In the 70's, breast feeding was taking
off (again) in the U.S. So Nestle, in
need of new customers for their baby formula, sent non-medical hirelings in
white jackets to developing countries, to convince new parents that Nestle's artificial product was better than breast milk.
Of course, the mothers they
approached already possessed a safe, effective, versatile – miraculous really
-- method of feeding newborns and young children. But mother after mother converted to the
belief that Nestle represented a big step toward modernity and a better life
for her baby.
Without an easy means of heating,
sterilizing, or buying more once they'd committed and gone off of breast milk, parents lost many children to death by clever advertising. It was so
clever, that most of them never made the connection.
It took years of protests from
religious, political and just plain citizen groups around the world, to get Nestle to stop -- and
they did so only because a lot of profit-destroying boycotting of their many
other products was going on. I've never forgiven them, never stopped boycotting their
products, and now I see why. They're doing it again, to babies.
Nowadays, it would take a whole lot of boycotting to put a dent in the $90+ billion Nestle takes in worldwide, each year. We'd better get started.
