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Linguistically speaking, using "milk" to refer to "the white juice of certain plants" (the second definition of milk in the Oxford American Dictionary) has a history that dates back centuries. The Latin root word of lettuce is lact, as in lactate, for its milky juice, which indicates that even the Romans had a fluid definition for milk. Ken Albala, professor of history at University of the Pacific and host of the podcast Food: A Cultural Culinary History, says that almond milk "shows up in pretty much every medieval cookbook." Almonds, which originate in the Middle East, reached southern Europe with the Moors around the 8th century, and their milk--yes, medieval Europeans called it milk in their various languages and dialects--quickly became all the rage among aristocrats as far afield as Iceland.

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