No Use Crying Over...?

Pedants will no doubt point out that dairy is by definition restricted to mammal-based milk products, thereby dismissing Miyoko’s rhetoric as nonsensical. They have a point, but only up to a point. Language is as language does, or rather as we do with it. If enough people start talking of vegan dairy, the term ‘dairy’ will simply widen its referent over time to cover any product made from milk of any kind. Indeed, we can even imagine a scenario, many years from now, in which ‘dairy’ paradigmatically refers to plant-based milk products, and the old use has become obsolete.

It is interesting to compare the above situation to that of the Swedish company Oatly. In the US, their drink is branded as ‘Oat milk’. By contrast, in the UK and other EU countries their mottos are ‘ditch milk and switch to oat drink’ and ‘it’s like milk but made for humans’. Is Oatly contradicting itself? Or is it merely switching from a loose (ordinary) sense of ‘milk’ to a more narrow (legalistic) one?