On 11 February 2026, the UK Supreme Court handed down a judgement that did more than settle a spat between two companies. In Dairy UK Ltd v Oatly AB, the court unanimously ruled that Oatly’s trademarked slogan, “Post Milk Generation”, was invalid for use on its food and drink products. The reasoning? The word “milk”, we are now told, belongs solely to the mammary excretions of animals.
On paper, it is a technical trademark decision about a marketing slogan, not a ban on chefs saying “almond milk” on a menu. But in practice, judgements like this ripple outward. They are picked up by regulators, trade bodies and risk-averse brands, and before long the language of the kitchen is being treated as corporate property.
To a casual observer, this might look like a dry little victory for Dairy UK Ltd. For anyone who cares about culinary history, language, or the way we actually cook and eat, it feels like something else: regulatory capture dressed up as consumer protection. It ignores a simple truth. Language, like a good sauce, needs to remain fluid if it is going to be any use to anyone.
We are told that calling plant-based liquids “milk” is a modern marketing trick, dreamed up by some bored copywriter in Shoreditch. A confusing “trend”. A con. If the courts had bothered to look in the pantry of history, they would have seen the opposite.
Plant-based milks have been part of European cooking for centuries. In the 1200s, almond milk moves from Middle Eastern kitchens into the European repertoire. By 1390, it is firmly established in English. In The Forme of Cury, the royal cookbook compiled by the master cooks of King Richard II, “almond mylk” appears in something like a quarter of the recipes.
For 800 years, English cooks have known exactly what almond milk is. It was a practical necessity, especially on fast days and during Lent, when animal products were forbidden. Mediaeval diners were not standing in the refectory, baffled because there was no udder on the nut. They understood perfectly well that the word described the function and character of the liquid, not its biological origin.
So when the dairy lobby in 2026 claims exclusive rights to the word, it is not protecting heritage. It is attempting to rewind the dictionary to a state that never existed. If anyone is tampering with tradition here, it is not the person soaking oats.
Set history aside for a moment and look at the word itself. “To milk” is a verb before it is a noun. It describes an action. A process of extraction.
You apply pressure to a source and draw out an internal liquid. You refine it, strain it, perhaps stabilise it. That is milking. Whether you are in a cowshed or standing at a sink with a muslin cloth, the mechanical reality is the same.
In the kitchen, when you soak oats, almonds or soybeans, blitz them with water, then press and strain, you are performing the same basic operation as a farmer in a parlour. You are extracting a nutrient-rich, white, opaque liquid. We quite happily talk about milking snakes for venom or milking rubber trees for latex. No one demands a mammary gland in sight before they allow the verb.
To insist that the resulting liquid cannot be called “milk” because it did not pass through an udder is like saying you cannot call peanut butter “butter” because it has never been near a churn. At some point, common sense has to be allowed into the room.
For a chef, language is as much a tool as a knife. The menu is not just a list of items, it is a quiet contract with the diner. Each word carries a set of expectations about texture, richness, mouthfeel and function.
When I write “coconut milk emulsion” on a menu, I am not reciting a legal definition. I am telling the diner: expect something smooth, rich, faintly sweet, with a certain weight on the tongue. When I write “smoked almond cream”, I am signalling fat content, viscosity, and how that element will sit in the structure of the dish.
Years ago, I had a conversation with a very earnest standards officer who suggested that “almond milk panna cotta” might be “misleading” and that “almond-based dessert set with agar” would be clearer. I suggested, as politely as I could manage, that if we started writing menus in that sort of language, we might as well eat in an operating theatre. The guests knew exactly what they were getting. The only person confused was the man with the clipboard.
Legal decisions that treat words like “milk” as territory to be fenced off create a chilling effect. If a supermarket has to call something “oat drink” or “soya-based beverage” on the carton, how long before someone decides a chef’s blackboard should follow the same anaemic vocabulary?
An “oat drink” sounds like something you might order in a bar as a dare. “Oat milk” is what you pour over your cereal or steam for a cappuccino. The word carries function. It tells the cook how it will behave in a frother, a pan, or a béchamel. “Drink” does not.
