When we say, “The Milky Way galaxy,” we are being redundant. The word “galaxy” itself means “milky way.” It comes via French and Latin from a modified Greek word for milk used to refer to the white band across the night sky.
We’re mammals, which means we define ourselves by having mammary glands and nursing. It should perhaps not be surprising, then, that “galaxy” hardly exhausts the cultural history of milk as a metaphor in our language. Among the many Shakespearean phrases that have become stock to the modern tongue is Lady Macbeth’s “the milk of human kindness.” In her psychopathic ambition, she meant it as a bad thing; her husband’s nature “is too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way” (of murdering the man who stands in between him and the throne). And then, there are all sorts of not so metaphorical, natural white liquid “milks” that don’t come from animals, such as coconut milk, milk of magnesia, or the white stuff milkweed or milk thistle produce and are named for, and so on.
I mention all of this because two dairy-state senators, Republican Jim Risch of Idaho and Democrat Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, are leading an effort to ban nondairy products made from soy, oat, et cetera from being “mislabeled with dairy terms such as milk, yogurt or cheese.” Milking an obviously dishonest concern for consumers who might be confused about whether soy milk came from a cow’s udder, they are also trying to get the Food and Drug Administration to ban these words from labels with a bill called the DAIRY PRIDE Act.
Milk products are not the only area where there is an effort to get the government into the word-policing of food. The United States Cattlemen’s Association was pleased about the introduction of 2019’s Real Marketing Edible Artificials Truthfully Act, introduced in the House by New York Democrat Anthony Brindisi and Kansas Republican Roger Marshall. Isn’t it coincidental how it’s the states with big cattle industries that seem to produce legislators with an interest in making sure consumers are treated to precise use of language on product labeling?
The world of 2020 is beset by so much language policing, often based so much more in a petty desire to police than in any real interest in precise and careful language. In this space, I often decry one or the other insane yet trendy claim about how some perfectly ordinary phrase is rendered anathema because it’s now deemed exclusive, or traumatizing, or culturally appropriative, or whatever breed of problematic. But it’s important to remember that the very worst language policing is the sort that comes from the actual government, which can regulate the way business operates, confiscate property, and control the literal police.
These state efforts to make sure we use words the way the dairy and meat industries prefer seek to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Nobody is buying the Impossible Burger thinking it’s beef, and Impossible Foods has a clear market interest in making sure consumers have an accurate impression about whether its product is made of animals. Nobody puts almond milk in coffee thinking it contains lactose and came from a Holstein. These bipartisan regulations, then, combine rent-seeking with censoriousness and coercion. They should garner bipartisan opposition.
