I can’t find a cite at the moment, but I am pretty sure I have heard of something like this among desert dwellers in southern Africa. Certain women of the tribe would be kept fat so that they could provide milk during times of drought.
I’ve always though that if a child is old enough that they could remember breastfeeding when the reached adulthood, maybe the child should not be breastfeeding.
I suppose the other problem with using women to produce milk is that they have not been bred, like goats or cows, for the best configuration to be milked. Unfortunately, society is going in the wrong direction on this, since silicone implants don’t help with milk production, and nobody is selecting for easily manually milkable nipples. There are breast pumps, though. I wonder if they make electric/vaccuum ones…
Thank you for your opinion. Given the rest of your post, I’ll be sure to give it all the weight it merits.
Goats and cows weren’t bred to have udders. They evolved from animals (cows from aurochs and goats from, erm, wild goats) that already had udders. Good milk producers were selected for, sure, but the basic anatomical set up was not. They were domesticated because they were already the ideal shape.
Most people with silicone implants can successfully breast feed. They don’t help, but with modern surgical techniques and a good surgeon, they tend not to hinder, either.
And silicone implants are not an inheritable trait. If your mother’s bad boob job left her unable to breastfeed, that doesn’t mean you can’t breastfeed your infant.
Well, yes, this part is true.
Am I missing a joke here? Most breast pumps are electric vacuum ones. There are manual vacuum ones, but they’re only used for occasional pumping. If you pump more than once a day, you get an electric, preferably a double pump that can do both breasts at once.
I am unaware of any breast pump that doesn’t work by vacuum.
Compare a modern “Holstein” with the traditional cow of that sort. In the last century, intense breeding has produced a cow much larger and udders 2 or 3 times larger, so it produces significantly more milk. This of course is all milk gland - adding volume with silicone inserts does not increase milk production, it simply fools those desiring to select for the trait. (A common male fantasy these days, if mens’ magazines are to be believed).
OK, I am throughly unfamiliar with the whole field of lactation with or without oral assistance. The only breast-pump I recall seeing was one on the news (or was it a comedy movie?) that was hand-pumped. So we have reached the stage where they function like at a modern dairy farm, there are just not any (I hope) designed to milk a whole herd of women at once… 
Seriously, breastfeeding is a healthy and natural practice. Just, at a certain age, it is time to let go the things of a child…
How much milk can a woman produce at a sitting, and how much in a 24-hr period? I have been living in Ecuador for some years, married to an Ecuadorian girl who routinely produces a liter from each breast at a sitting, although 4 doctors in the last 6 years have told me that is not possible (I only asked them, without mentioning my wife). We have 3 children—a boy 6, another who is 5, and a girl 3—who were all breast fed and still are. Peasant, indigenous women here are not tall and do have big breasts. I asked my wife if her sisters (2) and mother had/have produced similarly, and she seemed astonished or confused by the question, but said yes, that it is common among all the women she has known. I am also wondering if its ethnicity or what that apparently makes them so strikingly different than European and North American women. For prodigious nursing they don’t appear to suffer nutritionally in advanced age. When she visits family an leaves one or two of our older children with me, they help themselves to my wife’s saved milk from the fridge or freezer (we also use her milk in place of cow’s milk for everything that comes from the kitchen).
Anecdotal, admittedly second-hand: a friend of mine had adopted kids. He swore his wife had spontaneously begun lactating when one couldn’t handle formula.
“I have nipples, Greg. Can you milk me?” [/Jack Byrnes]
How are you measuring the liter? Is this when she’s pumping milk? Or are you weighing a baby/child who is nursing?
A liter sounds like a lot. A whole lot. A newborn rarely takes more than 100mL at once. A two month old may take 200mL. The general rule of thumb for pumping moms is that you take the baby’s weight in pounds, multiply by 2.5, and that’s how many ounces the child will likely take in 24 hours. So…if I haven’t forgotten everything I know about conversion factors, in metric you’d multiply the baby’s weight in kg by 163, and the result is how many mL of milk he’s likely to need.
So a baby is near 15 pounds (~7 kg) before he requires a liter of milk in a whole day. He’d be in third grade by the time he needed a liter per feeding!
I’m not going to say it’s impossible - there are women, as mentioned earlier in the thread, who are just super duper lactators. Theoretically, if you keep stimulating the nipples, you’ll make more and more milk. I don’t know if there’s a limit to that, beyond the speed at which milk ducts can make more milk. I just wonder what the situation is that would create that much milk.
There was one (white, European descent) woman in my Lactation for Moms of Preemies class who was very confused by the directions the hospital gave us.
