HUMAN CHEESE
6 October 2003

Cheese made from the milk of humans - our first chance for a vegan,
fair trade cheese!

The way to start would surely be to identify and organize a large set of 
mostly-vegan lactating women to create and own and manage the business, as 
a worker or producer cooperative, using their own bodies as the source for milk.  
They would test their bodies regularly for drugs and diseases that could 
be communicated through milk.  Sure that their milk was safe for people to 
consume, they could make it even more attractive by providing themselves 
with a subscription to a weekly CSA delivery of local organic vegetables 
as part of their compensation.  They would pay themselves a fair wage 
(perhaps a prorated local "living wage") and reclaim any surplus generated 
by the business.  The operation would be entirely worker-owned, certified 
organic and fair-trade.  They would sell their products either direct to the 
consumer (online, farmers' markets) or through cooperatively or 
collectively organized markets and restaurants.

Imagine the vegans, running through the streets with joy, eating pizza and
grilled cheese sandwiches and other cheesy delights!  Imagine their
digestive systems, happily digesting milk produced to meet their own
species' needs!  Imagine the pride of the women-owners who make this
possible with the fertility of their bodies!  Imagine the wild cows,
roaming the prairies, freed from slavery!  Milk and cheese will always be 
an inefficient way to make dietary use of the sun's photons, but as a rare 
delicacy human cheese could at least be considerably more palatable than 
the current alternatives.

Unfortunately, there are at least two major obstacles to this dream:

(1) Economic obstacle

A fair wage for our milk sourcers would be something like US$20 per hour.  
Assuming a morning milking and an evening milking, this leads to a cost of 
about $40 per woman-day.  One lactating woman can produce, on average, 2-3 
pounds of milk per day.  It takes about 10 pounds of milk to make 1 pound 
of cheese.  So we would require around 4 woman-days of milk to produce 1 
pound of cheese, at a cost of about $160.  And this is only one of the 
costs involved in producing the cheese: to pay other expenses (shipping 
costs, wages for non-milking work, etc.) we'd need to sell the cheese for 
nearly $200 per pound, which would greatly reduce its target audience.  
To get near a practical price (~$25 per pound) we'd have to pay our 
sourcers only $5 per day, far less than the value of their labor.

(2) Curdling obstacle

Making cheese requires the use of a curdling agent.  Although curdling is
somewhat possible using vinegar or other acids, the time-tested method for
cheese curdling requires the use of rennet, extracted from the stomachs of
cows.  It is very very hard or impossible to make good cheese without
rennet, which would render any human cheese very non-vegan.