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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