The Politics of Breastfeeding: When Breasts Are Bad for Business »

As revealing as Freakonomics, shocking as Fast Food Nation and thought provoking as No Logo, The Politics of Breastfeeding exposes infant feeding as one of the most important public health issues of our time.

Every thirty seconds a baby dies from infections due to a lack of breastfeeding and the use of bottles, artificial milks and other risky products. In her powerful book Gabrielle Palmer describes how big business uses subtle techniques to pressure parents to use alternatives to breastmilk. The infant feeding product companies' thirst for profit systematically undermines mothers' confidence in their ability to breastfeed their babies.

An essential and inspirational eye-opener, The Politics of Breastfeeding challenges our complacency about how we feed our children and radically reappraises a subject which concerns not only mothers, but everyone: man or woman, parent or childless, old or young.

preface to the third edition vii

1 why breastfeeding is political 1

2 the right to call ourselves mammals: the importance of biology 11

3 how breastfeeding works - and how it was damaged 19

4 beauty, books and breasts 33

5 a taste of infant feeding 46

6 it's not just the milk that counts 80

7 your generous donations could do more harm than good 91

8 hiv and breastfeeding 98

9 life, death and birth 113

10 population, fertility and sex 127

11 from the stone age to steam engines: a gallop through history 154

12 other women's babies: wet nursing 182

13 the industrial revolution in britain: the era of progress? 191

14 markets are not created by god 212

15 the lure of the global market 238

16 what is the code? 260

17 power struggles 279

18 dying for the code 289

19 documents and declarations 309

20 work, economics and the value of mothering 319

21 ecology, waste and greed 345

epilogue 361

acknowledgments 364

abbreviations and explanation of terms 365

appendix 1 the global strategy summary 367

appendix 2 the innocenti declaration 2005 368

appendix 3 the ten steps 372

appendix 4 section from the convention on the rights of the child 373

appendix 5 millennium development goals 374

appendix 6 mishaps, recalls and contaminants 375

appendix 7 infant feeding definitions 376

appendix 8 cedaw 377

useful addresses 378

references and notes 382

index 416