What’s new this week isn’t the name of the company itself-that’s been around awhile-but the lowercase-m reference on its packaging. As far as we can tell, the first reference to the word came in an episode of The Simpsons back in 2013, in which Bart discovers his school cafeteria is actually serving “malk,” fortified with Vitamin R (“Ouch! My bones are so brittle.”) Capital-M Malk, the branded version, hit shelves in 2014. Malk, apparently, stands for Milk Alternative (plus an L and a K for good measure). We wrote a backgrounder on that act and its hundred-year-old precedent here. But there’s an actual bill kicking around in Congress right now called the Dairy Pride Act that would ban use of the word “milk” on any product that doesn’t come from udders or nipples (that’s called a “lacteal secretion” in FDA-speak).
“It is an alternative to dairy meaning dairy free and the new labels clearly show this.”
“Malk is not nut milk pretending to be dairy,” she told Dairy Reporter. MALK brand products now bear the term “malk” everywhere they used to read “milk,” a switch co-founder August Vega says is meant to clear up confusion. Much to the delight of dairy industry lobbyists, at least one vegan nut drink company has removed all references to the word “milk” from its packaging.