I'm reading The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Polan.  I read another of his books In Defense of Food and decided to find his first one and read it too. In Defense of Food was an
easier read, but what he is saying in this book is pretty profound, but more like a college text.  Nothing about breastfeeding, although I think I will now refer to formula as industrial milk.

But I read this last night and think it fits with what we've been talking about the past few days.pg. 218 "

I couldn't look at their spiraled tails [pigs], which cruised above the earthy mass like conning towers on submarines, without thinking about the fate of pigtails in industrial hog production.  Simply put, there are no pigtails in industrial hog production.  Farmers "dock" or snip off, the tails at birth, a practice that has a certain twisted sense if you follow the logic of industrial efficiency on a hog farm.  Piglets in those CAFOs [concentrated animal feeding operations] are weaned from their mothers ten days after birth (compared with thirteen weeks in nature) because they gain weight faster on their drug-fortified feed than on sow's milk.  But this premature weaning leaves the pigs with a lifelong craving to suck and chew, a need they gratify in confinement by biting the tail of the animal in front of them.  A normal pig would fight off his molester, but a demoralized pig has stopped caring.  "Learned helplessness" is the psychological term, and is not uncommon in CAFOs, where tens of thousands of hogs spend their entire lives ignorant of earth or straw or sunshine, crowded together beneath a metal roof standing on slats suspended over a septic tank.  It's not surprising that an animal as intelligent as a pig gets depressed under these circumstances, and a depressed pig will allow his tail to be chewed on to the point of infection.  

And so on...but it really made me stop and think about babies/toddlers prematurely weaned from breast or bottle, who still have a need to suck.  Is this translated into eating (too  much) or smoking or chewing gum or tobacco or depression?  Which part of the "terrible twos" is our own fault?  

I remember thinking after I read In Defense of Food that we need this guy to write an expose' on the formula industry.  Now I'll write him for sure :-) www.michaelpollan.com 
Pat in SNJ

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