Why am I not surprised that they would have a stockpile in Europe, probably intended for Third World countries? If you don’t know, they’re the company that many people have boycotted, and still do, because of their aggressive pushing of POWDERED formula to discourage breastfeeding - powder that had to be mixed with water they knew darned well was polluted.
First, where exactly would anyone expect supplies of baby formula to come from: a mom and pop shop in Mariupol?
Second, these particular formulas for for babies who are allergic to cow’s milk protein, a critical need in an emergency. They are not in any way a substitute for breastfeeding, but highly complex medicinal formulas that only pharmaceutical firms can provide.
Nestle’s history of pushing baby formula in the 1970s is well known and was not the last such scandal the corporation was involved in. Who wants to take the side of $100 billion global conglomerates? But couldn’t you have checked the facts in the current crisis before posting this?
[Moderating]
This is only tangentially related to food, and not at all to any of the æsthetic or gustatory properties of food, and so is not really a good fit for CS. Moving to IMHO.
I almost put it in the Pit. I realize that the majority of the population does not know about the Nestle’ disaster, nor would they care, whether they have children of their own or not.
It’s just the overall idea of the whole thing.
Would you care to expand on (and link to sources) that explain what Nestle has done (or is doing) wrong that are relevant to the current crisis? All I can find from googling is that Nestle is airlifting supplies from Europe to help alleviate the situation in the U.S.
And why have you ignored @Exapno_Mapcase 's post?
I am trying to figure out the OP.
It is wrong to sell formula to 3rd world nations? Or what? And can we get a cite for something?
This seems to explain the issue:
The issue seems to be with Abbott Laboratories, not Nestle, unless I misread?
Now yeah, Nestle did some unsavory stuff several decades ago. This is well known. Is this a new issue with them?
And from your links, I’m not seeing any apparent wrongdoing on the part of Abbot Labs, either. This appears to be an unforeseen consequence of an “abundance of caution” complete shutdown of the plant. Could we reasonably expect Abbot Labs to have done anything different? What would we be saying if it turned out the infection did originate at the plant and there were more dead babies?
The COVID + war situation is exposing the general fragility of supply chains.
So let be get this straight, women in the ‘Third World’ should not be able to buy formula from Europe so they would be discouraged into breastfeeding, and also they don’t have to risk the polluted water but it’s OK here in the US because our water is not polluted?
Nestle is deplorable for a lot of reasons, including their blatant abuse of Michigan’s water resources for their own profit, but I have no idea what the F the OP is on about.
I can’t give a cite, but I have heard from several sources (Mrs. Geek and other people) that Nestle gives away formula to new mothers in 3rds world countries, but only gives them enough free formula to last until the mother’s milk has dried up. After that, the 3rd world mother is now forced to buy Nestle formula at Nestle prices since she otherwise cannot feed her baby. The criticism is that Nestle’s practices are predatory on mothers that really can’t afford their product.
So the stockpile in Europe would be formula that was originally intended to supply this predatory and morally questionable practice.
Again, no cite, but that should at least give people an idea of what the anger against Nestle is all about. Maybe someone can find out whether this is based on something true or not through googling now that they know what the (alleged) issue is. For all I know it could be fake news that has been spreading around facebook and the like.
As a child in the '70s I overheard some grown ups talking about Nestle and how they were exploiting African women. I put 2 and 2 together and concluded that Nestle had huge farms full of African ladies who were milked daily and that’s where baby formula comes from. It took me years to get rid of that image. But it seems that the truth was even worse.
Here is a link to a respectable site/cite. http://www.babymilkaction.org/nestlefree#:~:text=Nestlé%2C%20the%20maker%20of%20Nescafé,death%20and%20suffering%20of%20infants.
I feel so conflicted about this whole thing. Yes, pushing formula on women who have just delivered in order to trap them is horrific. But at the same time, i also get so angry at smug commenters, usually men, saying “And those women could have just fed their babies themselves, for free, omg!”, as if the only concievable reason a woman would prefer formula to nursing is if she were tricked.
