
Humans evolved to be cooperative breeders - FossilHominid
https://www.sapiens.org/culture/milk-sharing/
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kanobo
This is remotely tangentially related but when I learned that the milk in one
milk carton was composed of many hundreds of cows and not just one cow it blew
my mind as a child.

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maerF0x0
This is common for many industrial ag products and part of why it's safety is
harder. The safety of multiple containers of milk are the worst of the set of
individual cows. So you have the incidence of one sick cow leveraged out to
many more consumers than if it were 1:1

Another similar case is ground beef[1] where a hamburger patty can contain
material from >100 cows

[1]:
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/05/there...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/05/there-
are-a-lot-more-cows-in-a-single-hamburger-than-you-realize/)

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eitland
Regarding milk: at least around here, the milk get tested rather thoroughly,
both on composition, bacteria content and taste.

Also all modern dairies pasteurize all milk meant for consumption, which means
the bacteria in it are dead anyway.

Source: grew up on a farm, studied agriculture.

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maerF0x0
Of course, totally agree there are processes in place to mitigate the leverage
points. It just points out the necessity for such mitigations to be in place
due to the multiplicative nature.

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fortran77
There's a paper, summarized here at Harvard Medical Review, that suggests
there there may be some risks for some of the mothers in this milk-sharing
group.

> At six months of age, the analysis revealed that 20 metabolites differed in
> overweight versus lean women. Additionally, milk adenine in obese mothers
> was associated with greater weight gain in infants.

[https://hms.harvard.edu/news/breast-milk-
obesity](https://hms.harvard.edu/news/breast-milk-obesity)

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kristianp
The title is for a different article. It should be "What Milk-Sharing
Communities Reveal".

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richardbrevig
Actually it's a sentence within the article. There's no article on sapiens.org
with this title.

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mips_avatar
I think it’s interesting about how connected cross-feeding mothers feel to the
other kids in their sharing community. I wonder if this could be used to build
life-long stronger bonds in communities.

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ketanmaheshwari
Does the lady in picture shown breast feeding two kids holding a beer? I think
it might be harmful to consume alcohol while breastfeeding but more strange is
the choice of picture for the article.

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dpiers
It looks like it might be a Dundee Summer Shandy - not a bad choice for a hot
day at the park in upstate NY.

It is not considered harmful to have a beer while breastfeeding. I'm sure the
subject of the photo was aware of how it would be perceived and didn't put her
drink out of frame to help normalize public breastfeeding.

