Human Cheese

Breast milk cheese made by Chef Daniel Angerer from
his wife's breast milk. Photo: David Angerer via National Post

Intriguing that the Globe and Mail  and National Post both had articles today about cheese made from human milk. They profiled a restauranteur, Daniel Angerer and Miriam Simun, a cheese maker in New York who are making cheese out of human breast milk. Angerer from his wife's breast milk and Simun from women she found on the internet. Woman she found on the internet! That in itself is disturbing.

Sick or Sustainable was the Globe headline. So, what do you think? Is it sick to think that as adults, we are consuming an organic product of a stranger's bodily fluids, namely her breast? Or is it something perfectly logical since the milk products we currently eat/drink are meant for babies of a different species entirely, so why not use the milk that was actually meant for us.

It doesn't help the argument any when Simon is describing her cheeses as "imparting a complex funk, somewhere in between butter, yellow taxi cabs and wafting wavers of street cart smells."
mmmm.. NYC street funk. In addition to the squirm factor, some critics are going as far as likening eating the cheese to cannibalism.

The flip side to that is supporters consider labelling it as vegan and PETA considers it more humane.

Moral debate aside, we can't call ourselves Experimental Foodies if we didn't at least try it once. So, bring it on, I say. If/when a reputable restaurant puts it on their menu, I'd take a gander at it. Purchasing it from a woman who gathers her ingredients from people on the internet, however, is a little too crazy even for an experimentalist.