The Right Books

In Tanzania a vociferous band of activists is currently waging a campaign for the recognition of breast feeding as a distinctively Tanzanian custom, as circumcision was for the ancient Jews or burning bras for modern American feminists. At UNICEF, the World Health Organization (WHO), the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), Ms. magazine, and the U.S. Congress, they believe that “breast is best” and that infant formulas are a sort of poisonous draught concocted and marketed by multinational food corporations in their unremitting effort to dominate international economies and infect the world with the carcinogenic cells of capitalism and technology. Around this controversy has swirled, over the past decade, a flood of indignation, misinformation, and blurry blueprints for a world reordered that is comparable, almost, to the flood that in Marx’s heyday churned behind the forbidding portals of the British Museum. Out of the Mouths of Babes: The Infant Formula Controversy (Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio 43403; $6.95), by Fred D. Miller Jr., is an evenhanded study that does not shrink from choosing sides in its conclusion.

The infant-formula controversy goes back to the late Forties; among the first critics were Derrick B. Jelliffe—currently professor of Public Health at UCLA, formerly director of the Caribbean Food and Nutrition Institute in Jamaica—and his wife, Patrice, who charged that unscrupulous practices were responsible for a million infant deaths a year. In 1974 Mike Muller published The Baby Killers, which blamed high infant mortality in Chile on the multinationals; the Consumers Union sponsored a sympathetic report, as did the Program in International Nutrition at Cornell; and in 1978 Bill Moyers made a documentary for CBS purporting to be an exposé of unethical company practices. Stealing a leaf from the ICCR’s 1974 action taken in affiliation with the World Council of Churches, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations abetted numerous shareholder resolutions filed against the corporations that led, indirectly but cumulatively, to a boycott of Nestlé; to a 118 to 1 vote at the World Health Organization’s annual meeting (the sole dissenter being the U.S.) in favor of adopting an International Code of Marketing of Breast Milk Substitutes, stringently curtailing corporate efforts to advertise and market infant formulas overseas; and, in 1981, to a joint resolution by Congress entitled Support of Implementation of WHO Voluntary Code on Infant Formula. The roster of sympathizers includes Ralph Nader, César Chavez, Gloria Steinem, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and Edward Kennedy.

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In Tanzania a vociferous band of activists is currently waging a campaign for the recognition of breast feeding as a distinctively Tanzanian custom, as circumcision was for the ancient Jews or burning bras for modern American feminists. At UNICEF, the World Health Organization (WHO), the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility (ICCR), Ms. magazine, and the U.S. Congress, they believe that “breast is best” and that infant formulas are a sort of poisonous draught concocted and marketed by multinational food corporations in their unremitting effort to dominate international economies and infect the world with the carcinogenic cells of capitalism and technology. Around this controversy has swirled, over the past decade, a flood of indignation, misinformation, and blurry blueprints for a world reordered that is comparable, almost, to the flood that in Marx’s heyday churned behind the forbidding portals of the British Museum. Out of the Mouths of Babes: The Infant Formula Controversy (Social Philosophy and Policy Center, Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio 43403; $6.95), by Fred D. Miller Jr., is an evenhanded study that does not shrink from choosing sides in its conclusion.

The infant-formula controversy goes back to the late Forties; among the first critics were Derrick B. Jelliffe—currently professor of Public Health at UCLA, formerly director of the Caribbean Food and Nutrition Institute in Jamaica—and his wife, Patrice, who charged that unscrupulous practices were responsible for a million infant deaths a year. In 1974 Mike Muller published The Baby Killers, which blamed high infant mortality in Chile on the multinationals; the Consumers Union sponsored a sympathetic report, as did the Program in International Nutrition at Cornell; and in 1978 Bill Moyers made a documentary for CBS purporting to be an exposé of unethical company practices. Stealing a leaf from the ICCR’s 1974 action taken in affiliation with the World Council of Churches, the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations abetted numerous shareholder resolutions filed against the corporations that led, indirectly but cumulatively, to a boycott of Nestlé; to a 118 to 1 vote at the World Health Organization’s annual meeting (the sole dissenter being the U.S.) in favor of adopting an International Code of Marketing of Breast Milk Substitutes, stringently curtailing corporate efforts to advertise and market infant formulas overseas; and, in 1981, to a joint resolution by Congress entitled Support of Implementation of WHO Voluntary Code on Infant Formula. The roster of sympathizers includes Ralph Nader, César Chavez, Gloria Steinem, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and Edward Kennedy.