As it turns out this is a real headline. Here's the story. Okay... so I think it's gross. I'd wager that most people agree with me. Moving beyond the visceral response, there are other problems as well. This is a very poorly thought our request on PETA's part. In the letter to Ben and Jerry's PETA actually used the phrase "breast is best". Yeah... for infants because they have no immune system. Breast milk gives infants antibodies and immune cells to keep them healthy until their thymus kicks into high gear around 1 year. It's not any healthier for adult humans to drink human milk than it is to drink cow milk.
Next I'd like to point out that using human products raises a lot of public health issues. What sort of medication would these milk-producing women be taking? Does anyone know how to effectively filter them out? How would the milk be treated to prevent human disease from being transmitted? You can catch a lot more stuff from a person than from a cow. In fact, breast milk is one of the vectors by which HIV can be transmitted. I mean... are we going to pasteurize human milk? What about excessive hormone levels? Bovine hormones MIGHT have some effect on humans, but the homology between human and bovine proteins is not so high. Human hormones are bound to affect us. You know what we call human products in the sciences? Biohazardous waste.
Finally, PETA missed the mark because human don't produce a lot of milk. It takes about 5.3 liters of milk to make a gallon of ice cream. Yeah, seems like a lot, but I'm admittedly too lazy to find another source. Ben and Jerry's produces about 13 million gallons of ice cream each year. A dairy cow can produce upwards of 30 liters of milk in a day. An adult human female is lucky to get around 1 liter. So, assuming that Ben and Jerry were to hire a bunch of wet nurses to provide them milk, they'd need... *doing math*... 188,767.12 lactating women employed at all times to produce sufficient milk. Since it's kinda hard to get 0.12 of a person (barring some sort of gruesome experiment) we'll just round that up to 188,768 lactating women.
So PETA... your suggestion is totally workable provided you can come up with thousands and thousands of lactating women. And really, what women wouldn't want to be hooked up to a milking machine all day? It should be easy to find recruits.
1 comments:
This all comes from a Swiss restaurant that IS using human breast milk in sauces, soups, and stews. It's paying donors about $5 a pint. But? ICK. They claim it is better (as an ingredient), but human breast milk is watery compared to cow milk, so I doubt it. Then I picture herds of women, free-range, macrobiotically fed, getting hooked up to milk-extraction devices twice a day. Somehow that is simultaneously hilarious and creepy.
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