The baby milk culture wars

As Aldi becomes the first Irish supermarket to launch its own formula, we look at how a ‘breast is best’ policy has kept prices high, and how mothers are feeling the strain

In one block of flats in the Liberties in Dublin, young men are going door to door with boxes of baby formula that are stolen to order. Gliding a trolley down the polished aisles of your own supermarket, you can see rows of powdered newborn milk illustrated by cartoon bears, with incongruous security tags strapped around them. Beyond the nappies or the wipes, convex mirrors might be installed at the end of the aisle. And sharp signs often tell browsing mothers passive-aggressively to smile, they’re on security camera.

In a supermarket, the baby section can rival the off-licence as one of the most heavily surveilled aisles. As a number of Irish supermarkets have confirmed, baby formula is one of the most stolen items in grocery stores.

One source in a top supermarket said that they often get grief for tagging baby formula, that most people feel the compassionate thing to do for a mother who is desperate for baby food is to turn a blind eye. But retailers argue that in many cases, it is not individual mothers who are trying to steal boxes to make ends meet. They claim that more professional shoplifters are trying to steal formula in bulk.

So why does Ireland have such a market for stolen formula?

It’s worth asking if there would be a black market for formula if the prices for the main market weren’t getting so high. Figures shared with the Irish Independent show that in just three years, the price of baby formula in Ireland has rocketed by almost a third. Aptamil and SMA newborn formulas now cost €16.49 for an 800g tub, while Cow & Gate’s from-birth formula comes in at €13.99 for 800g. Prices for specialist formulas tailored for dietary management cost more. For example, Aptamil’s Comfort formula, made for infants suffering from colic and constipation, costs €19.49 for 800g.

Last month, Aldi became the first supermarket in Ireland to launch an own-brand infant formula. The Mamia infant milk is one of the cheapest brands, at €8.99 for 800g. Ahead of

its launch, Aldi commissioned research, which showed that 66pc of Irish parents of young children found it financially challenging to cover the cost of all baby products they purchase. And this figure rose to 72pc for parents buying formula. “Parents who purchase infant formula are more likely to cut spend on other groceries to afford baby products,” it said.

This could be something of a gamechanger for the sector. For many families, formula is the most expensive essential weekly item in their basket. And baby-feeding experts have starkly warned that they are aware of more and more parents who are taking the risk of diluting formula to try to make it last longer — which poses a risk to newborn health.

On one side of this, you have the profits of companies. On the other is the financial pressure put on new parents. Surely, this is an issue that should galvanise people and the powers that be?

However, as anyone who tries to agitate for price controls on formula will learn fast, anything related to bottle feeding quickly becomes consumed and snared by one of the most fraught and judgmental culture wars in motherhood. It is almost impossible to make the case for affordable formula in Ireland, without the discussion being derailed by a parallel argument about low breastfeeding rates and nefarious formula corporations.

Advocating for families who can’t afford formula is hampered, when much of the discussion around how we choose to feed our babies seems to judgmentally imply that nobody should be buying formula at all.

Up until the early 1960s, Ireland had very high breastfeeding rates — 90pc in some hospitals. Over the course of the next two decades, that breastfeeding rate would be decimated, with formula taking over as the way that the majority of babies were fed. There seems to be no definitive account of why breastfeeding rates dropped so dramatically. Some theories blame increased medical interventions in maternity hospitals, like inductions and caesarean sections in the 1970s, which can delay the start of milk production in the body. Others point to the fact that formula marketing was totally unregulated, and hospitals had access to free formula from manufacturers up to the mid-1980s. Socioeconomic factors probably played a part too, as more women joined the workforce.

By the 1990s, there was a more conscientious effort globally to improve breastfeeding rates and also to stifle the ability of formula corporations to get mothers using their products from birth. The World Health Organisation and UN launched proactive breastfeeding campaigns, and Ireland set up its own National Breastfeeding Policy. Despite this, Ireland now has one of the lowest breastfeeding rates in the world. Around 60pc of mothers report still breastfeeding after being discharged from hospital with their baby.

So breastfeeding initiatives are obviously laudable. Somewhere along the line, though, advocating for breastfeeding seems to have blurred into demonising formula. Breastfeeding and formula feeding don’t seem to be distinct choices anymore, more like two sparring adversaries. And it seems that when formula is vilified, it’s the mother who becomes the villain.

