Breast Milk in the News
Breast milk is getting a lot of attention these days.
First, Daniel Angerer, a chef in New York City, made cheese from his wife’s breast milk. He and his wife had a surplus of milk on hand for their child, and he decided to experiment with it. I personally wouldn’t rush to eat it, but that’s no shocker–I won’t even eat cauliflower. (The NYC Health Dept. has made sure the breast milk cheese isn’t actually on his restaurant’s menu.)
However, I don’t know if breast milk cheese deserves the full-on media “gross out” reports that have been circulating the past few days. It’s been talked about almost everywhere, and the Today Show even tricked someone into eating a bite. (Watch his reaction when he finds out what it is.) Making the cow comparison, the NY Post ran a photo on the front page of the mother with the headline “Moo!”. How old are we? While the breast milk cheese may be a bit off the beaten path and not to everyone’s liking, it’s only breast milk, folks. I’m no hippie, but who cares what these people do with it behind closed doors? Well, here’s what Chef Angerer had to say:
“We realized we were going to have to throw a lot of it out, pour this liquid gold down the drain, and we were not going to do that,” Angerer said. “So, me being a chef, we said, ‘Hey, let’s make some cheese!’”
Boy, do I understand the “liquid gold” concept. I would pump for 30 minutes and only get 2 ounces of milk. If my husband let it sit out too long, I would go berserk. “Do you know how long that took me?!” Perhaps if someone were making cheese with it, we would have been able to use it longer.
If you’re game for trying breast milk cheese, the recipe can be found on Angerer’s web site.
Next, you may have seen The Office last week where Jim and Pam gave birth to a daughter. In the episode, Pam mistakenly breastfeeds her roommate’s infant. What caused a few chuckles in the fictional show actually occurred to a Chicago couple, and they are now suing the hospital for the mix up. At 4 a.m., a staffer brought in a baby boy for feeding. Another nurse walked in a few minutes later and noticed the error. No one was injured and there was a very low chance of the baby or the woman being exposed to any disease. But, the couple is suing the hospital for $30,000 in damages. The mother:
“She [The nurse] said, ‘The baby you’re feeding isn’t yours,’ ” Jennifer Spiegel, 33, recalled. “It was just an awful, internal feeling.”
This really surprised me. It seemed like an honest mistake on the part of the hospital that was discovered very, very quickly. Hospitals really do go to great lengths to prevent these sort of situations. However, no system is perfect. Human error can still occur. And, while the security of your newborn is nothing to be taken lightly, remember this was only for one feeding. Does nursing another infant warrant “an awful, internal feeling” plus a lawsuit? Remember that wet nurses have been around for thousands of years.
In some parts of the world, women only breastfeed for a few weeks because of the social stigma. As you may remember, the actress Salma Hayek got a lot of attention when she breastfed another woman’s hungry baby on a trip to Africa. Certainly the stigma is unwarranted–mothers should be able to breastfeed as long as makes sense for their family. If only there were a way for those children to still get the nutrients from breast milk in another way. Like…cheese?
Tepary Said,
March 10, 2010 @ 8:55 pm
While I’m not sidling up to indulge in a little breastmilk myself, I wouldn’t have any kind of problem with having my child have the breastmilk of a friend, or for the time I was breastfeeding feeding a friend’s child
Timothy Mills Said,
March 11, 2010 @ 2:21 am
While a lawsuit is completely out of proportion, I understand the horror. There is a deep cultural belief that mothers simply “know” their children – their cry, smell, and of course appearance.
The mother in this case believed that it was her child – a believe bolstered by the myth of infallible maternal intuition. When the mistake was revealed, she wasn’t just learning that she had inadvertently fed someone else’s child (a fact that may cause some discomfort, but probably not great consternation). She was also realizing that her “mommy instinct” was not as infallible as she’d been led to believe. This belief was tied to her identity as a mother. Naturally, she was deeply hurt – which probably motivated the extreme indignation that led to the lawsuit.
Of course, the solution isn’t to condone the lawsuit, but to tone down the rhetoric of mommy instinct. The fact is, you might not know your kid from another instantly. And that doesn’t make you a bad mother (or father – but we dads aren’t expected to have perfect intuitions). It just makes you human.
At least, that’s my take on it.
Fiona Said,
March 11, 2010 @ 4:38 pm
In my grandparents time, people breast fed their friend children if they were looking after them.
mamanomnom Said,
March 12, 2010 @ 11:14 am
I have no problem with the making of breastmilk cheese. I mean, why is it that cows, goats, etc. can be milked and that milk isn’t considered gross?
One thing I would say to the restaurant owner and his wife is that if they had extra and simply didn’t want to throw it away, they could donate to a milk bank. HMBANA is an organization overseeing the milk banks in the U.S. http://www.hmbana.org. It’s a pretty easy process, and the milk is screened for bacteria, pasteurized, and fed to preemies, sick babies, etc. whose mothers can’t make enough milk due to their own sickness or other issues.
Julie Said,
March 13, 2010 @ 1:11 am
I used to find my bottles in another infant’s things at our daycare. The staff assured me that it was only the empty bottles that ended up getting mixed around, but I always wondered if they had ever accidentally fed some of my breast milk to this other kid. His mom and I used the same bottles. Her bottles never ended up with my things, though. I really didn’t mind if her kid got a little of my stuff, but I admit I would have been totally freaked out if I’d thought the mistake had gone the other way!
Kelly Minton Said,
March 16, 2010 @ 8:29 am
The chef story is pretty funny. It’s especially funny to me because I started a line of greeting cards called Marvelous Mommies and we actually did a card with a “Moo” punchline: http://marvelousmommies.com/?p=humor&select=03 Unfortunately, I don’t think a cheese card would be quite as sellable!