r62, I didn't equate them, but...

1. oil + vinegar is the most basic salad dressing

2. oil + vinegar + egg = mayonnaise

3. Mayonnaise is a form of oil & vinegar & by housewife logic, is therefore 'salad dressing'.

5. By definition, 'mayonnaise" has oil, vinegar, and egg. Miracle Whip has emulsifiers equivalent to egg, but no literal egg, so it can't legally be called 'mayonnaise' -- at least, not without additional prominent qualifiers like 'mayonnaise-flavored food spread".

6. By calling it 'salad dressing', Kraft avoids the need to qualify it as anything. They do the same thing by taking advantage of appearance-similarity to call fake margarine "Spread", and call fake American cheese "Singles".

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incidentally... is 'American Cheese' by literal definition, always and inevitably 'processed cheese food"? Or is there actually some commercially-orphaned cheddar-like orange-colored literal 'cheese' called 'American cheese' theoretically "out there" somewhere that's simply been 100% displaced by processed cheese food?

My theory: some guy whose last name was probably 'Kraft' set out to make cheddar with cheaper ingredients & improved unrefrigerated shelf life on industrial scale, called it "American Cheese", then ended up in a catch-22 when the gov't said you can't call it 'cheese' (without additional qualifications)... so now, we have a popular variety of cheese food named after a fictional 'real' cheese.

Alternate theory: There's a real cheese somewhere out there called "American cheese" that was once derived from cheddar, but it's so inferior in terms of taste, texture, shelf life, ability to melt gracefully, etc, to processed cheese food that there's literally no reason to bother with it.

I've also been told that Mexican "queso blanco" is LITERALLY the same thing as "American cheese", minus the orange food coloring, and exists because Mexico didn't allow orange food coloring. Eventually, Kraft marketed it as both 'white American cheese' (when sliced & wrapped as singles) and "queso blanco" (when sold as molded blocks or pre-shredded) to gain shelf space in supermarkets.