songs while they worked on textiles. The linguistic flow can be like a mighty river and there comes a point where it's counter-productive to rage against it.

And the US milk industry is exploring ways to keep it defined just like that, whether they will succeed or not.

Always gotta wonder about those who TD factual answers, ya know?

In the UK it isn't, for the reason you suggest: it's not milk. It's called, for example, “Almond drink” or “milk substitute”.

https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/products/287...

They wouldn't be allowed to call it “almond juice” either because it's NOT almond juice, it's basically water.

Because it's used the same way as milk.

Marty is 100% correct. People do not want to put soy juice or almond juice in their coffee or on their cereal.

Marketing tactic.

Because it’s mimicking milk. Why is non-dairy creamer called such? It has no cream which is from milk.

It's used as a milk alternative so the marketing gurus figured it was the easiest way to get the point across to the consumer. I doubt they would sell as much calling it soy juice.