When I had my baby in the middle of a Level 5 lockdown, I was moored to my couch for most of the third and fourth trimester. One of the most distinct memories of my antenatal classes — held over Zoom — was the intense attempt to censor any and all discussion of not just formula but any use of any bottle at all. In one of those classes, a mother going through her first pregnancy, who already had young stepchildren and did not have extended maternity leave, tried to ask about expressing breastmilk so that she could try to split some of the night feeds with her partner, the baby’s father. The midwife shut the discussion down quickly, with some joke about fathers’ jobs being doing the wash-up and bringing us snacks while we breastfed.

Formula was only mentioned with passing, loaded references to “artificial feeding”. Statistically, around 40pc of the mothers in my class were going to leave the hospital with formula-fed babies. Yet teaching us how to properly sterilise bottles and safely prepare milk was not included in the class.

Presuming that the near prohibition of formula is the same as the promotion of breastfeeding is an interesting antenatal strategy, particularly for a maternity hospital in which I was silently handed a pre-prepared bottle of formula by an exhausted midwife as I tried to get through my first night on my own, after an emergency section. During my five-day stay, I got less than five minutes with a lactation consultant — despite the fact I was having real difficulty with latching.

After being discharged, my new tiny family of three was in a Statesanctioned newborn bubble. It was illegal for our families to travel into the county, and everyone was too afraid to visit a newborn anyway for fear of the virus.

Afraid of getting lonely, I plunged myself into online groups for new mothers. Up until then, the anti-formula judgment I’d felt had been just implied or suggested. Here, the judgment was plain, loud and righteous. Listening to the rhetoric around formula, you would have thought some of the women were talking about poison.

I watched as box-fresh mothers tapped desperate messages into the groups, timestamped for the small hours of the night, talking about the agony of mastitis, the primal fear that their baby was hungry, the suffocating sense that they were malfunctioning and failing. The rest of us would rush to her with compassion, the kind of love that women find easy to share anonymously with each other, and the overfamiliar assurance that “you’re doing great, mama!”.

Most messages were empathetic. But others were a jagged kind of sympathetic. “That’s awful! Don’t let this ruin your breastfeeding journey so soon,” some would say, with patronising assurances that us “mamas” have no idea how strong we are, and newborn babies are so resilient and if they seem really hungry, it’s probably because they’re going through a leap.

It is almost impossible to make the case for affordable formula in Ireland, without the discussion being derailed by a parallel argument about low breastfeeding rates and nefarious formula corporations

I couldn’t help but notice that some of the breastfeeding propaganda that saturated these groups had adopted the language of religion. Breastfeeding is a journey, a privilege. It’s redemptive suffering. The WHO guidance, reverentially known as “The Code”, was cited like biblical verse. A common theory, which I always found interesting, was that fallen women like myself were using formula because snaky corporations had found a way to evade “The Code” and advertise it aggressively to me.

Even in the rawness of that fourth trimester, when I was liable to cry and blame myself for anything and everything, this stuck in my craw. Did these other women think I was so passive and pliant, so stupid and credulous, that I would decide what to put in my vulnerable infant’s mouth based not on the difficulty I was having with breastfeeding, but on some subliminal brand awareness?

Yet, this is the view that seems to be endorsed by the WHO, which claims that “inappropriate marketing of breast-milk substitutes continues to undermine efforts to improve breastfeeding rates and duration worldwide.” This is the same WHO that has an information page on infant feeding, which warns that “over 820,000 children’s lives could be saved every year among children under five years, if all children 0-23 months were optimally breastfed”. It doesn’t clarify that this is a figure based solely on developing countries.

I wonder about the unclear use of figures and statistics on the importance of breastfeeding in the developing world, in the wholly different context of wealthy countries where women have easier access to clean and sterilised bottles of formula. Does this create an inference that the harm to children is caused not by the absence of breastfeeding — possibly the only available source of nutrition — but the availability of formula?

Talking to the other mothers I know who are either combination-feeding or exclusively using formula, there was one dominant reason why they chose formula: their baby was hungry, and they needed to feed it. There are myriad reasons why breastfeeding does

We should not punish people for using formula to feed their babies. Formula is not a threat to public health. If people need to access formula, we need to make it cheaper and easier

not work, some medical, some societal. All of these seem well understood. So why is the valid choice to use formula so often challenged?

Which gets to the heart of the shame that surrounds formula feeding. For a certain cohort of people, using formula is never going to be seen as a valid choice. Perhaps it’s because people are loath to be seen to blame mothers directly. But a woman who uses formula will always have her reasons and choices stripped.

