I remember very clearly, too clearly maybe, my own little breakdown over baby formula. I was in the Barbican, my baby strapped to me, a hot day, that weird exhausted light, and I called my mum. I was standing outside the supermarket, and I called my mum to ask her, to remind me, the reason why I shouldn’t buy the baby formula. Why I should persist with the breastfeeding, why it had to be me – always infinitely always me – who fed the baby, who got up in the night to feed the baby, who walked through London looking for somewhere soft to sit and feed the baby. She asked me what I wanted to hear and I didn’t know – that was the point. I was quite tired and mad, and the whole parenting project seemed to veer from terribly vivid to totally obscured within the same, sometimes, second.
My children eat food now. Well, beans and biscuits. But since the recent reports of how desperate parents are stealing formula milk, the price of which rises wildly, that memory keeps swimming back to me. The cheapest brand has risen by 45% in the last two years.
It already held a confusing place on the supermarket shelves, treated in a similar way to alcohol or tobacco, despite being a product designed exclusively to keep babies alive. Did you know, for example, that it’s illegal to advertise baby formula? It can’t be displayed prominently, like at the checkouts, or in the windows, and shops aren’t allowed to offer deals on it. Did you know, you can’t get reward points on your loyalty card for buying it, even though it’s one of the most expensive products in the supermarket? The packaging must not feature nutritional information, nor can it have a picture of a baby, and labels must contain a “statement of the superiority of breastfeeding” and another that says it should only be used “on the advice of a health worker”.
While these rules were put in place with the very best intentions, the impact of the regulations in the UK makes the lives of parents who aren’t able to breastfeed undoubtedly harder.
When my daughter was born, some combination of a traumatic birth and bad luck meant my milk didn’t come in, so the nurses showed me how to feed her formula with a tiny straw attached to my little finger. The straw cut her mouth. They told us OK, use a cup, but she couldn’t drink, so as a last resort they let us use a bottle – in hospital that week my hands shook with shame and guilt. Formula feeding had been presented to me as a terrible failure, of the body and mind, and formula itself something dangerous. One night I sat in the kitchen, the baby screaming on me, as I tearily weighed up the benefits of feeding her a bottle of formula, which might settle her now but also, possibly, ruin her life forever. I hadn’t slept for days. My hair was made of salami. My mind was soup.
In many supermarkets, baby formula has a security tag, like a bottle of whisky, and when I see that tag I always think of shame itself, clamped to its side. It’s no coincidence that a product shrouded in such guilt and confusion is also at the very centre of a crisis – it’s disproportionately regulated, but has no price cap. It costs a fortune, but is an essential item for millions. People in low-income households can receive Healthy Start vouchers, but their cash value only covers around half the cost of most types of formula. The supermarket becomes an obstacle course, in high winds and sleet.
Alison Thewliss, chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Infant Feeding, is pressing the government to investigate the market because, “Parents are stealing formula from shops, relying on baby banks and formula foraging on Facebook, while profits and marketing spends from the companies has soared.”
Charities are warning that parents living in poverty are resorting to watering down formula or feeding their children unsafe foods because lots of food banks won’t give out formula, the idea being that it might discourage breastfeeding. There’s a grim kind of gatekeeping going on, a sense that mothers must be protected from themselves. And even putting aside the rotten and familiar profiteering by aggressive corporations, people in need are being prevented from getting the milk they need to keep their babies alive.
We do this, don’t we? We stroke with one hand and snatch with the other. We talk earnestly about such things as children’s nutrition and new mothers’ “mental health”, while endorsing or enduring a system that flagrantly mocks them, making people feel like terrible parents if they can’t (or don’t) breastfeed, while removing access to any alternative. Me, I was fine. I had choices, even if it didn’t feel like it at the time. Eventually, I was able to breastfeed, and did so for months, until that day outside the supermarket, on the phone in the sun – was I asking for statistics about child development, my mum asked, or encouragement, or cash? I realised much later, years I think, I just wanted permission.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
