Way Way TMI Question Warning: Why Not Human Cheese?

Factual Questions
1

Honest to God, this came up tonight in a conversation between Mrs. RickJay and I.

Has anyone ever attempted the manufacture of cheese out of human milk? Logically, it seems to me it’s just a matter of, uh, milking someone, or multiple someones, and then making cheese out of it. I did a Google but could only find links to people asking the same question.

If you were to attempt to make cheese out of human milk, would it be easier or harder? How does human milk differ from cow and goat milk, chemically and nutriotionally speaking? Assuming you had sufficient volumes, would it be superior or inferior cheese-making material?

2

I don’t know the answer, but wanted to share the fact the UncleBeer and I have had a similar conversation. Scary, eh? There used to be a joke site called humancheese.com that said they sold celebrity cheese, but it’s gone now.

3

See “The Basics of Making Cheese”

Above are listed the fat, protein, milk sugar and minerals percentages for various lactating mammals (not humans). Human’s mother’s milk (see quote below) is closest to cow’s milk in overall fat content, but the suprise (to me) is how variable the output is. Some mother’s can feed their children table cream right from their nipple.
Fat and cholesterol are very important components in human milk. In fact, the milk from a healthy mother has about 50 to 60 percent of its energy (kilocalories) as fat.1 The cholesterol in human milk supplies an infant with close to six times the amount most adults consume from their food.

4

Well, if you have four lactating women possibly.

Err… this woman claimed to have made human breast yoghurt. Ahem.

Oh, and I couldn’t find humancheese.com, but I found HumanButter.
Surprisingly little porn. Niche pornograph cottage-industry, anyone?

5

I would think the main reason that we don’t make human cheese is that we would then need people who were constantly producing human milk to sustain the human cheese factory. With cows it wasn’t so hard since you’re trying to get them to produce offspring as fast as possible anyway, but with humans it’d be a bit more difficult. And think about it, who’d really want the job of having their breasts fondled for milk?

6

We had a thread about this recently, and someone who had some experience making cheese pointed out that human milk doesn’t have much protein and what it does have is mostly the wrong kind for cheesemaking. So even if you could sort out the supply problems, you won’t have an easy job of getting the milk to turn into cheese.

7

In a world where women routinely have sex with strangers for money, have the money taken away from them by pimps, and get beat up from time to time, I have no trouble imagining a place with a long row of seats and a great many bored topless women chatting, gossiping and reading “People” magazine while milking nozzles are hooked up to their tits by the hour…

Although the necessity of paying them a living wage would doubtless make the cheese rather expensive.

8

Goat milk is rather high in both the cream content and protein needed for cheese and it takes several gallons of milk to produce less than a pound of cheese.

Extrapolate that as you will.

9

Actually, in dairy production, they produce offspring at a rate which will keep them lactating. You don’t necessarily want calves at the rate they get produced at, and one thing animal breeders and researchers keep trying for is cows that will lactate for a longer time after dropping a calf. Also, we’ve selectively bred dairy cattle to give far more milk than would be required naturally (the average US dairy cow produces over 8 tons/yr) - a solution which cannot be applied to humans without some thorny ethical issues, although envisioning the results may, errrm, titillate some …