“I don’t understand…it says, ‘pump 2 minutes past the end of the flow of milk.’ What does that mean?”
The lactation consultant said, “Well, when the milk stops, pump for two more minutes. That will stimulate your breasts to make more milk next time.”
“But…what do you mean, stops? It doesn’t stop.” She’d pumped for 45 minutes, waiting for her milk flow to stop, and it never did. (Most women drain a breast in about 20 minutes, give or take.)
I tried not to hate her too much, as I struggled to make even 50 mL at a time. 
Large breast size is not an indicator of good milk production. In fact, for complex hormonal and physical reasons, very large breasted women (like myself) tend to have more trouble producing milk than smaller women.
If I ever hear, “What? How could YOU not be making enough milk?! They’re huge!” again, noses will be punched.
As far as how much milk a woman can produce, the example that comes to my mind is the Chinese policewoman & mother who kept at one point nine babies fed after a major earthquake.
I also have this problem… I am 37 almost 38 and my daughter is almost 22. I still have leaking of breast milk.
My hubby also has noticed and so have i. I have had all tests done and nothing seems to be wrong. Any ideas?..
There’s quite a long list of things that can cause women to produce nipple discharge (that may or may not look like milk) when they’re not breastfeeding. The list includes common things like birth control pills or other medications. It also includes benign (not-cancer) tumors in the breast tissue or in the brain. But of course, it can also be a sign of cancer, so it’s always important to get it checked out by a doctor. I’m glad to hear you’ve done that.
Since nothing seems to be wrong, it’s likely got to do with hormonal fluctuations during your menstrual cycle, and should stop when you enter menopause.
If it ever changes in appearance or quantity, go back to get it checked out again, though. Just because you have harmless leaking now doesn’t mean you can’t get cancer on top of it.
The interesting Thing is, that for humans with the right gene Mutation (mostly Europeans), if they Keep drinking milk (cows milk usually) after breastfeeding stops, they Keep producing lactase.
Though even there is a wide spread, and not all oler Europeans can drink milk without Problems.
However, as the genetic-Asian Mongols also did, even without having the Enzyme, humans can still use milk by curdling it into cheese (with herbs or from calves stomach) or letting the milk ferment into light alcoholic drink. Kumis - Wikipedia
So letting dairy animals use the grass humans can’t eat is useful even for lactose-intolerant humans.
I know this post is several years old, but since the zombie has been poked, I want to address what has got to be an Urban Legend. You need fluid to produce milk. If there is water to give a woman to make milk, then just give it to everyone.
I have been a nursing mother, and breastfeeding makes you thirsty. Whenever I sat down to nurse my son, I always made sure I had a glass of water to replace the fluid I was losing. At first I wasn’t careful about this, and didn’t understand why I was so thirsty all the time. All those wet diapers he was producing-- that had to go into me first.
When the boychik was about 14 months, I caught a stomach virus (from him) and couldn’t even keep down water. My husband went out and got him some Pediasure, and gave it to him from a bottle when he wanted to nurse, because I was so dehydrated, I was afraid to nurse him. It lasted about 16 hours. 24, and I would have gone to the hospital.
Someone else already pointed out that there’s no use in feeding women to get them to produce milk except for infants. If you have food, you give it to the adults. If you don’t, women can’t produce milk-- a woman with an infant and no food might produce milk for a few days, but that all comes from her own bodily resources, it’s not free. Something I’d like to pound into Steinbeck’s head.
Lactose-intolerant humans are usually intolerant only to cow’s milk, not goat’s milk. I don’t know why. But it’s the reason that goat and lamb cheese are so popular in the Mediterranean, because that’s a region where people don’t tend to have the lactase gene.
Anyway, when I was a teenager (1980s) I babysat a baby who was adopted, and happened to be both lactose-intolerant and allergic to soy, so her parents couldn’t buy
formula off the shelves. When she was first diagnosed, she was on donor breastmilk for a few weeks, then on elemental formula for the next six months, which the parents had shipped to them every week, and which thankfully their insurance paid for. When she turned six months, they started making their own formula with goat’s milk, water, Karo syrup, and a vitamin supplement they got with a prescription. She was also eating some foods by then, so she got a lot of vitamins that way.
I don’t know if she ever could drink cow’s milk, or if she outgrew the allergy to soy, but when she was three, which was about when I stopped babysitting for them (I finished high school), they still had goat’s milk in the fridge.
Back in the day, goat’s milk was fed to babies who weren’t breast-fed. My maternal grandfather kept goats during the Depression for this reason. It’s closer to human milk than cow’s milk is; we use cow’s milk and derivatives because it’s cheaper and easier to obtain.