People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is asking the ice cream maker to begin using breast milk in its products instead of cow’s milk, saying it would reduce the suffering of cows and calves and give ice cream lovers a healthier product.
“If Ben and Jerry’s replaced the cow’s milk in its ice cream with breast milk, your customers - and cows - would reap the benefits,” wrote Tracy Reiman, executive vice president of the animal rights advocacy group. She said dairy products have been linked to juvenile diabetes, allergies and obesity.
I love me some ice cream but I don’t think breast milk ice cream is the answer, do you?
I have to respond to this, because I have a child with type 1 diabetes - or what used to be called juvenile diabetes.
I would love to see a study that proved a correlation to type 1 and dairy products. I personally think it’s a load of hooey. There are enough misconceptions about type 1: we don’t need these crazy people to create more.
I think there’s always room for two threads about breast milk and the ice cream to be made from it on the Dope. Heck, why not breast milk cheese, breast milk yogurt, or other dairy products? Maybe we should start a crusade to impregnate women so we can stop mistreating cows?
You know the old saying, “There is plenty of room for all gods creatures, right next to the mashed potatoes” ?
I always thought PETA stood for People Eating Tasty Animals.
It seems I was wrong. It really stands for (Poorly Educated Teen Activists) http://peta-sucks.com/smf/
Who knew?
I’d love for a PETA person to defend this position.
Not unless they always have been. This is par for the course, in my experience with PETA. The first I ever remember hearing about them was back around the mid/late '90s they wanted to put (IIRC) pictures of dead, bloody, butchered animals in (IIRC) Burger King kids meals.
What struck me as odd in PETA’s press release (well, what struck me as the most odd) was the statement about have to keep cows in a perpetual breeding cycle to continue milk production. Milkproduction.com agrees with this, but says for optimal milk production a cow should be having a calf once every year, rather than the nine months stated by PETA. Apparently, cows, like humans, will continue to produce milk so long as something is milking them. I’m curious if there are similar issues with human milk production. The internet loves a good six year old who still breast feeds story, but I wonder if the mom’s in those stories would have optimal milk production if they were more regularly reproducing.
Hmmmph…the more I think about this plan of PETA’s, the poorer thought out it is. This isn’t particularly shocking, given the source.
You know, they actually do make one good point: Why is it considered bizarre for adults to drink human milk (from our own species), but we don’t blink at drinking the stuff that comes out of cows?
If they actually did make human milk based iced cream, I’d definitely try it out!
I bet most mothers have tasted their own, either deliberately or because sometimes it splashes and the nearest cloth is over…there…and it’s quicker just to lick it.
Tastes like melted ice cream, actually. Very sweet, far sweeter than cow’s milk.
