In the Devil's Garden: A Sinful History of Forbidden Food (16 page)

Thou Shalt Not Eat Thy Mother

It was once the premiere dining spot on the planet. Friendly service. Convenient location. Great view. Fresh, hot food. And the price—talk about cheap! Mother’s milk, straight from her breast, was the original blue plate special. Now veering toward extinction. Despite international campaigns to preserve humanity’s first drinking straw, breast-feeding has been on a fifty-year decline. Americans were once assured two years a-suckle, but today a mere quarter of them have the pleasure, and then for only a few months. Similar declines are also occurring in many parts of Asia and Africa. This turning of the universal food into a near taboo has been blamed on everything from the spread of colonial Puritanism to the entry of mothers into the workforce, but most scholars agree that the predominant reason is the greed of a small group of businessmen who promote a reconstituted milklike product as a convenient replacement. “With millions of dollars’ worth of baby formula sold each year,” writes scholar Marilyn Yalom in her
History of the Breast
, “the growth of bottle feeding can be attributed sheerly to the profits involved . . . and their promotion by both the industry and the medical profession.”

The cumulative result is comparable to the Holocaust. World health organizations estimate that 1.5 million babies die unnecessarily each year because they are nursed with baby formula instead of breast milk. These deaths are not the fault of the formula product itself, but stem from the unclean water used to reconstitute the stuff in some areas of the world. But countries with relatively clean water also suffer because bottle-fed children everywhere are more likely to be obese, score lower on IQ tests, and suffer serious allergies. Bottle-feeding is also sometimes associated with learning disorders. The United States alone is thought to spend between $2 billion and $4 billion a year fighting diseases connected to bottle feeding.

Baby formulas were originally created to help mothers who could neither breast-feed nor afford a human milk nurse, and they were doubtless an improvement on the practice of nursing babies on donkey’s milk. It quickly grew into a small industry with over twenty prefab brands on the market by the late 1800s, all emphasizing convenience and promoting the idea that a woman’s breast was unhygienic. This notion, of course, is pure nonsense—a woman’s nipple naturally exudes an antiseptic liquid—but it caught on in an era fraught with Puritan ethics and a love of modernity. The formulas’ negative health effects were at first too subtle to measure, and so it wasn’t until the companies began peddling their product in countries where the water was unsafe that obvious problems started popping up. The manufacturers could hardly have been unaware of the impending disaster they created. No matter—with money to be made, they flooded the areas with advertising. According to the book
Milk, Money, and Madness
, during August 1974 there were over 250 ads for baby formula in the tiny West African country of Sierra Leone alone. International agencies and corporations gave free samples of baby formula to hospitals in countries where they knew it should not be used, and pictures portraying healthy bottle-fed babies lined doctors’ waiting rooms.

The most revolting marketing device was the hiring of women dressed as nurses who visited hospitals to urge new mothers to use a particular formula. According to one study, 87 percent of Nigerian mothers stopped breast-feeding because of visits from these so-called “milk nurses.” Pranks like this led to the famous worldwide boycott of Nestlé products during the 1970s. When Nestlé sued a group for publishing a book titled
Nestlé Kills Babies
, it took the mega-corporation three trials to win, only to then be chastised by the judge for “dangerous and life-destroying [activities].”

The major baby formula manufacturers have since voluntarily signed an agreement to abide by restrictions akin to the ones imposed on cigarette and liquor manufacturers. This has moderated the most egregious abuses suffered, but many companies have just become more subtle in their marketing. Some now mail American mothers redeemable checks for up to $50 to purchase their products. Others send cases of formula free of charge. These “gifts” are timed to arrive as soon as possible after the mother has given birth. “It’s a common practice,” said Deborah Myers of the mother-baby program at Kaiser Hospital of Portland, Oregon, “and sends out an unfortunate message to new mothers when they are sleep deprived and most vulnerable to suggestion.” Company officials say they send samples only to mothers who specifically ask for them; their customer service operators, however, told me “they use marketing lists all the time.” The practice of encouraging mothers to take a break from breast nursing in the early stages is particularly deceptive because when she does her breasts stop producing milk, making it more difficult to resume, and her child loses the ability to latch on to the nipple. This essentially addicts her and her baby to formula.

Strangely enough, members of the $8-billion-a-year baby-formula business seem reluctant to concede that they have, at times, effectively tried to replace the maternal breast. Repeated requests for comments from various companies have been ignored, save a sole Nestlé representative who said that they vigorously abide by all voluntary labeling and marketing rules. Not that anyone’s suggesting the industry wants to harm children or denies that formula sometimes saves lives. It’s a question of marketing gone amok. Companies now put a label on their products stating that breast milk is superior to baby formula; some also suggest that the customer not prepare the formula with water out of the communal toilet. In 1999 breast-feeding in America increased ever so slightly for the first time in fifty years, and the country’s president, Bill Clinton, finally made it legal to nurse children publicly on federal property. Mothers in the British government, however, have not fared as well. Members of Parliament were recently refused the right to nurse their babies in government chambers because Parliamentary rules forbid both refreshments and visitors. It appears breast-feeding “visiting” infants violated both regulations.

Got Milk?