A formula-feeding mother is only ever recognised as a sign of a failed breastfeeding policy. I strongly suspect that the reason the high price of formula is failing to capture any political attention is because some still need to be convinced that having access to formula is essential.

The only politician in the country who seems to be trying to do anything about the high price of formula is Labour senator Rebecca Moynihan. She told me that she felt that the fervent pursuit of breastfeeding, sometimes as the only valid feeding choice, had turned this debate “toxic”, and made it very difficult to advocate for those who needed formula but were struggling to afford it.

“We should not punish people for using formula to feed their babies,” she says. “Formula is not a threat to public health. If people need to access formula, we need to make it cheaper and easier.

“Formula feeding is a very legitimate choice, and for some women it is the only choice. It is essential that people are able to access it before six months. I do not think we should be moralising how people choose to feed their babies.”

Through her own work on this issue, Senator Moynihan managed to get brand-new research from the Oireachtas parliamentary budget office, which shows that the price of baby formula rose from 30.2pc from January 2020 to December 2023. The research showed that households that need baby formula ended up spending €3.40 more each week on formula. It said low-income households faced the largest rise, spending an average

of €3.90 more a week on formula over the last three years.

When I asked the Department of Health about the rocketing price of formula and the impact this might be having on families, I got almost 700 words back about how important breastfeeding is and how Ireland’s “culture of bottle feeding” was linked to childhood obesity and chronic diseases.

Not once did the Government respond to the substance of the article I was writing, which is about the dramatic hike in the cost of essential baby formula year on year.

The price of formula isn’t just rising in Ireland. Last year, the formula market attracted the attention of the UK’s consumer watchdog after reports that prices had been rising by 25pc in two years. It launched an investigation, which resulted in formula giant Danone — which manufactures here in Ireland — announcing that it was cutting the price of leading brand Aptamil by 7pc in the UK.

When I asked Danone why a similar price cut had not been offered to its Irish customers, a spokeswoman said “the price of our products is determined by a variety of factors that vary from one country to another”.

When Ms Moynihan tried to get our own Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) to launch a similar investigation on the Irish baby formula market, it brushed her off.

When I asked the CCPC about the high prices of formula, it said it is “very conscious of the impact of rising prices on consumers, and the consequences for the most vulnerable in our society. The CCPC’s role in pricing is ensuring that prices are set independently by competing businesses, and those prices are then prominently displayed at the point of sale thereby enabling consumers to make informed choices about which supplier offers the best value. We do not, and cannot, tell businesses what prices to charge, but we enforce laws that mean there is competitive pressure on businesses to set prices at a level that will attract customers.”

In the absence of anyone doing anything, families will continue to struggle. Formula poverty is hard to assess. I contacted St Vincent de Paul, to see if the high price of formula had emerged as an issue for struggling households. Initially, the charity told me that despite the price hikes on baby formula, it had not emerged as a major issue on its helpline. A spokesman told me that they might get around 30 calls a month where someone mentions struggling to afford formula, but this would only represent a tiny proportion of the total number of people who call asking for help. So, they weren’t able to help me with this piece.

But the more I thought about it, the more I felt that this figure was not really telling the whole story. Of all the people who ask SVP for help, it is likely that only a certain proportion of them have a baby. And of those who have a baby, it’s almost impossible to know how many are using formula and how many are breastfeeding. So when 30 families a month come forward asking for help buying formula for their babies, it could be difficult to understand what that says about the scale of formula poverty in Ireland.

One Saturday earlier this year, I woke up to the thrumming of my phone vibrating under my pillow. Had I seen Instagram?

I had a story published that day, reporting on formula inflation and reflecting the story of one woman who said she had seen and studiously ignored mothers in her own supermarket who were stealing formula. The comments were septic. Mothers being too thick to know that “breastfeeding was free,” or too selfish to give up their Friday-night wine were gleefully thrown around as the reasons why dumb women use formula. Much of this vicious bitching was led by other women. What didn’t seem to be getting commentators exercised were the figures showing that the multibillion formula industry was jacking up its prices way beyond the rate of inflation. Nobody seems to want to waste the chance to shame a woman by shaming a powerful company instead.

It doesn’t seem to matter how high the cost of formula rises. If you’re a mother who bottle feeds, you’re being told that that’s the price you have to pay.

The comments were septic: mothers being too thick to know that ‘breastfeeding was free’ or too selfish to give up wine night