by Zoë Pollock
Catherine Price reviews Deborah Valenze's Milk: A Global and Local History. The human-on-animal breastfeeding weirds me out the most:
An 18th-century French authority once suggested that new mothers practice suckling newborn puppies, presumably as a gentle way to build up to nursing their own babies. Conversely, in various parts of Europe from the 16th through the 19th century, babies were sometimes nursed directly by animals. The intriguingly titled 1816 German book The Goat as the Best and Most Agreeable Wet-Nurse speaks to this, as does an 18th-century account Valenze found of a hospital in Aix, France:
The cribs are arranged in a large room in 2 ranks. Each goat which comes to feed enters bleating and goes to hunt the infant which has been given it, pushes back the covering with its horns and straddles the crib to give suck to the infant. Since that time they have raised very large numbers in that hospital.
Meghan Rosen has more on human breast-feeding, including this factoid:
A garlicky dinner, for example, predictably changes the taste of human breast milk, and babies tend to like it. One study even found that babies preferred their mother’s garlic-imbued milk to milk that was garlic-free.
The Dish 