Ben & Jerry’s, please cover your ears. Don’t go changing no matter what PETA asks you to do!! That’s right, B&J have been pleaded upon by the animal rights organization to replace the cow’s milk in their ice cream with… human breast milk. 

Let that sink in for a minute…

PETA sent a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, cofounders of ice cream icon Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc., urging them to replace the cow’s milk in their products with human breast milk. PETA’s request comes in the wake of news reports that a Swiss restaurant owner will begin purchasing breast milk from nursing mothers and substituting breast milk for 75 percent of the cow’s milk in the food he serves.(Uh, is he telling his customers that?) PETA points out that such a move on their part would lessen the suffering of dairy cows and their babies on factory farms and benefit human health at the same time.

Here is PETA’s letter to Ben & Jerry:

September 23, 2008

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, Cofounders
Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc.

Dear Mr. Cohen and Mr. Greenfield,

On behalf of PETA and our more than 2 million members and supporters, I’d like to bring your attention to an innovative new idea from Switzerland that would bring a unique twist to Ben and Jerry’s. Storchen restaurant is set to unveil a menu that includes soups, stews, and sauces made with at least 75 percent breast milk procured from human donors who are paid in exchange for their milk. If Ben and Jerry’s replaced the cow’s milk in its ice cream with breast milk, your customers–and cows–would reap the benefits.

Using cow’s milk for your ice cream is a hazard to your customer’s health. Dairy products have been linked to juvenile diabetes, allergies, constipation, obesity, and prostate and ovarian cancer. The late Dr. Benjamin Spock, America’s leading authority on child care, spoke out against feeding cow’s milk to children, saying it may play a role in anemia, allergies, and juvenile diabetes and in the long term, will set kids up for obesity and heart disease–America’s number one cause of death.

Animals will also benefit from the switch to breast milk. Like all mammals, cows only produce milk during and after pregnancy, so to be able to constantly milk them, cows are forcefully impregnated every nine months. After several years of living in filthy conditions and being forced to produce 10 times more milk than they would naturally, their exhausted bodies are turned into hamburgers or ground up for soup.

And of course, the veal industry could not survive without the dairy industry. Because male calves can’t produce milk, dairy farmers take them from their mothers immediately after birth and sell them to veal farms, where they endure 14 to 17 weeks of torment chained inside a crate so small that they can’t even turn around.

The breast is best! Won’t you give cows and their babies a break and our health a boost by switching from cow’s milk to breast milk in Ben and Jerry’s ice cream? Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Tracy Reiman
Executive Vice President

Now, personally, I’m one for soy milk in my cappuccino, but, my friends, breast milk in my little tub of Cherry Garcia is going too far. PETA, who often do good things-if not in a zealotly, raging laser beam eyeball sort of way– insists that using human milk instead of milk from cows will decrease the suffering of dairy cows. I don’t like to think of the cows suffering just for our lactose-filled pleasure, but I am addicted to dairy. So, I try to combat this by purchasing organic, farm raised dairy products whenever I can. I could see a reasonable request might be to have B&J use soy, rice, or tofu to make their ice creams, but this is just ridiculous.