Milk

Intriguingly, in a world where we’re happy to drink poo-brown fizz without knowing its ingredients, take pills because we’re told to, and eat the flesh of animals we’ve never met, last week some people were grossed out that women in New Zealand have been sharing breast milk.

Wet nurses are nothing new. Besides which, in these modern days, with breast

Image credit: Mary Cassatt

pumps, packaging options and those new-fangled freezers, surely the ick factor is rather reduced? The non-related baby is not actually latched on to the unrelated mother’s breast. Or is the reaction more about some fundamental sense of betrayal: we believe mums are there, body and mind, for their own. Not for anyone ‘other’.

Mother’s milk: the very definition of trust, and comfort food. Does the notion bring up primal fears of disloyalty and abandonment?

Photo credit: Alamy

Or maybe they’re just worried about health issues. You don’t even know the other woman, what if she has…the Black Plague? What if she eats junkfood, drinks like a fish, snorts P?

Well what about you? We all eat such crap these days, and who knows what's in our drinking water (if we even drink water), we breathe in carbon monoxide, VOCs and particulates every day: we're all toxic.

With all the toxins in human breast milk, maybe your baby would actually be better off on cow’s milk. Or formula, made from cow’s milk, but with all the water processed out. That way you can buy it in a tin, and add some water back in. Makes total sense.

Cows eat grass after all, and in New Zealand they live outdoors, not in battery farm environments. Reassuringly bucolic and traditional. Natural. But wait: there’s actually not enough pasture to go around anymore, what with the 4.9 million cows grazing in NZ these days. So in reality they don’t get much grass. Now they eat mainly PKE – a palm oil by-product, imported from countries like Malaysia and Indonesia where the environment is being thoroughly trashed in order to grow this lucrative cash crop.

Still, might as well get your kids started on palm oil early, it’s in virtually every processed food product these days.

But while we’re busy being grossed out by food produced by someone else’s body,

Photo credit: Telegraph

let’s recap. How much of your food today was, actually, someone else's body?

And when it’s normal for adults to drink milk made by another species, what, exactly, is so gross about a baby drinking milk that was produced by another human?