Human Breast Milk Ice Cream


The People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals have asked Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield to replace cow's milk in their Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream with harvested human breast milk.

Realistically, the idea of using human breast milk in a commercial dairy (?) product is likely unworkable. To begin, there's a legal hurdle since current food and drug laws don't address the commercial production and sale of human products for consumption. Laws need to be created or existing laws need to be amended.

There also would be a problem obtaining sufficient quantities of human breast milk to justify the construction and operation of a human breast milk ice cream production facility. Literally, thousands of post-partum women would have to interrupt their routines to express milk several times daily to keep any plant operating. Of course, then there's the problem of gathering the human breast milk from a multitude of locations and transporting it to the production facility.

All the while, some assurance would also need to be provided, through sampling and testing, that women were not negligently or intentionally contaminating the milk by ingesting harmful substances.

Most important, however, it's believed that the cost of surmounting all the impediments to placing human breast milk ice cream on store shelves will be outrageously expensive. As a consequence, to make the idea a viable business venture would dictate that the product be priced somewhere above the stratosphere. Even if people could get past the ick-and-eww-factor, they probably could never afford to buy it.