Dairy Queens

There was a huge brouhaha on Crackbook yesterday. It was a gigantic cat fight with women screaming at one another in all caps and accusations of EWWWW!! and GROSS!! and DISGUSTING!!

OK. Maybe it was just actually one or two ladies and there wasn't really a cat fight and the caps lock key was surprisingly silent and maybe I was the only one being disgusting and the other commenters were polite. Sue me.

A friend of mine posted the following:

just heard that there is a restaurant in New York that is serving breast milk cheese. Ummmm...... Uhhhhh....... Seriously!??!?! I'm thinking, NO THANK YOU!!!!
(Dear Karen, Don't shoot me. Kthanxbai!)

I proceeded to reveal, in the comments of Karen's status message, that I once made two batches of blueberry muffins, one with regular cow's milk and one with breast milk I had leftover in the freezer after weaning Bubba and Miss-Miss. And my mom, the Ty-man, and I ate the breast milk muffins. And that I had also tasted my own breast milk. And I once wondered if husbands, when participating in a blind breast milk taste test, could pick out their wife's breast milk amongst the breast milk samples from the wives of their friends.

(That last bit? Came to me late one night. I was bleary-eyed, watching HSN at 3 AM with the J-man latched on. Needless to say, my mind wasn't all there.)

What I'm trying to say is that my mother, my husband, and I survived the consumption of breast milk muffins. We even determined that the breast milk muffins tasted sweeter and were softer than the cow's milk muffins.

And after reading the responses to my admission, I started to wonder.

What is it about anyone over the age of 1 consuming human milk that makes all of us generally freak out and run screaming for the hills?

I really want to know what it is about this that makes us squeamish. Is it the vague sense of cannibalism? Is it that by consuming breast milk, we take away the sexual nature of womens' breasts and acknowledge that they are, fundamentally, mammary glands there to serve a function of nutrition? Or is it the image of women, attached to milking machines, being milked for profit and feeding the masses rather than their own children?

Honestly, we are made to digest human milk much more easily than cow/goat/whatever-animal-you-choose milk and, speaking from experience, human milk tastes rather mild and sweet. Whatever Mama eats is the flavor of the milk. So, rather than grassy/hay-flavored milk, wouldn't you prefer to have PB&J/Godiva chocolate-flavored milk? I would. I suppose I'm in the minority because the thought of consuming a human milk product doesn't disgust me at all.

The Ty-man put it succinctly when, at dinner last night, he posited, How do those same people feel about swallowing?

Well put, Ty-man. Well put.

So, what say all of you? Is drinking breast milk gross or what's the big deal? Would ejaculate be a better protein resource and should we hook men up to...

Oh, Lordy. I went too far, didn't I?

Ignore that last question and answer the first.

Thanks.