Social child feeding practices: breastfeeding as a social and economic problem

The study deals with the problem of natural breastfeeding desacralization as a result of the development of the international system of milk capitalism. There is a bottle-feeding culture, i.e. feeding a child with a bottle and a nipple with infant formula, donor milk or expressed mother’s milk, in the context of breastfeeding. One can observe a transition to technological feeding and a growing demand for sacred biological resource (human milk as the major biological, social and economic resource), turning natural breastfeeding into an alternative social practice of feeding infants. An attempt is made to analyze the social status of breastfeeding by women of different social strata. Besides, the research demonstrates the relationship of the infant feeding practices with the morbidity rate and public expenditure on health. It is concluded that the current discussion about the proper child feeding practices is not within the healthy nutrition and proper reproduction of the population but the maintenance and reproduction of the international system of milk capitalism.