296 F. Giles
advice, as does the Australian Breastfeeding Association website (Tawla
2013 ). Nevertheless, as Gribble and Hausman argue, ‘Cultural dis-
taste for sharing milk, not evidence-based research, supports these offi-
cial warnings’; and there are risks in ‘all forms of infant feeding’ ( 2012 :
275).
With the growth of HMBANA, and the focus of social marketing
on health benefits, the medicalisation of breastmilk and its potential
for contamination combined to remove it from the realm of a food to
that of a medicine, with all its attendant rarefication (Hausman 2003 ,
2011 ). In Europe during the 1980s, screening protocols were intro-
duced alongside stricter protocols for blood donating, without sig-
nificant disruption to the milk banking networks. One indication of
the more relaxed approach to human milk banking in Europe is that
healthy infants are provided with unpasteurised milk, with pasteuri-
sation only required for premature or sick infants (Shaw and Morgan
2017 ). But as Julie Smith argues, the resistance to acknowledging
human milk as a food product, and its production as labour, contin-
ues to devalue it at the same time that its medical benefits have been
mythologised as virtually magical (Smith 2013 ).
Exclusive Breastfeeding as Exclusionary
Mothering
The combination of a cultural forgetting of breastfeeding practices
throughout the twentieth century and the fear of cross-infection dur-
ing its initial period of revival in the 1980s set the scene for a distrust of
human milk sharing. The scientific focus on milk’s nutritional and bio-
chemical properties has been beneficial in promoting breastfeeding, but
the attendant medicalisation has also resulted in increased surveillance
of the health and lifestyle of lactating mothers and a sense of unease
in relation to milk’s materiality and its embodied relationship to moth-
ers and their offspring. Knowledge of its biochemistry has not been
matched with knowledge of its material properties, with the ‘yuk factor’
attributed to some mothers’ discomfort with breastfeeding, as well as
http://www.ebook3000.com