The Milk of Life

No matter what your diet’s like today, we all likely started life
eating the same thing: breast milk, formula milk, or a bit of both.
But both of these products aren’t always easy to come by.
Breastfeeding can be difficult or impossible for some parents, and
formula milk isn’t always safe, affordable, or even available — as
we’re seeing in the US, where formula milk is currently 70 percent
out-of-stock. This episode, we tell the story of how we got here,
and we explore what we should we do to make feeding babies easier
in the future. Along the way, we find out what makes human milk—or
"white blood," as it perhaps should be known—so unique, as well as
why Parisian attitudes to feeding infants in the 1800s made it
known as a city with no children. We've also got the story of when
formula was first invented, the dirty tricks used to market it, and
the competing pressures and changing advice that have swung the
pendulum from "breast is best" to formula and back again. Listen in
for the story behind the news, the tale of our first and most
essential food. We need your help! We’re conducting an audience
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