I honestly think the single biggest mistake I made as a new mother was nursing past six weeks, when I went back to work. The cost to my mental and physical health was tremendous: in addition to juggling a challening job and a baby that was a so-so sleeper, I was on the stupid pump two hours a day, and I had to wake up whenever the baby woke. Nursing was a double whammy for me: in addition to costing me hours of sleep (woke to feed the baby: woke up to pump), it was inherently physically draining. Nursing substantially impacted my ability to enjoy my child’s first year and reduced my ability to be the reponsive, attentive mother (and wife, and teacher) I wanted to be. But I stuck with it, because of the relentless messaging that the intangible benefits of breastmilk trumped anything else. I didn’t even consider quitting. Literally never crossed my mind. You don’t quit unless you’re physically incapable, not if you love your child.
So, at least for me, nursing sucked. And so I get real annoyed when people act like there’s literally no reason a woman would want formula other than because she was manipulated by evil marketers (or is selfish/vain) . If clean water isn’t available, then obviously avoiding having to give polluted water to the baby is a major concern and that needs to be made clear. But nursing isn’t a “free” option.
I literally couldn’t produce enough milk for my kids. I pumped during the work day to prevent myself from completely drying up, but without being able to supplement with formula, i would have had to quit the job that was supporting my household. Nursing would have cost me more than $100k per child in today’s wages.
Yeah, nursing isn’t free. Nursing has a large metabolic cost, and a huge time and “being tied down” cost.
That article is apparently from 2014. Someone recently added a couple of tweets from March 17 of this year complaining that Nestle was staying in Russia.
The article does not say that on March 23, Nestle stopped its investments in Russia and pulled all sales of candies and snacks. It is, however, continuing sales of baby foods and donating those profits to charities. That’s a company press release. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the claims or how fully they have been implemented but they’ve been widely reported all over the world.
As I said earlier, the stockpile was not standard baby formula but special medical formula for infants who are allergic to cow’s milk proteins (CMP). It is rare for breastfed babies to develop symptoms this way, but it can happen when the mother has dairy milks or foods. For the most part, CMP formulas replace other kinds of formulas, although an extremely strict no-dairy diet can continue breastfeeding. There are two types of non-CMP formulas but both taste bad so are difficult to accept and are also expensive. They are definitely not what Nestle was doing in the 1970s.
Just for giggles, I went to Nestle and found this page. I started writing about lactose intolerance in the 1980s and quickly widened that to all other reasons people can’t have milk, so I have chapters in my books about CMP. I can say that this is a very good online page that pushes nothing but breastfeeding itself.
Please, all of you, stop making me defend Nestles.
Do you follow The Mary Sue?
When was this? (Just the decade is OK.) I have heard that the La Leche League is not as aggressive as they used to be.
I personally believe that if a baby can get colostrum, that’s more important than, say, nursing for X period of time. And BFing out of guilt benefits nobody.
(I’ll never forget, probably 25 years ago when I was still a 30something, I was at a book club with a group of women who are about the age I am now, and the topic came up. I mentioned that I knew a LOT of women who told me that they gave up breastfeeding, or never did it in the first place, because you just can’t hand the baby over to your husband and say, “Here, you do this.” Those women all looked at me like I had just said “Sieg Heil.”)
I’ve only had one woman tell me that she had to give up breastfeeding because her husband had a bad attitude about it; not surprisingly, it was a baby conceived in order to save the marriage (yeah, like THAT has ever worked) and he would point at her chest out in public and holler, “CHECK OUT DEM HOOTERS!”
Yeah, there were other issues in that marriage.
This post reminds me of a thread on another board, where a woman said that charging $5 for an ounce of human milk from a breast milk bank was highway robbery, and those of us who knew something about the way donated body fluids of all types are collected and processed said it isn’t.
I also know that what you described is not how BMBs work.
On a happier note, this happened a few years ago, and yeah, a lot of people thought the story was fake, but it wasn’t; one human pregnancy in about 700,000 produces four babies, and that’s what happened here. Had they not had the expert care of MSF, chances are, NONE of them would have survived, and I saw in a later story that other nursing mothers shared the duties, which is very generous of them.
Sounds like they could be doing plenty different.