A call to add breast milk to Chunky Monkey ice cream
We’re used to outrageous gimmicks from the activists at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, but this one may take the cake. PETA is urging Ben & Jerry’s to use human breast milk in their ice cream.
In the group’s statement:
“PETA’s request comes in the wake of news reports that a Swiss
restaurant owner will begin purchasing breast milk from nursing mothers
and substituting breast milk for 75 percent of the cow’s milk in the
food he serves.”PETA officials say a move to human breast milk would lessen the
suffering of dairy cows and their babies on factory farms and benefit
human health.“The fact that human adults consume huge quantities of dairy products
made from milk that was meant for a baby cow just doesn’t make sense,”
says PETA Executive Vice President Tracy Reiman. “Everyone knows that
‘the breast is best,’ so Ben & Jerry’s could do consumers and cows a big
favor by making the switch to breast milk.”
Besides the ew, sick factor, this breast milk in commerically prepared food would violate many health and safety standards. But, even beyond that, let’s not drag one of the life’s true pleasures into a political fight: PETA, you can throw paint on people’s fur coats, stand naked in the street and boycott Hardee’s if you want. BUT — Stay away from my ice cream!
A spokesman for Ben and Jerry’s had a more measured response: “We applaud PETA’s novel approach to bringing attention to an issue, but
we believe a mother’s milk is best used for her child.”
Aisha covered education and breaking news for nearly ten years before joining the Lifestyle staff where she writes a "Dirty Laundry" parenting column. She is the home and family editor and wastes too much time on Facebook and political blogs. 
So, drinking human milk is gross but drinking cows milk is not? People sure are weird…
The problem here is the way PETA went about it.. and, in general, goes about things. They have a very good underlying point, but the way they publicize it is so absurd that it turns people off of the good message. First, cows milk isn’t as good for people as human milk is. In addition, we in the Western world have an over-reliance on dairy products (which is one of the many reasons we’re fat and unhealthy). This over-reliance has made us systematically abuse cows by filling them with hormones to make more milk, they end up with mastitis (50% of US cows have mastitis), and we simply take boy calves and put them in veal crates where they can’t even stand up or move around for months. In order to produce the same amount of dairy, we would need to systematically abuse human mothers in the same fashion.
Great underlying points, but completely absurd method.
Here are some really funny suggestions for potential breast-milk ice cream names: http://www.unboundedition.com/content/view/8154/50/
Strawb-areola, anyone?
I think using breast-milk is a great idea. Why abuse and put the innocent cows to work when we have the milk resource ourselves? Ben and Jerry’s pays the farms for the cow’s milk, so why not pay women instead? As a mother who breastfed, I had an oversupply of milk. When my baby stopped breastfeeding, most of my frozen breast-milk was thrown out. It could have been put to some good use. I would have loved making some extra money for all the time and effort I had to put into breast pumping anyway.
Oh great…just another way to make us mothers who chose not to breast-feed feel guilty.
Plus, wouldn’t this take away milk for those who need it the most - infants? That…or they plan on exploiting us moms who chose not to breast-feed, by making us into production cows.
whoa whoa whoa…I was fine with the idea of a baby drinking their mother’s breast milk, but I’m not drinking another woman’s lactation. I’m kinda attached to the whole cow milk thing. At least cows only eat vegetation. Keep in mind you ingest whatever the animal was being fed, which brings to mind that I dont agree on all the hormones being fed to us (its messing with our biology). Do you really think you’d be ok downing cocktails of antidepressants and large amounts of saturated fats at the expense of a bovines’ well being?
Exactly! I don’t want someone else’s breast milk in my ice cream. I breast fed and I know that if I decided to have a cocktail one evening, my daughter spit up a little more than usual the next day. If I ate spicey food, she felt it. Not knowing what these women drink, eat, take for headaches, cramps, depression, insomnia or whatever, I wouldn’t want to drink that milk or eat that ice cream. I trust the milk I drink or anything I eat with dairy in it, comes from cows who are not treated inhumanely or eat only good clean things. I do agree that there are too many hormones put in our milk, but think about the hormones in breast milk!!
EEEWWWW! My kids drank my milk. I drank my mother’s milk. I’m not ingesting milk from some random woman from God-knows where doing God-knows what. So instead of hooking cows up to pumps, we should hook woman up. Are you going to pay her? How do you decide how much her milk is worth? You think the price of milk is high now…just imagine.
A. Breast is best, at least for your baby. I don’t know about milk from other moms, or if it is all that beneficial for adults.
B. Historically people became lactose-intolerant as they grew older, and some people still are. However, in recent human history we have evolved the ability to drink milk later in life because it was useful - it allowed us to take advantage of another food source. Symbiotically, cows’ predecessors realized it was easier to hang around us and let us provide protection than taking their chances with lions or bears or whatever. So us drinking their milk isn’t really a problem.
PETA should be tackling the real problem, which is the treatment of these cows. The conditions in factory farms is quite absurd, and if you learn much about them it is appalling. The conditions are squalid, which means lots of antibiotics and hormones in the cows, which isn’t really good for them or for us. PETA should be clamoring for Ben & Jerry’s to only use milk from pasture-raised cows that are hormone and drug free.
Would people from PETA eat this ice cream? Because the mother could have eaten a big, juicy hamburger which is now part of her milk…