Today I came across this article on a human cheese event. Not metaphoric cheese like a cheesy person who tells cheesy jokes a-ha-ha but actual cheese made from human (breast) milk. I'm intrigued by the slant that the event has taken, portraying it as a kind an intellectual edible art exhibit. It takes some of the unsettlingness out of, well, eating something that came from a human. A consenting human, that is, and one who is still alive. This is something that evangelistic vegans would promote, as it does not mistreat animals.
To be completely logical about all this, there shouldn't be anything cringe-inducing about this at all. Babies drink breast milk and are able to take in their mother's antibodies that way; doctors encourage breastfeeding over formula. And women may still lactate past the point when they stop breastfeeding, and it's to our advantage to get that woman's consent to use her breast milk. If you stop to think about it, it's a little weird that we drink the milk of other species of animals. But it's one thing to pump milk out of a cow and another thing to get it out of a human, a much more complex mammal (no offense to any cows who might be reading this). There are regulations as to what a dairy cow eats, but with humans... I mean, women who have just given birth are probably on carefully controlled diets as well, but there's still so much variability between one mother and the next... but according to that article it seems as though a lot of work has been put into producing the milk that was used to make the cheese. I guess I'll just have to wait to make a more informed decision and see if other humans build up a taste-- literally and figuratively-- for human cheese.
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