Except for coconut milk, because reasons.

It's weird, since "milk" in English has included plant milk longer than the taxonomic definition of a "mammal" has existed.

It actually is allowed for German "Scheuermilch" ("scouring cream", which is a cleaning detergent, literal translation: "scrubbing milk").

Germany has a whole line of not milks, almost chicken, like chicken, thun visch and i can almost be certain i saw mjolk and moloko somehwere. I always chuckle a bit when i see it.

I can tell you a little about how Germany does this and I think the rest of the EU & France should be similar. There is a government body defining what specific foods are and if your food doesn't match that, you can't name it like the food in question. And that does make sense - butter has to be made from milk and not some palm oil mixed together by shady businesses and milk has to come from an animal and can't be water & white paint.

This does make sense and really protects the consumer. It does - however - really run into problems when dealing with those vegetarian meat replacements. It would make sense to sell a "vegetarian ham", but ham has an exact, legal definition and part of that definition is that ham has to contain meat.

There's no "thinking" happening. Only the convergence of two opposite things:

• French politicians wanted to please the meat industry;
• The EU free market has a strictly defined set of rules that essentially prevents member states from banning "EU-legal" stuff from being sold in their country (as I understand it – because in practice it's a very complex topic and the EU is not nearly as overbearing with its laws as "euroskeptics" tend to portray them, like when during COVID borders were completely closed despite far-right parties having spouted for years that Freedom of Movement meant the end of territorial sovereignty and what-have-you).

Now the politicians got their headlines so they're happy, and in practice almost nothing changes for the consumer so they're mostly happy. Ah and the veggie producers get fucked in the process, but the politicians don't care and the consumers don't know or care.

It's basically the dumb version of the current agricultural protests (the French farmers are pissed, among other things, that their products have to compete with "common EU market" products which were made using lots of cheap pesticides that would be illegal to use in France. Now to be fair it's not a 1-to-1 comparison because pesticide usage has profound health effects on local populations but you get the idea).

Either way to avoid unfair treatment of local producers, the government has to either deregulate the industry to match the lowest common EU denominator, or to successfully lobby the EU to raise the requirements everywhere. Or I guess just treat producers unfairly and hope they'll be able to compete anyway.

It's just the standard intersection between domestic and EU law when it comes to food labelling.

E.g. if you want to sell stuff in Germany as beer that isn't beer according to German law then you can't brew it in Germany, it has to be imported and thus fall under common market rules.