Things change all the time

The last time we saw them together they looked like this

From a health perspective, human breast milk is by far the healthiest thing to give your baby and if you can’t produce enough of it or you aren’t always around and can’t save enough by pumping, it is still good to breast feed sometimes to keep milk production going so your baby gets some actual breast milk.

Formula is important because not everyone can breast feed. Formula is useful because breast feeding and pumping can be painful or a bother and it’s nice to be able to take a break from it every now and then. Formula is good.

But companies have been pushing using baby formula for every baby and pushing it as a complete alternative for people who could also do some breast feeding. They want people to stop breast feeding entirely and become dependent on their product instead, because dependency = profit.

This includes misinformation campaigns to make people doubt the quality of their own breast milk, which is WILD because breast milk is objectively so much better than formula. A lot of that misinformation happened decades ago but its impact still lingers in communities and has changed how people view breast mil and formula.

Breast milk is not even free in the sense of ‘not costing anything.’ Breast milk requires calories, vitamins, nutrition. There’s a reason why even WIC gives breastfeeding parents more nutrition. IDK what it is now, but back in the day as a breastfeeding parent I got carrots, extra milk, and tuna fish, because even government programs which are notorious at underestimating what people actually need to survive, let alone thrive, recognize that breast milk is not by any means free. It doesn’t come out of the ether, it is produced by a body which converts food into other food. Breastfeeding parents need to eat more food and drink more liquid, which means they need more clean and safe liquids to drink, they need more protein, they need more iron, they need more everything, because the process of producing breast milk requires protein and liquid and vitamins to go into the breast milk, and requires protein and liquid to fuel the parent’s body for the process of producing and delivering that milk.

Breast milk is only free if you don’t value the work of breastfeeding parents: the time that it takes to pump or feed, the fact that breastfeeding creates a schedule that a body has to adhere to because the body begins to understand 'I have to produce this much food at this time’, creating an obligation of time from that parent compared to the other. Breast milk is only free if you don’t value that labor, which, like, clearly as a culture we do not.

None of which undoes the fact that promoting formula-feeding over breastfeeding was in fact pushed as the 'civilized’ choice over the past century. Like, yes, there was definitely and still is propaganda that you only breastfed if you were a lower-class person who couldn’t afford the more scientifically-advanced option of formula, that breastfeeding will 'ruin’ your breasts and body, etc. etc. All of that is true.