A Brief History of Plant-Based Milk

One of my biggest pet peeves is this romanticized idea of ancestral eating that has been picking up on social media. It’s born out of a frustration with the state of food today, which is understandable - the FDA is certainly not perfect and there are harmful food additives, flavors, pesticides, herbicides, etc, that we can get exposed to. But what people are turning to is equally misguided.

According to many influencers, an ancestral diet is largely beef, raw dairy, honey, eggs, and some select fruits. Some of the more moderate ones incorporate vegetables, but a lot of them simply don’t. There’s a large movement of people that are spouting the claim that you don’t need to eat vegetables - that meat gives you all the nutrients you need. There are countless people who trust these influencers, and are accepting these claims as if they are fact.

Besides the fact that research overwhelmingly demonstrates the benefits of eating vegetables and other plants like whole grains and legumes, a simple understanding of basic history also tells us that a diet of almost exclusively animal products is not ancestral for most of us. Be so for real, your ancestors did not eat dead cows for every single meal. With a few exceptions for the ancestors who lived in far northern climates, most people’s ancestors were not rich and didn’t eat loads of meat - not even every day, and certainly not three times per day. Even if you go back to before the Neolithic Revolution, people ate plants. A lot of people are forgetting the gatherer part of hunter-gatherer.

If your ancestors are not from extreme northern places that are close to the arctic circle, your ancestors ate most or all of the following, all the time: grains, legumes, fruits, vegetables, nuts, seeds, mushrooms. Many people’s ancestors didn’t even eat dairy. Eggs were either a rare forage find from wild birds, or a more seasonal item - chickens that lay eggs nearly every day are a result of modern genetic selection and circadian and infradian manipulation - a far cry from the natural state of things.

But perhaps the most sinister part of all this is the blatant erasure of the diverse and long history of plant based milks. According to these “ancestral” diet influencers, plant-based milk is a new, trendy, and unnatural, unhealthy alternative to dairy for the crazy extremists like us who don’t eat animal products. In this narrative, veganism is painted as extreme, and consuming beef, raw milk, and eggs every day is seen as the natural and the correct state of things.

To be perfectly clear: Wherever oats, almonds, coconut, and soy grew - there was milk made out of it. Soy milk and coconut milk have been consumed in Asia for thousands of years, and almond milk was popular across Europe in the middle ages. In fact, almond milk appears in pretty much every record of medieval recipes.

Oat milk has old roots, too. A quick google search will tell you that oat milk was invented in the 1990s. This is erasure. Oatmeal milk was in use in the 17th century as suitable food for “invalids”, and fermented oat milk based drinks have been consumed in Scotland for at least hundreds of years. In English, the word "milk" has been used to refer to "milk-like plant juices" since at least 1200 CE.

Plant milk has a long history in the Americas, too. The Wabanaki and other people indigenous to northeast Turtle Island have been making nut-based milks for time immemorial. If you want to actually embrace ancestral eating, you should be eating more plants.