We pick up where we left off yesterday: talking shit about the Nestlé Company for killing brown babies.*
*allegedly, because fuck them if they’re gonna sue me too.
Today’s Moment of Science…. A Brief-ish History of Titty Sprinkles Part II: The Nestlé Scandal
One of the first baby formulas developed in the 1860s was an offering from German-Swiss chemist Henri Nestlé. Like many others, it combined dry powdered cow’s milk, sugar, and a form of wheat flour that was easily digestible for tiny tummies. Nestlé’s Farine Lacteé, or ‘milk flour,’ was on the market by the 1870s, and the company is still one of the largest producers of baby formula to this day.
As the company grew it developed some rather impolite habits: buying up access to clean water on the cheap, and scraping profit from every corner of the planet via baby formula sales.
You only need a few things to prepare baby formula safely for a wee human: clean water, sanitized bottles, and the correct ratio of formula to water. If you’re in a part of the world where you can safely drink the local water, your water is safe to make baby formula with straight out of the tap for most infants.
So what do you think happened when Nestlé tried to sell baby formula in a poverty stricken market with, at best, inconsistent access to clean water?
The Nestlé Company didn’t merely dump their product onto a few store shelves in developing countries and scamper off, no. Their sales reps went into hospitals costumed up like nurses to counsel new mothers. To be fair, it wasn’t just Nestlé; this was a common practice in the formula industry at the time. Patients couldn’t tell these ‘milk nurses’ from real ones. I imagine what they told women was only slightly more responsible than “breast milk is best but not really, give your kid this powder to snort like cocaine.”
These new mothers were told formula was better for baby and had no reason to doubt the advice; after all, they heard it from a nurse in a hospital. To get around government crackdowns in Jamaica, milk nurses would get patients’ addresses and visit them at home. In the Philippines they were known to work housing projects, looking for diapers on the clothesline as a sign of a potential customer.
Perhaps most insidiously was their sales tactic of giving out “free” samples. The idea of free samples in an economically disadvantaged part of the world sounds like a perfectly charitable thing to do.
Howthefuckever. Depending on the person, milk supply can dry up in a matter of days. What was presented as a free sample was, in reality, a way to hook the patient on their supply.
This was only the beginning of the problems with formula in the developing world. Nestlé’s instructions for formula preparation explicitly said to wash your hands thoroughly with soap and sterilize bottles by boiling them in a saucepan of clean water beforehand. Which seems at odds with their practice of selling formula to parts of the world where a majority of households at the time had no washing facilities or indoor kitchens.
Even when they did write instructions in the local language, high illiteracy rates prevented the instructions from being of widespread use.
Inevitably, formula fed children died. Sometimes from contamination, sometimes from overly diluted formula. In Nigeria at the time, formula for a three month old could cost 30% of the minimum wage.
In 1974, the British NGO War on Want published The Baby Killer, detailing Nestlé’s more ghoulish work in the developing world. In 1977, several NGOs organized a boycott of the company. In an ensuing senate hearing investigating their marketing practices, Nestlé’s spokesperson Oswald Ballerin was grilled by the late Senator Ted Kennedy.
“Would you agree with me that your product should not be used where there is impure water?” Though Ballerin agreed, when asked if he thought Nestlé bore any responsibility for use in the developing world, he said “How can I be responsible for the water supply?”
Nestlé didn’t sue the original publisher of The Baby Killer. They did however sue for libel a German publisher that re-published it under the name Nestlé tötet Babies, meaning “Nestlé kills babies,” because that could give people the wrong impression. The maker of crunch bars won because they couldn’t be held criminally responsible for killing those babies, but two years of litigation awarded them all of $400 from the defendant, and the judge told them they needed to get their shit together.
It took until the 1980s for the WHO to set some standards for how formula manufacturers operate. No more lavishing bribes- er, “gifts”- on doctors and clinics. No more direct contact between sales reps and patients. No more samples or misleading information to insinuate the powder was better than the tit.
Is Nestlé following the new rules? They sure claim they are. But with some unethical practices continuing to pop up here and there, the Nestle boycott is still going strong after 45 years.
This has been your Moment of Science, suggesting for some light reading, google ‘Nestle’ and ‘water scandal’ and just see what happens.
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Then, there was the Chinese milk scandal. One supplier had a rather unscrupulous manager who diluted milk brought in from farms. To have the milk pass inspection of a basic nitrogen test to determine protein level, he added melamine.
Tens of thousands of infants and children got oxalate kidney stones, tens of thousands requiring dialysis for life.
Needless to say, eventually public health caught on, analyzed samples and well, that manager who started the whole mess was executed.
The milk used in China, as well as some of the already long victimized nations you’ve mentioned.
Of course, the initial impetus for formula development was Queen Victoria, who complained that she felt like an animal nursing her own offspring.
As single male in his 50’s who has never had any children you might think that I would not have much to say on this topic. EXCEPT… My mom was an emergency foster parent for Westchester, NY for many many years. And over the years our household took care of MANY MANY infants. W/O formula, all those kids would have died. FULL.STOP.
Honestly can’t remember what brand(s) were used. All I know is that I learned how to properly feed an infant not long after I was able to feed myself. To this day I am an an excellent baby burper, changer of diapers, and over all admirer of the sheer amazing thing that little humans can be. One little burp and smile can wipe away all the annoyances of being woken up at all odd hours of screams that really only mean three things… feed me. change me. show me I’m loved.
Yeah, I got no problems with babies. I just doubt that I would be able to refrain from going to jail for unaliving them if it was all up to me after they reached a certain age… Amazes me that I survived (; Mom was a hero beyond belief.