Mother’s milk may be the universal food, but that other stuff, the coagulated excretions of mammals, is most definitely not. An estimated 50 percent of the world have serious problems digesting cow’s milk because of a complex sugar—called lactose— contained in all milk. Practically the only real true-blue milk drinkers appear to be the white boys from northern Europe who are thought to have learned the habit, in conjunction with their freaky skin color, some ten thousand years ago. Their ability to digest milk was developed to compensate for a lack of calcium when weather conditions eliminated many dark green plants in the north. According to scholar Marvin Harris, their fairer skin developed at the same time because it created a chemical reaction with sunlight, which facilitated the digestion of the dreck they sucked out of the pets’ teats. All quite barbarous, according to Greek historian Herodotus, who condemned the northerners for “sow(ing) no crops . . . and moreover, they are drinkers of milk!” Even the cow-loving Hindus have trouble digesting milk, which is why, with the exception of lactose-tolerant Northern Indians, you will find so much more yogurt or butter than milk in their diet—the fermentation that produces yogurt and cheese breaks down lactose into simpler sugars that are easily digested. None of this is relevant to human breast milk, which is entirely different from cow’s milk.

American Pigs

Haiti’s last pig died on June 21, 1983. An American scientist killed it. There’s no way of knowing what the Ph.D. thought as he put the bullet into the animal’s brain. He or she probably thought of it as a favor to the Haitians. The island’s pigs were supposed to be infected by a deadly disease. Besides, the good ol’ U.S. of A. had promised that once all those dirty little black pigs were dead, they’d soon be replaced with nice white American ones. So what was all the fuss about?

The official reason for the extermination of Haiti’s beloved
cochon-planche
was to stop African Swine Fever from spreading to the continental United States. The disease had first appeared in Haiti’s neighbor, the Dominican Republic, in 1978, and soon a very small number of Haitian animals had tested positive. But although Swine Fever is normally 99 percent fatal to pigs (it doesn’t affect humans), the Haitian subspecies appeared to have developed an immunity to the bug. Very few animals actually died, and by the time the American-sponsored eradication program began three years later, the disease had disappeared. Notwithstanding this—or the voracious objections of the Haitian peasantry—Washington went ahead and spent $23 million for an army of pig-hunting helicopters to ensure that the Haitian pig joined the pterodactyls among the annals of the extinct.

This is not the first time the Americans have tried to eliminate a species from the face of the Earth. During the 1800s they tried to drive the American buffalo to extinction as part of a campaign to destroy the Native American cultures that were hindering white America’s economic plans. The stated intent of the Haitian policy was, as we read, different. But the results were remarkably similar.

The vast majority of Haitians in the early 1980s were subsistence farmers with an annual income of about $130. The pigs were the “master component of the Haitian peasant production system,” according to Haitian sociologist Jean-Jacques Honorat, and helped make the farmers’ poor but independent lifestyle possible. The animals’ scavenger diet cost the farmer nothing, and the money earned by sale of their meat provided cash for necessities like school uniforms and medicine. U.S. officials understood the pig’s importance. That’s why they promised to replace every scroungy little Haitian pig with a brand-new superdeluxe American model. And what a pig it was! The American
über-schweins
were three times the size of their Haitian relatives and bred to produce the best-tasting, leanest bacon on the planet. But once all the Haitian pigs were dead, the Yanks decided that only farmers with enough money to pay for a special water system and concrete floors would be given replacement animals. Luxuries like these, however, were too expensive for most Haitian people to put in their homes, much less in their pigsties. The Haitian pigs had survived off garbage and insects and excrement, thus doubling as an outhouse on legs and an insecticide that kept the farmer’s lands free of pests. The American beasts turned up their nose at anything less than a special vitamin-enriched feed that cost about $90 a year, more than half of the average peasant’s annual income.

The result was predictable (in fact, the peasant farmers
had
predicted it). Relatively few pigs were actually handed out by the Americans. Those that were failed to survive because no one could afford the water-mist system the animals needed to survive in the heat. When school attendance dropped 25 percent because of the absent pig money, people tried to bring back the old black pigs. But the rabidly anti-Communist Haitian right-wing government had both pigs and their owners executed as Communists. The same officials, who were supposed to control prices for the American pig feed, then created shortages so they could enhance their profits. The peasants were soon locked out of the swine-breeding business, and ten years after the death of the last Haitian pig, almost all of them had been forced to sell their ancestral lands to make ends meet. Even one of the American officials involved with the program reportedly admitted it had been a tragic mistake.

Perhaps
mistake
is misleading. It turns out that a year before the Americans had started pushing to exterminate the black pigs, their friends at the World Bank had been pressuring the Haitian government to shift their island’s economic focus from subsistence farming to growing crops for export. The idea was for corporations to take over the peasants’ farms and grow coffee and flowers, while the farmers moved to the cities to become splendidly desperate factory workers creating cheap goods for North American consumers. The peasants, however, had held their noses at the idea—Haiti is home to the first successful slave rebellion in the Western Hemisphere and the area’s first free black nation. So the idea of ending up on some white boy’s corporate plantation went against their grain. The World Bank’s plan, in fact, was going nowhere until the Yanks wiped out the pigs and “accidentally” destroyed the peasant economy. This forced farmers to sell off their family plots, which multinationals grabbed up at bargain prices. Within a decade Haiti had switched from subsistence to an export economy. Staple food production decreased by 30 percent, and the urban population doubled. Some Haitians are still saying the pigs were killed to force them to work in American factories for $1 a day. Then again, maybe it was the ghosts of the slave owners taking a long-delayed revenge: Haiti’s 1804 slave revolution began with a voodoo ceremony that climaxed in the drinking of a pig’s blood.