There is a small absurdity in all this that every creative person will recognise.
In most jurisdictions, recipes are not protected by copyright. You can spend years developing a technique to milk a walnut, coaxing out a stable emulsion that behaves like cream in both savoury and sweet contexts. The day you publish it, someone else can copy it step for step, and there is very little you can do about it.
Your labour, your know-how, your small breakthroughs in texture and stability: all open season.
Yet at the same time, vast industry bodies are allowed to treat a common noun as their personal asset. We have created a world in which the dairy industry can effectively ring-fence a word that has been in everyday use since the Middle Ages, while a chef cannot meaningfully “own” the dish they invented. The vocabulary of the creator is being privatised, while the creator’s actual work is left unprotected.
Forgive me if I find that backwards.
Let me be very clear: I am all for honest labelling. As someone who cares deeply about provenance and standards, I want the consumer to know exactly what they are buying. I want honey that tells me whether it has been adulterated. I want truffle oil that admits it has never been near a truffle, if that is the case.
Informative labelling adds detail. “Oat milk: a plant-based alternative” is helpful. It tells you what it is and what it does, without pretending to be something else.
What we are seeing now is something different: linguistic erasure. The functional noun is removed and replaced with hollow, bureaucratic words like “drink”, “beverage” or “plant-based liquid preparation”, as if we were stocking a canteen in a minor space station.
That tells the cook almost nothing. It does not convey how the product will behave in a custard, whether it will split when heated, whether it will foam in a coffee machine. It certainly does not honour 800 years of shared terminology.
If the dairy industry truly wanted to protect its heritage, it would channel its energy into highlighting provenance and quality. Tell me that your milk is raw, or organic, or from grass-fed Ayrshire cattle. Celebrate the farm and the breed. By all means, protect geographical indications and standards of production.
Do not pretend you invented the word.
The most revealing part of all this is the “coconut milk” exception. Under current rules, “coconut milk” is allowed because it has a “traditional use”. The coconut, apparently, has been grandfathered into the language.
That alone destroys the “consumer confusion” argument.
If the British public can distinguish between a cow and a coconut without judicial supervision, they can probably manage an oat. The only real difference is that one industry has had centuries to embed itself and lobby for a legacy pass, while newer plant-based producers are told to queue at the back and accept whatever anaemic term they are given.
“Oat drink” is not about clarity. It is about selective protectionism. It protects incumbents, not consumers.
If you want to dive further down this particular rabbit hole – or just arm yourself for the next dinner-table argument about oat milk – here are some places to start.
If nothing else, spending an afternoon with these will cure you of the notion that oat milk was invented by a barista in 2015.
We are at a point where protectionism is starting to interfere with the natural evolution of language. English has never been a tidy tongue. It borrows, adapts, mutates. That is why it is useful.
For some eight centuries, “milk” has been perfectly capable of describing both the secretion of an animal and the extracted essence of a plant. Cooks, diners and shoppers have managed this dual meaning quite happily.
The Supreme Court’s decision may have handed a short-term victory to Big Dairy in a specific trademark dispute, but it has done the English language no favours. Nor has it done justice to the millions of so-called “Post Milk Generation” consumers who know exactly what they are buying and are quite capable of reading a label.
You can force a company to change the words on its packaging. You can strip a slogan of its legal protection. What you cannot do, not really, is litigate away eight hundred years of culinary practice and common sense.
We have been milking plants since the 13th century. We carried on through plagues, wars, rationing and the invention of the microwave, and we are not going to stop now because someone in a suit has decided that only a cow counts.
It is time to stop milking the legal system and start respecting two things: the intelligence of the consumer and the creative freedom of the kitchen.
Chef Ian McAndrew’s specialist eBooks and guides are available directly on ChefYesChef, including his technical titles and autobiography. If you want more practical, chef-led reading beyond this article, you’ll find the full collection here.
Chef Ian McAndrew works with chefs, businesses, and individuals on a wide range of culinary projects, from concept development to practical problem-solving.
If you’d like to talk through an idea or need informed guidance, you’re welcome to contact him.
