Breast is best but…
There’s no way I’d give up my precious breast milk to make a pint of Chunky Monkey.
PETA Urges Ben & Jerry’s To Use Human Milk
September 23, 2008
Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, Cofounders
Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc.
Dear Mr. Cohen and Mr. Greenfield,
On behalf of PETA and our more than 2 million members and supporters, I’d like to bring your attention to an innovative new idea from Switzerland that would bring a unique twist to Ben and Jerry’s.
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. If Ben and Jerry’s replaced the cow’s milk in its ice cream with breast milk, your customers-and cows-would reap the benefits.
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.
And of course, the veal industry could not survive without the dairy industry. Because male calves can’t produce milk, dairy farmers take them from their mothers immediately after birth and sell them to veal farms, where they endure 14 to 17 weeks of torment chained inside a crate so small that they can’t even turn around.
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? Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Tracy Reiman
Executive Vice President
My StumbleUpon Page
September 25th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
Even though I do think that cow’s milk is for calves, I just can’t picture lactating women lining up, even for pay, to provide breast milk for consumption by the general public. To produce enough to meet demand, we just might end up like those poor dairy cows.
September 26th, 2008 at 10:03 am
I completely agree with Katherine. I can’t imagine human milk becoming the standard ingredient instead of cow’s milk. I wouldn’t shy away from something that was made with human milk, though; I just don’t think a large producer of dairy goods, like Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, is where it’s going to be found.