What is the proper purpose of breast milk?

[undeterred]

Tell me its not to make ice cream.

[meow2u3]

1. Making ice cream for babies

and toddlers to enjoy. This way, the kids get a sweet treat straight out of Mom.

[arcadian]

2. To fatten up infants.

[undeterred]

3. You know, it was uncool when I was an infant.

In the very weird era of the fifties, you were socioeconomically cool if you did not nurse your baby and went directly to bottle feeding. Doctors supported this, just like they kept fathers out of the delivery room and kept delivering mothers semi-comatose.

It seems like right now we are entering another strange phase, where breast milk is so good its to be shared with EVERYONE.

[Critters2]

11. Yep. That's why my brother and I weren't breastfed. My mom got talked out of it.

She did with my sis. Had done enough reading by that time that she stood her ground. And yes, my sister was healthier--fewer colds, less colic--than us. Nature knows what it's doing.

[Arugula Latte]

4. To "suck" profits from Nestle Corp.! ...Damn you, breast milk!

*shakes fist*

[undeterred]

5. Damn you, women!

[Beer Snob-50]

6. it is to make yunny and healhty latte's

:9

[LeftyMom]

7. Mothers produce milk to feed their young.

Human mothers feed their human babies, chimp mothers feed their baby chimps, whale mothers feed their calves, cows feed their calves, etc. Each species' milk is different and best suited to the needs of that species' infants, and even an individual mother's milk changes as the infant ages and it's needs adapt. Some species have a limited amount of infant sharing (where one usually related mother will nurse another's young) and occasionally even in the wild mothers will adopt an unrelated infant of the same species and nurse it, but for the most part milk is produced by a mother for her offspring and that's it.

[undeterred]

8. Wouldn't you think that using it commercially could pose

a lot of health risks since almost everthing (biolgically good and bad) can be passed from mother to child?

[LeftyMom]

9. There are milk banks, they test everything like blood banks do.

They're really f'n expensive for that reason, they're there.

And of course commercial use of milk would be all kinds of problematic. Commercial use of bovine milk spreads all sorts of nasty diseases, which is why they started pasteurizing the stuff. And of course the only reason there's so much cows' milk to go around is the forcible impregnation of cows and slaughter of their calves. Since we're presumably not going to rape human women and kill infants to create a milk surplus, there would never be much extra human milk to go around.

[undeterred]

10. Cows are forcibly impregnated and calves are slaughtered

to produce milk?

[Critters2]

12. Yes. nt

[LeftyMom]

13. Sure.

Mammals don't generally produce milk without having a pregnancy (there are exceptions related to adoptive lactation, but this is uncommon) so the cows have to be impregnated repeatedly to keep them producing milk. The production of calves is a side-effect of this process, but milk is really the main and intended product, and producing sufficient milk results in a surplus of calves. Some of the female calves are kept to replace the "spent" dairy cows, asthey're generally slaughtered by age four as milk production declines a bit at that age, while the rest of the females and all of the males are killed for meat. Slaughter can be within a week or so of birth (as "bob veal" mostly used for pet and baby food), after confinement in a veal crate ("special fed" "milk fed" or "provimi method" veal) or most rarely the dairy calves may be reared to adulthood for beef. The latter is uncommon because other breeds are more efficient at converting food to muscle mass, and can be more economically reared to slaughter weight.

[undeterred]

14. And here I am in the Dairy State.

[LeftyMom]

15. The consumer really isn't supposed to know the details.

It gets in the way of the marketing.

[undeterred]

17. I've only had real unpasteurized cows milk once-

when I was a child on my grandparents farm. They pretty much lived off their farm and their neighbor's farms and a trip into town once every two weeks. I didn't like the milk because it tasted so different. The eggs were ok though.

[Burma Jones]

16. To deter husbands......