Breastmilk is sweet and clean, less heavy on the tongue than cow’s milk, less, well, animal. When first produced, the consistency is watery, but as output continues, it becomes fuller in body, more caloric, like a fresh soy or almond milk. After sitting out, it develops a thick cream top that can be scooped with a fingertip and tastes like half-and-half. The color of breastmilk is usually whitish, but it can also be slightly blue or yellow or tinged with the color of foods eaten: green for greens, orange for carrots, red for beets. (In the beginning, it’s called colostrum and appears in droplets that are dense, oily, and yellow.)
These things I observed firsthand as I pumped and squeezed after the birth of my baby last August. Along with a taste of my own product, I ingested, in the form of books, nurses’ advice, TikTok, and much googling, high-grade breastmilk propaganda. I learned, for instance, that it is a “superfood.” That it shifts composition throughout the day (it contains more melatonin at night) and nutritional composition (more fat and more protein) the longer it is produced. That when you get sick, the milk bulks up with protective antibodies and white blood cells, like a bespoke cough syrup. I was evangelized by statistics and studies demonstrating miraculous outcomes: that children who are raised on breastmilk are less likely than those who are not to develop Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes and obesity. And that certain longitudinal studies found they are likely to have higher IQs and score better on math and reading tests. When breastfeeding declined globally through the twentieth century following the invention of formula, groups like UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) campaigned to promote exclusive breastfeeding or pumping in mothers. Support groups like La Leche League bolstered those efforts, and an industry of lactation consultants bloomed. The movement (sometimes referred to as “breast is best”) has been wildly successful: In the United States, in 1989, 52 percent of infants were initiated on the breast. By 2022, the percentage was 83.
Now, we are completely batshit for the stuff. On Instagram and TikTok, influencers flaunt their sloshing liter pitchers of breastmilk, their overflowing bottles straight off the pump, their endless Rolodex of tiny plastic packets of frozen breastmilk in the freezer. They tell you to eat fenugreek, brewer’s yeast, blue Gatorade, Miracle Milkookies at two bucks a pop. (In fact, there is little evidence that eating any particular food is correlated to increasing milk supply.) There are infinite girls on scroll, telling you to feed the fridge first with frozen milk. Other girls are crying over their paltry supply, performing their anguish and documenting their days attempting to increase production (and follows). Once one has acquired enough breastmilk (too much even for an infant to reasonably consume), it is recommended for a range of applications: to cure cradle cap, diaper rash, acne, ear infection, sunburn, or poison ivy; to be made into shampoo, cheese, jewelry, crystals, or paperweights.
Along with a taste of my own product, I ingested high-grade breastmilk propaganda.
I gave birth in a hospital that was “baby-friendly,” which is health care parlance for a medical center that pushes exclusive breastfeeding. After a relatively easy labor and delivery (which is not saying very much), I lay for a timeless hour, the early afternoon sun streaming in through the windows, teeth chattering violently from hormones, with my baby, caked in white vernix, alien, impossible, and warm, on my chest. I would describe my feeling toward him in those moments as a huge shocked blank. I was exhausted, relieved, in awe of mortality, grateful for my husband and my doctor, grateful to be alive, frightened that I wouldn’t be able to love the little gray creature who was peacefully rising and falling at the tip of my nose.
Then I was whisked away and commanded to shove the tiny baby’s face into my nipple whenever he cried, which was anytime he wasn’t nursing. It was sweet at first, the holy picture of mother and child, but by our second evening in the hospital, the only time the baby stopped crying was to scream. My husband valiantly held our screeching, red-faced newborn for hours so I could try to catch a few minutes of sleep with a blanket wrapped around my head. Nurses ebbed and flowed. They came to check my vitals and the baby’s latch and remind me that for the process of lactation to be established, my nipples required constant stimulation. The more frequently my milk ducts were emptied, they said, the faster and fuller my milk would come in. They warned me that if I were to take a break, my milk might not establish at all.
At four in the morning on my third night in the hospital, delirious and frightened, I tugged on the sleeve of a nurse who had scoured the employee office to bring me a few graham crackers and a cherry Jell-O.
“What happens if I fall asleep?” I asked her, the baby still diligently suckling.
“You can’t fall asleep,” she said, her eyes sorry. “If you do, you might drop the baby.”
My milk did not come in. By the third day, I was too depleted to do anything except research how quickly it would take me to die from sleep deprivation.
