![]() “We also make asiago, cheddar, mozzarella. We make about 60 percent of feta and havarti cheese in Canada,” MacPhail said. “We are now the largest speciality cheese processor in Canada. But it’s their cheese plant in Summerside that is leading the way. From making butter in their O’Leary plant to the evaporated and condensed milk produced in downtown Charlottetown along with traditional milk processing plants in St Eleanor’s and Charlottetown, ADL is a going concern. With five processing plants across PEI, the dairy cooperative’s reach is wide, and ADL employs over 300 people, running their production facilities 24/7. “Every single dairy farmer on PEI is a member of ADL,” Jamie MacPhail, marketing manager of ADL, said, “All are family-owned and they are all members of ADL.” And that, quite simply, is due to Atlantic Canada’s largest independent dairy cooperative, Amalgamated Dairy Limited (ADL). Weighing infants and relying on data and measurements to determine the healthy progress of an infant is still widely debated today, with many feeling it fuels insecurities around insufficient breastmilk that can impede breastfeeding progress.Walk by the dairy section of any Prince Edward Island grocery store and you will easily find a wide range of local products on the shelves. A perceived ‘failure’ to meet these standards or expectations can create feelings of shame or anxiety, even though these standards do not recognise the many different factors that can impact on birth weight, for example health conditions or income. ![]() Those weights would have been plotted on development charts based on standardised weights for the baby’s age. These would have been used by health visitors during home visits to new mothers to weigh the infant. For example, in the section on Scientific Motherhood we have included some crochet infant weighing scales from the 1930s. ‘What’s remarkable in many cases is that you might be looking at a historical object, but a lot of the questions it raises are still very relevant today. ![]() The exhibition eschews a strictly chronological order, although the curators point out that to understand the future of milk, the history must be clearly established. (Image credit: Courtesy of The Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent, courtesy Wellcome Collection) Harris-Babou draws links between this traumatic history and the severe inequalities in Black maternal health outcomes seen today in the US and UK.’ The work references the lullaby ‘All the pretty horses’, which was said to have been sung by an enslaved African mother who was separated from her infant in order to care for and wet-nurse her enslaver’s child. The first-hand testimony within this work allows us to think about the passing down of maternal knowledge and how these ideas and beliefs sit alongside public health messaging. ‘It explores the relationship of the individual to maternal health care systems, the inequalities within these structures and how these impact the choices that are available to new parents. ‘A new commission by Ilana Harris-Babou, Let Down Reflex, combines personal testimonies about breastfeeding by the artist’s mother, sister and niece with the wider political context that surrounds infant feeding,’ the curators say. These references sit alongside personal narratives that explore the hijacking of the breastfeeding narrative by formula companies, feeding into issues of empire and exploration, a tension expressed in the work of the artists. At the same time, human milk is making its way into online markets and companies are starting to prototype synthetic versions of human milk.’ We are also at a crossroads for the dairy industry after Brexit, with the potential for new policies to shape the sector and an urgent need for climate-conscious agriculture. Most households still buy dairy milk but there are now many milk alternatives available. Why do we eat and drink what we do, and who gets to choose what they eat? Milk has been central to many people’s diets in the UK for over a century. ‘It’s also a medium through which we can unpick larger questions about our diets and food system, the politics and economics of infant feeding, relationships between humans, animals and the environment. It’s something many of us in the UK take for granted,’ say exhibition curators Marianne Templeton and Honor Beddard. ![]() ‘Milk is woven into the everydayness of our lives, whether it’s in a cup of tea or coffee, or in the routines of infant feeding. Courtesy Wellcome Collection) Milk: exploring the politics of dairy ![]() (Image credit: © artist and ARTantide Gallery, Verona Galerie Elisabeth & Klaus Thoman, Innsbruck/ Wien. ![]()
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