Breast Milk Headlines Explode After Ben & Jerry’s Letter
So, last month we sent off a letter to Ben & Jerry’s to urge the ice cream giant to drop cow’s milk from its menu and start churning out recipes that use the only milk intended for human consumption—breast milk. It’s a pretty simple concept to grasp. I mean, you don’t see doctors taking newborn babes from their mothers’ arms and suckling them up to a cow in a “drinking room” next to the infants ward. C’mon! That’s absurd. Really.
Our letter to the company has garnered so much attention—and by that I mean impossible-to-walk-down-the-street-without-someone-asking-questions sort of attention—that stories about breast milk have been popping up everywhere! Not that we like to brag—OK, we love it!—but I do think our buxom beaut of an idea got the ball rolling.
Whether it’s Angelina Jolie breast-feeding for a W magazine cover, the illegal duplication of breastfeeding pictures of Jamie Lynn Spears (which has prompted a federal pornography investigation), or—my personal favorite—the guy-next-door who sells his wife’s breast milk for money (these are hard times, folks), stories about breast milk are spreading through the newspapers like a wildfire!
Of course, one of our favorite writings about breast milk appears in PETA President Ingrid E. Newkirk’s newest book, One Can Make a Difference. Check it out: An entire chapter in the book focuses on how human breast milk is better for babies than cow’s milk is: A pediatrician in India in the 80s found that if she urged people to switch from formula and animal’s milk to human breast milk (she even started a human-breast-milk bank!), she could reduce incidences of diarrhea—which were leading to deaths! Deadly diarrhea—do you really think that does a body good? Neither do we.
Written by Jennifer Cierlitsky