If you find yourself with a baby to feed and barren titties today… well, not today-today because I’ve seen the news and been to a store, but like ‘in modern times in general’ today…. You have options. Good healthy ones that will fully nourish your infant. But that wasn’t always the case.
The history of attempting to make a substitute for boob juice has been a rocky one. Howthefuckever. When it comes to life saving innovations, few breakthroughs have put up numbers that rival baby formula.
Today’s Moment of Science… A Brief-ish History of Titty Sprinkles.
There are plenty of reasons why a parent might not be able to breastfeed. TL;DR is that it’s none of your fucking business, pass the formula. But milk supply can be naturally low or dry up early. Some life saving medications that pass into breast milk are particularly nasty for tadpole humans. When babies are adopted at birth, and I know there’s confusion for a few clever chucklefucks about how this works, but typically that means their new, overjoyed, doting parents physiologically have no swollen bosom to lend the darling infant a guzzle.
Or, and hear me out, in America we live in a capitalist hellscape where parents don’t get an appropriate amount of time off after they’ve made a human. The expectation we put on these new moms- many of whom are working- to be able to nourish children solely from their teet is preposterous.
But again, not your tits, not your fucking business. *ahem* Where was I? Oh. Tits.
One ancient solution that actually worked was a wet nurse, a lactating woman who would nurse someone else’s child. Documented as early as 4,000 years ago, wet nurses switched from being used when in absolute need to something mothers started requesting out of choice as early as 950 BCE. The field turned into a whole regulated and organized profession because goddamnit, kids gotta eat.
There were complaints about the practice, but very few of them had to do with any notion that one woman’s breast milk was not nutritious for another one’s infant. This had far more to do with the cockamamie ideas of some seventeenth century French obstetrician named Jacques Guillemeau. He thought wet nurses would switch children or pass “imperfections” onto the child, and from the child it could be passed to the (wealthy) parents. A happy, sober, well behaved wet nurse was acceptable when absolutely necessary, but under no circumstances should you ever get a wet nurse with auburn hair. Their temperament fucks with the breast milk. It’s Guillemeau’s law of spicy tits or something.
It bears noting that wet nurses economic situations were somewhere between “disadvantaged” and “fucking enslaved.”
There were early attempts at replacement foods for breast milk. Bad attempts. It varied by region, but a common one was bread soaked in water or cow’s milk supplemented with sugar. Cereal cooked in broth. Various animal milks. Sometimes they’d have a kid latch right onto the animal nipple and I have questions that I don’t necessarily want answers to. This all worked to varying degrees of supporting the tiny coffin industry. In the 19th century after we got a smidge better at food chemistry, we saw the first real baby formulas show up.
Justus Von Liebig created the first formula in 1865 consisting of cow’s milk, wheat and malt flour, and potassium bicarbonate. By 1883, the market for baby formulas had exploded with dozens of brands of infant food in powder form to be added to dairy milk.
But look.
It wasn’t all smooth sailing.
Tiny humans tend to be delicate and a lack of calories is just one hurdle to keeping them alive. Unhygienic bottles before we had a grasp on germ theory, contaminated milk in the era before refrigeration, and nutritional deficiencies with some early formulations were just some in a list of problems. It wasn’t simply “a formula was made and shit worked out.” A formula was made and it was a long goddamn process to get where we are today. Uh, “general times” today.
Then there was that whole giant goddamn scandal with Nestle. Which is a story for tomorrow.
This has been your Moment of Science, reminding you that “well it didn’t kill me” is awful reasoning for why your kids should take your dumbass advice.
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There is ample evidence as well that sheep and goat milk was used to augment breast milk for human infants with reasonable success – augment, not replace. Replacement, well it was disastrous, as humans are neither sheep or goats.
As an infant, I had a severe allergy to cow’s milk, so the new fangled isomil was used. Went from failing to thrive and incessantly vomiting to healthy in no time flat. Later, that allergy apparently was phased out by my body, because I’ve tolerated cow’s milk from tweens to my 60’s. Brief lactose intolerance after my gallbladder was removed, much to doctor’s and my own mystification, as the brush cells that produce lactase are in the intestine and really don’t care about bile.
I’m on the transplant list though, full body transplant. The only problem is, they keep trying to pawn off one with a brain. 😉