Re: a mother's milk smelling strongly of garlic according to FOB and 
grandmother even though mother isn't eating garlic.  Baby "doesn't seem to 
mind".  

The mother is producing milk for her baby, not for gramma or dad.  

Years ago in Elkins, West Virginia, home of the International Ramp Festival, 
Augusta Heritage Arts Festival, and Mountain State Forest Festival, a client of 
mine commented some time after the fact about her high intake of ramps and 
her baby daughter's opinion of this.  Ramps grow in forested/shaded areas but 
not in full sun, so can be found growing wild in various places in my home 
state.  I didn't hear of ramps until I was in my twenties and then living in north 
central West Virginia, a particularly mountainous part of the state surrounded 
by ski resorts.  Still haven't tasted one due to their odor and reputed taste  
emitted by those who have feasted in such a manner.  Ramps are harvested in 
the spring, and local ramp festivals offer "Ramp Feeds" serving beans, ham, 
cornbread, and ramps sauteed with potatoes.  The experience of eating a raw 
ramp has been described by a friend of mine as garlic x 16.  The bulb of a ramp 
looks similar to a green onion bulb, and the leaves are wider and flatter than 
that of the green onion/scallion.  

Anyway, a nursing client of mine in the 1990's reported that she loved onions 
and green peppers so much that she had to eat them at least once a day, 
either in a breakfast omelet and/or raw as part of a salad for lunch or and/or 
sauteed in a stir-fry dish for dinner, and her baby had no objections to green 
pepper and onion flavored mamamilk.  Her baby was born in winter, and in the 
spring, ramp season arrived as usual.  The mother loved ramps and ate them.  
On one particular evening for dinner, she enjoyed a "huge plate" of ramps, and 
not long afterward, her baby cried for 4 to 5 hours and refused the breast for 
that length of time.  Mom attributed her daughter's fussiness and breast 
refusal to ramp-flavored mother's milk.  I wouldn't be surprised, since my 
mother likes to reminisce about her days as an elementary education teacher 
in West Virginia public schools.  After she and my father moved to Tucker 
county, an area in which ramps are harvested each spring, it was not unusual 
for school to be cancelled on a Monday because the students' body odor en 
masse a la ramps was more than the teachers could bear. The odor was 
emitted from innocent grade school children who had apparently been 
nourished over the weekend with wild, raw ramps and/or ramps sauteed with 
potatoes, etc.  I experienced an excruciating headache in the late 1970's 
when a community resident brought in a jar of canned ramps to my workplace 
as her annual gift to a coworker.  He opened the jar, inhaled, then happily 
said, "Ahhhhh . . . . " while the rest of us complained mightily.  

Imagine my shock a few years later when I heard Lynn Rosetto Kasper on her 
NPR show, "The Splendid Table," interviewing chef Sally Schneider about using 
ramps in various dishes, saying that restaurants in New York and elsewhere 
were serving ramps as well.  Who knew?!

Finding it hard to believe that there's anything out of kilter with the smell of 
garlic in the milk, whether the mother is ingesting it or not,

Debra Swank, RN IBCLC
Ashburn, Virginia USA


  

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