In another time, at a different hospital, there would have been a nursery to send the baby to for a few hours. In the nursery, they would have topped the baby off with an ounce or two of formula, just to take the edge off; they might have offered him a pacifier to give him some comfort and help him get back to sleep. Instead, because of the WHO regulations, the nursery had been restricted, and formula was all but banned, at least without “medical indication” from a physician. Pacifiers were taboo, too, lest they cause “nipple confusion” (a concern over which the medical literature is split). The lactation consultants at the hospital and beyond offered contradicting advice, some of which was predicated on pseudoscience and most of which prioritized breastfeeding above all else, including my mental health and the baby’s well-being.
The only piece of evidence that I heard repeated was that only one to five percent of women are truly, medically unable to breastfeed exclusively — a fact in need of a primary source. (The 1980s textbook that WHO references to bolster this endlessly repeated claim doesn’t cite any research.) Yet it is wielded to convince parents that their ability to exclusively breastfeed is a direct product of their endurance and desire. By the fifth day of my baby’s life, he had lost 10 percent of his body weight and was jaundiced from dehydration. Our pediatrician told us to start supplementing with formula, the first time in our many interactions with the health care system that the option was ever presented.
Still, because of the messaging around breastfeeding I’d already been exposed to, supplementing with formula felt like a personal failure. On the recommendation of yet another lactation consultant, I went home and triple fed for two months to attempt to increase my supply. Triple feeding involves feeding the baby at the breast, then feeding a bottle of formula, then pumping to stimulate milk production, a process that can take up to two hours, by which point the baby is ready to feed again. (It worked a little, but definitely not enough to breastfeed exclusively.) I watched TikTok while I nursed, the algorithm serving up anxious-making breastfeeding content of the kind described above. The closest experience I’ve ever had to this process was the similarly all-consuming struggle with disordered eating I battled through my twenties; every single day of those years was clouded by a fixation on a number on a scale, going up or going down. It is an utter mindfuck that while concerns about postpartum depression have become mainstream, birthing parents in the United States are conscripted into the physical and emotional torture of exclusive breastfeeding.
I thought a lot about Shulamith Firestone during the temporary psychosis of early breastfeeding. Her book, The Dialectic of Sex, envisioned a future where reproductive technology could liberate women from the unequal burden of pregnancy and childbirth and ultimately rebalance the power dynamic between genders by easing reproductive labor. “If nature is unjust, then change nature,” as her followers are fond of writing.
Breastfeeding is not inherently romantic or good.
Well, what the fuck, I stewed. Science already invented artificial breastmilk; why have we so wholly stigmatized its use? It feels like something close to a conspiracy against women and people with cycles when you start listing the benefits of formula: Parenting can be more equitable when both parents can contribute to feeding; infants who are formula-fed eat less frequently. It is even more galling to find out that many of the oft-stated benefits of breastmilk, including higher IQ and lower rates of obesity, while directionally right, are overblown: In a review of the data, the economist Emily Oster concluded that the differences between formula-fed babies and breastfed babies are in fact very slight. She also argues that it’s difficult to conclude that breastmilk is the sole cause of smarter, healthier, more prosperous babies when women who choose to breastfeed in the United States tend to be better educated, whiter, and wealthier. If breastmilk isn’t actually a magical elixir that makes infants robust and good at standardized testing, then why aren’t parents in the United States really being given a chance to decide what’s best for them and what is best for the baby? Looking back on it all, it feels like a very deft sleight of hand. If you are made to obsess on the issue of whether or not you are able to breastfeed, you are unable to wonder, What are my other options?
Eventually, I stumbled into a Firestone-ish solution for breastfeeding called combination or mixed feeding, a process where you feed your baby both breastmilk and formula — for me, it offers the best of both worlds.
Ironically, the imperative to breastfeed clouds some of the unique and very real pleasures of the process: the way your breasts are suddenly useful and, as a result, just functional parts of your body like your arm or your ear rather than sexy cushions of fat. And the practical satisfaction of knowing what goes into your body is expressed directly into food for an infant. The obsession with breastmilk also limits our ability to see the romance in formula feeding: warming up a bottle on the stove, testing it on a wrist, cradling an infant in the crook of your arm. The mild, chalky smell of the powder as it’s mixed with hot water. The cartoonish way the baby opens its mouth into a waxing crescent as soon as the bottle is in sight. Watching someone else lovingly feed the baby. Breastfeeding is not inherently romantic or good. It can really only become so if freely chosen and given in love. It is, in this way, just like any other form of feeding or being fed.
Wei Tchou writes about food and culture. Her memoir, Little Seed, is a family story and a natural history of the fern.
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