PETA’s letter to Ben and Jerry

September 27, 2008

I’ve accentuated the important parts of the letter here:

September 23, 2008

Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, Cofounders
Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc.

Dear Mr. Cohen and Mr. Greenfield,

On behalf of PETA and our more than 2 million members and supporters, I’d like to bring your attention to an innovative new idea from Switzerland that would bring a unique twist to Ben and Jerry’s. Storchen restaurant is set to unveil a menu that includes soups, stews, and sauces made with at least 75 percent breast milk procured from human donors who are paid in exchange for their milk. If Ben and Jerry’s replaced the cow’s milk in its ice cream with breast milk, your customers–and cows–would reap the benefits.

Using cow’s milk for your ice cream is a hazard to your customer’s health. Dairy products have been linked to juvenile diabetes, allergies, constipation, obesity, and prostate and ovarian cancer. The late Dr. Benjamin Spock, America’s leading authority on child care, spoke out against feeding cow’s milk to children, saying it may play a role in anemia, allergies, and juvenile diabetes and in the long term, will set kids up for obesity and heart disease–America’s number one cause of death.

Animals will also benefit from the switch to breast milk.

Like all mammals, cows only produce milk during and after pregnancy, so to be able to constantly milk them, cows are forcefully impregnated every nine months. After several years of living in filthy conditions and being forced to produce 10 times more milk than they would naturally, their exhausted bodies are turned into hamburgers or ground up for soup.

And of course, the veal industry could not survive without the dairy industry. Because male calves can’t produce milk, dairy farmers take them from their mothers immediately after birth and sell them to veal farms, where they endure 14 to17 weeks of torment chained inside a crate so small that they can’t even turn around.

The breast is best! Won’t you give cows and their babies a break and our health a boost by switching from cow’s milk to breast milk in Ben and Jerry’s ice cream? Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Tracy Reiman
Executive Vice President
PETA

And thus you see, the human breastmilk was just a hook. They weren’t being serious. No one was honestly suggesting that B&J’s should hook women up to pumps and use their milk to make ice cream. Get real.

Oh, and PETA wasn’t hurting any women by discussing breastmilk’s nutritional value to human babies. Hello? Remember all those babies in China who DIED because they got cow’s milk instead of breastmilk?

Everyone who missed the point of PETA’s letter and who accused PETA of being sexist for discussing human breastmilk was being intellectually dishonest, anti-animal, and anti-PETA.

Posted by Elaine Vigneault | Filed Under Feminism, Sexuality, animal-rights, veganism