No, seriously. Or at least, if it’s a hoax, it’s a hoax being perpetrated on PETA’s own news release page:
This morning, PETA dispatched a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, cofounders of ice cream icon Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc., urging them to replace the cow’s milk in their products with human breast milk. PETA’s request comes in the wake of news reports that a Swiss restaurant owner will begin purchasing breast milk from nursing mothers and substituting breast milk for 75 percent of the cow’s milk in the food he serves. PETA points out to Cohen and Greenfield that such a move on their part would lessen the suffering of dairy cows and their babies on factory farms and benefit human health at the same time.
The Swiss restaurant owner mentioned in the press release is Hans Locher of the Storchen restaurant in Winterthur, and it turns out Swiss health inspectors have already forbidden him to use human milk as a cooking ingredient. I’m going to take a wild guess that the American FDA would react similarly. [Hat tip to james_nicoll]
(Bonus chain of thought: The mention of non-traditional dairy products naturally puts me in mind of the old Green Acres episode in which Mr. Haney was selling beauty cream supposedly made from hamster milk, which got me wondering, at the tender age of six, what hamster-milk cheese would taste like. And a much more recent discussion of artisanal cheeses raised the question of why pig’s milk isn’t used in cheese-making. The Illinois Pork Producers Association has the answer to that one.)