Skimmed

Breastfeeding, Race, and Injustice

By: Andrea Freeman

Narrated by: Randye Kaye

Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins

Publisher's Summary

Born into a tenant farming family in North Carolina in 1946, Mary Louise, Mary Ann, Mary Alice, and Mary Catherine were medical miracles. Annie Mae Fultz, a Black-Cherokee woman who lost her ability to hear and speak in childhood, became the mother of America's first surviving set of identical quadruplets. They were instant celebrities. Their White doctor named them after his own family members. He sold the rights to use the sisters for marketing purposes to the highest-bidding formula company. The girls lived in poverty, while Pet Milk's profits from a previously untapped market of Black families skyrocketed. 

Over half a century later, baby formula is a 70-billion-dollar industry and Black mothers have the lowest breastfeeding rates in the country. Since slavery, legal, political, and societal factors have routinely denied Black women the ability to choose how to feed their babies. In Skimmed, Andrea Freeman tells the riveting story of the Fultz quadruplets while uncovering how feeding America's youngest citizens is awash in social, legal, and cultural inequalities. This book highlights the making of a modern public health crisis, the four extraordinary girls whose stories encapsulate a nationwide injustice, and how we can fight for a healthier future.

©2020 Andrea Freeman (P)2020 Tantor

Great storytelling, but I wish non Black narrators would not say the n word.

This was an amazing well researched piece about the institutional barriers to breastfeeding in the Black community. I appreciated it as a Black IBCLC, buuuut I wish the non Black narrator did not say the n word, it literally made me cringe every time.

Misleading from the start

In addition to other misleading claims, the author loses all credibility by calling formula "junk food for babies." Formula is designed to be the closest source of nutrition to breastmilk. Because of that, it does need to have an easily digestible carbohydrate (sugar). In breastmilk, that is lactose, in formula that is usually cane sugar or corn syrup (not high fructose corn syrup- that is something different). In fact, in addition to her inaccurate claims about the contents of formula and its effects on infants, she seems to misunderstand breastmilk and infant digestion as well. Lactose intolerance in babies is rare, because lactose is the carbohydrate found in breastmilk. Lactose intolerance generally comes later, after infancy, when the need for breastmilk has ceased. She seems to think lactose is problematic in itself, and applies this claim to her negative views on formula, overlooking the fact that breastmilk contains high amounts of it. This information is freely available, so why is she making these ridiculous claims? As far as telling the stories of black women who were manipulated, she does a poor job. It's disjointed, and not very cohesive, because she jumps around too much. In the very beginning, she touches on the fact that she is a white woman telling the stories of black women. The farther you get into the book, it seems like she, too, is using these women, just to push her narrative, that breast is best and formula is terrible. Yes, formula companies have done terrible things, but that doesn't make formula itself bad, and we have the option of not supporting the companies that are to blame. And as far as breast is best? Well, it's much more nuanced in today's world than she wants to recognize, and this mantra isn't always true. Skip this book. I was excited to read it, but it is too much opinion with cherry-picked information that doesn't paint the whole picture.