Millions of us owe our early development in part to Gail Borden's invention of evaporating milk and the resulting famous concoction that was our sole food for the first months of life:
One can (13 fluid ounces) of evaporated cow's milk, 19 fluid ounces of water and 2 tablespoons of corn syrup.
If we survived this simplistic approach to infant nutrition, then why should we consider breast-feeding to be important?
In the 1700s, wet nurses in Europe were chosen for their milk with such care that special agencies were set up to handle their housing needs. By the 1880s, the era of my grandmother's birth, wet nursing had fallen out of favor, and the Sears catalog was offering milk substitutes including a product called "Ridge's Food for Infants" at 65 cents per bottle.
In the "Roaring '20s," the chances of my mother being breast-fed had slipped to 50 percent. Borden's canned product generally had been accepted as being nutritious, relatively inexpensive and free of bacterial contamination. At the same time, hospitals encouraged changes in infant care that greatly reduced the odds a mother would initiate breast-feeding.
By the time my children were born in the early 1970s, only 22 percent of all American infants were breast-fed at birth.
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