Our strange attitude to breasts
According to an interview given by journalist Rosie Millard to Mother and Baby magazine, John Humphrys was once served coffee ’spiked’ with her breast milk. Characteristically, Humphrys snappily downplayed the issue, saying ‘It’s the first I have ever heard of it. It’s not really spiking … I very much doubt that I would have noticed or that it would have done me any harm, since I drank breast milk for the first year of my life’.
I’m not always a fan of Humphrys, but in this case he is right. Surely it is no more strange that humans drink human milk than humans drink cows’ milk? With the nutritional content of breast milk being designed for humans, not calves, wouldn’t the use of breast milk have been enriching Humphrys’ morning brew, rather than making it dangerous in some way, as the word ’spiking’ implies? Is what makes it seem ’strange’, distasteful even, to many people the fact that it comes from breasts, a part of the body which now seem to exist solely for the titilation (excuse the pun!) of others, rather than their evolved function of keeping our children nourished and healthy in their early months?
Worrying however it the next piece of information provided by Ms Millard. She said that she used to express ‘a couple of bottles of milk out in the disabled loo at work, which I would store in the fridge belonging to the Today programme’.Why was food being prepared in a toilet? Would we want to eat food prepared in a toilet cubicle, let alone a vulnerable baby? Why was no better facility made available for breastfeeding mothers to use in private and peace? It seems that any concerns that the BBC might have harboured were not towards junior Millard, as Rosie continued: ‘Once there was a complaint on my desk from the disabled unit, suggesting that my discreet milking sessions might stop a disabled person having a wee’.
I’m not a evangelical ‘breast is best’ campaigner. But there is no doubt that in most situations, breastfeeding provides an excellent start in life and can increase the feeling on bonding for the mother. Certainly if a mother wants to feed her child, we should make the tiny adaptations that enable her to do so for the first year of the baby’s life. And we should stop treating breasts and breast milk as if they are something dirty and perverted, rather than life-sustaining.
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