PETA Asks Ben & Jerry's to Use Human Milk to Make Ice Cream
Ronald Bailey | September 24, 2008, 10:29am
The folks at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have written a letter to Ben & Jerry's suggesting that the socially conscious purveyors of fats and sugars in the form tasty ice cream switch from bovine milk to human milk. As PETA explains:
The breast is best! Won't you give cows and their babies a break and our health a boost by switching from cow's milk to breast milk in Ben and Jerry's ice cream?
Why?
Using cow's milk for your ice cream is a hazard to your customer's health. Dairy products have been linked to juvenile diabetes, allergies, constipation, obesity, and prostate and ovarian cancer. The late Dr. Benjamin Spock, America's leading authority on child care, spoke out against feeding cow's milk to children, saying it may play a role in anemia, allergies, and juvenile diabetes and in the long term, will set kids up for obesity and heart disease-America's number one cause of death.
Animals will also benefit from the switch to breast milk. Like all mammals, cows only produce milk during and after pregnancy, so to be able to constantly milk them, cows are forcefully impregnated every nine months. After several years of living in filthy conditions and being forced to produce 10 times more milk than they would naturally, their exhausted bodies are turned into hamburgers or ground up for soup.
PETA is cribbing the idea from a Swiss restaurant:
Storchen restaurant is set to unveil a menu that includes soups, stews, and sauces made with at least 75 percent breast milk procured from human donors who are paid in exchange for their milk.
Apparently there is already a market for human milk. Find reporting on the proposal and the PETA letter here.
ChrisH | September 24, 2008, 1:20pm | #
Human milk tastes wonderful, but it doesn't exactly taste like "milk", and I don't know if it would work well for ice cream.
Another problem is scale; cows are just fantastic milk producers. I read something in the context of genetic engineering -- getting mammals to produce medicinal protiens in their milk. It was saying how it was easier to do the with goats, but cows are the holy grail because they produce X times more milk -- where X was like, 8, 10, 20 times. This must be in wikipedia somewhere.
Anyway, with humans not bred for milk production, their productivity is going to be pathetic. On the other hand, when I was taking childbirth classes, they pointed out that there was a law in, like, Victorian England or something, that wet nurses could have to more than 8 children under their "care" -- and pointed out that if there was a law to limit this, presumably women were serving MORE than 8 children at a time.
I know the PETAns of the world would consider it blatant propaganda, but there was the awesome segment on a History Channel show (part of the 90% non-history shows on the channels) that showed a completely modern dairy.
The cows roamed around a big barn, because pens cause stress. Robotic squeegees ran across the floor to keep the poo in control. The cows are trained to go to the milking stations on their own -- they can feel when it's time. The milking is entirely robotic; these things reach out and scrub the udders, attach the milking cups, and clean up afterward. Each suction cup is independent, so one teat may get milked more than another; it detects when the teat has been emptied.
The milk is held separate so that it can be tested for any infection, and to measure content, etc.
The milking station was separated by gates, but still visible to the rest of the barn, because cows are herd animals and being separated causes stress.
In this case, the more "factory" the farm, the better the animals were treated. All of this for purely selfish, capitalist reasons: healthy, content, unstressed cows are more productive.
A lesson for many office environments, I think. Oh. Gotta go to the data milking station now, sorry...
Finally: I wonder what whale milk tastes like? That's gotta be hell to collect.
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