The Brooklyn Rail

Being female in America is pretty weird right now. For example, OddFellows: a trendy ice cream shop, currently serving up melty scoops of breast-milk–flavored ice cream with the line, “Just like mom used to make.” Is there human milk in it? No, that’s illegal—infection and body trafficking, for a start—but there is cow milk in it, which is certainly from a cow’s breast, though we call them “udders” to feel a bit better about it, I guess. More specifically, it contains cow colostrum, a specific sort of breast milk that’s harder to get and few of the customers know much about, even as it drips down sticky fingers on a Brooklyn sidewalk. And is it really like Mom used to make? Sort of. Maybe. If moms ate a lot of grass and chewed on their vomit and were repeatedly knocked up for the sake of capitalism, which, come to think of it, does sound a bit like the future pronatalists are after (minus the grass).

Whether bovine or human, colostrum is the milk all mammals make in the first hours or days after giving birth: a thick, yellow, salty-sweet liquid that looks, to many mothers, so alarming that Medieval Europeans called it “bee stings” and threw the human version away. The milk a new mother’s body makes turns white after a while—how long depends on the species, in part because milk itself is timed to adapt to a baby’s growing needs, and different mammals grow and change at different rates. In humans, we switch to “mature milk” usually after a couple weeks.

Presumably OddFellows, in partnership with Frida, the baby-things company—most famous for that one sucking apparatus you can use to hoover boogers out of your infant’s nose—decided there’d be a market for breast-milk–flavored ice cream because we like things that are sweet and salty these days (mammary glands evolved from the same sort of glands that make sweat, and yes, there’s sodium in it) but, more importantly, because some people think you can eat colostrum for its health benefits. There are traditional medicinal practices for this purpose, some better than others, arguably for good reason: In any species, colostrum evolved to care for our newborns, not because of nutrition exactly, but because it’s especially dense in immunological stuff: prebiotics, probiotics, actual immune cells from the mother, and above all, a special brew of milk sugars that the baby can’t even digest. These are called “oligosaccharides” and are specifically for the baby’s growing microbiome: gut bugs. See, birth isn’t just when you reproduce—you’re also making an entire new ecosystem for the bacteria that inhabit you, and given that you will someday die, it’s nice that you went and built them a new condo. (If you make milk, your breast tissue helps put in the drywall.) Colostrum, in other words, is more like a combo of fertilizer and a slightly chaotic reno crew, there to clear the digestive path of infectious baddies and make everything nice and cozy for your commensals.

Little of which actually makes it into the ice cream in question, of course, because it’s been pasteurized so it won’t kill you. Also a cow’s digestive tract is different from a human’s. Because they have four-part stomachs. And eat a lot of grass. In fact, they eat so much grass they have to ferment the stuff in their massively long digestive tract, which produces quite a lot of methane as a waste product, that launches obligingly out of the cow’s anus and mouth at regular intervals so it won’t explode like a meat balloon. Because methane contributes to global warming, the dairy industry is actively cooking the planet. (Though I’m not vegan, it’s not wrong to say all ice cream is hurricane-flavored.)

The reason we pasteurize our milk products, of course, is because they used to regularly kill human babies. Americans used to feed our infants and young children cow’s milk. A lot of it. And they used to get diarrhea from it. A lot of it. Enough, in fact, to die—also tuberculosis, brucellosis, salmonellosis, strep, diphtheria… the list goes on and on. In the late nineteenth century, infant deaths were significantly higher than they are in the US and Europe right now, thanks in no small part to the fact that we gently heat cow’s milk to 150 degrees for thirty minutes (162 for fifteen seconds can also serve) and now our fat, adorable babies aren’t dying nearly as quickly as they used to. This is, to be clear, a really good thing.

The recent Florida woman who sued a dairy farm for selling her “raw” cow’s milk (she became very, very sick and had a miscarriage) is probably unaware of that fact, but then, against all medical advice, she went and drank unpasteurized milk while pregnant. Depending which stage of pregnancy she was in, her placenta may well have been downregulating her immune system, making her more vulnerable to any pathogens in the milk—which is to say, a rather bad time to make bad decisions. But no matter. She and the cow that made the milk are sisters, in a way—each playing a role on a larger stage of mammals’ unending female labor, both a little sore, both tired, both undervalued and under cared for, while the Florida tide continues to rise.