Mother's Milk

Arriving back in Switzerland from a sunny holiday abroad I was surprised by several things: the fact that autumn had rapidly advanced across the Zurich region; the fact that financial markets appeared to be in meltdown and the fact that there was just one headline dominating the Swiss newspapers.

It has been a tumultuous week in the banking sector, something that should be a cause for alarm in Switzerland, home to two of the world’s biggest banks. Stock markets have plunged, credit markets are frozen and American banks are folding like a house of cards – literally and figuratively.

On top of all this financial shenanigans, there is the tragic case of contaminated baby milk in China, an escalating scandal in which four children have died and hundreds have become ill through ingestion of baby milk formula allegedly contaminated by unscrupulous farmers and negligent food companies with melamine.

Amid this turmoil, the Swiss German newspapers have doggedly pursued the news, refusing to be sidetracked by such global issues as financial crisis and food scares, sticking instead to the more homely subject of a local restaurateur who has a novel idea for drumming up interest in his cuisine.

A chef in Winterthur announced this week that he wanted to experiment with a new ingredient in the production of his Zurich Geschnetzletes and Soups: namely breast milk. Not merely breaking a taboo but positively crushing it underfoot, the chef told local newspapers that it would be completely natural: “We were all brought up on it,” he said. “Why shouldn’t it still be part of our diets?”

Well – I might suggest one reason here: I was brought up on, among other things, Ribena and weetabix but that alone is not reason enough for me to expect a chef to use them in the preparation of my Wild Ragout.

Of course, he wasn’t expecting the milk to produced by one woman alone: in fact he distributed fliers to women who might be willing to donate. And at the princely sum of 6.50 francs for a four decilitre up of mother nature’s finest, he was certainly willing to fork out more than for standard dairy fare.

Naturally this caused an outcry: of all places, the country in the world with the highest number of cattle per head of population (expect perhaps Argentina), producing gallons and gallons of milk each year, this chef decides that human milk would be a better alternative.

The local health authorities, with typically Byzantine justification, said that while it was not permitted to process milk extracted from a human into food stuffs, it was not forbidden either. Later they decided that the fact that human milk was not listed as a safe food stuff, then the chef would in effect be acting illegally by serving it to customers.

The project was dropped but not before the man’s restaurant, the aptly named Stork in Iberg, was given the best publicity any restaurant has ever received in Switzerland. Food for thought.