Taking Down the Bottle

By Stephanie Ondrack
Issue 137, July/August 2006

It took a few months of mulling the topic over in the back of my mind before I came up with some reasons. The evidence is soft, even circumstantial, but I think it all adds up. And I concluded that even Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, with its progressive left-coast attitudes, embodies the traits of a bottle-feeding society. In some cases, this is only because we belong to a larger community. But still, if the bottle fits... The incidences of bottle homage are often subtle enough that we do not see them. They operate as a sort of smokescreen. Although doctors, nurses, mothers, and even formula marketers endlessly drone that "breast is best," they have not succeeded in surmounting the societal perception that the bottle is nonetheless okay, that it is really almost as good—indeed, that it is still the social norm. This normalization of the bottle takes place on a variety of levels and through a variety of media. Formula ads trumpet the putative benefits of artificial milk ("closer than ever to breastmilk"), but the real message—that bottle-feeding is the norm—is conveyed through less visible forms of representation. And while the media are discreet and the offenses hard to pinpoint, the message is presented persuasively enough that the many studies proving that breastfeeding is essential for normal human health and that formula can be harmful do not speak as loudly as the cultural cajolings that whisper to parents that bottle-feeding is just fine: Go ahead, you were bottle-fed, and you turned out alright.

Most revealing to me was discovering the depth of my own misconceptions. When my first baby was born and a nurse squeezed colostrum out of my nipple for the first time to encourage the baby to latch on, my jaw dropped in astonishment when I saw that my milk was exuded from not one hole, but many. I knew nothing about this. I'd read books on breastfeeding, taken prenatal classes, and my mother and all my friends had breastfed their babies, but I had always pictured the human nipple as having a single central hole—just like a bottle. That I could have known so little about my own body was possible only in a society in which the bottle has taken precedence over the breast. Such fundamental ignorance can hinder the understanding of breastfeeding even among the most keen—as it did for me.

Words
Perhaps most elusive is the bias embedded in the word breastmilk itself. How did it happen that human milk is denied the propriety of the generic term milk? How did the milk of cows, a completely different species, achieve the honor—and the branding advantage—of milk? Did the dairy board exert its influence? To me, it seems downright suspicious that the word breast be thus highlighted. Where else would milk come from? By definition, all mammals lactate—the root word of mammal is the Latin word mamma, or breast—and possess mammaries for that purpose. We don't include the word breast when we speak of how goats, chimpanzees, bats, or whales feed their young. By calling human milk breastmilk, we draw unnecessary attention to the milk's means of conveyance.

Or, rather, we expose a cultural obsession with the human female breast as sexual object that has almost eclipsed its primary and original role as an organ of nutrition. If we were to restore to human milk its rightful term of just plain milk (and downgrade what we buy in cartons to cow's milk), we might be a step closer to ending the perception that there is anything sexual about a breast while it is nursing a baby, and a step closer to normalizing the way babies are meant to be fed.

It has also been well documented that we use an inverted language to describe the differences between breastfeeding and bottle-feeding. Breastfeeding is the biological norm; instead of talking about "the benefits of breastfeeding," we should be talking about the hazards or risks of failing to breastfeed. Breastfeeding does not increase a child's IQ per se—it is more accurate to say that the absence of breastfeeding prevents mental development from reaching its inherent potential.¹ Human milk continues to nourish, develop, and hone a baby's systems postpartum, just as the placenta did before birth. From this biological perspective, babies expect to be breastfed, and will not achieve their normal projected potential if denied it. When we think of formula as "just fine" and breastmilk as "enhanced," we confuse the norm of tens of thousands of years with a technological convenience less than a century old.

Images
Baby-shower paraphernalia—wrapping paper, gift bags, decorated streamers, cards, e-cards—is lousy with images of baby bottles. Since I began to notice this, I have been hard-pressed to find baby-shower items that are not abundantly festooned with bottles. Amid the heaps of shower bric-a-brac, not a single image of a breast is to be found.