HUMAN CHEESE
6 October 2003

I think it would be fantastic to try making cheese from the milk of
humans.  Assuming one could produce something delicious (and I can't
imagine this being a problem, seeing the vast diversity of cheeses we can
obtain from cow's, sheep's and goat's milk), we could provide the world
with a vegan, fair-trade cheese.

My goal would ultimately be to identify a large set of mostly-vegan
lactating women to use as milk sourcers, then have them test their bodies
regularly for drugs and diseases that could be communicated through milk.  
Sure that their milk was safe for people to consume, we could make it even
more attractive by providing them with a subscription to a weekly CSA
delivery of local organic vegetables as part of their compensation.  We
would pay them a fair wage (perhaps a prorated local "living wage") and
could offer them part ownership of the business.  The operation would be
entirely worker-owned, certified organic and fair-trade.  We would sell
our 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, salaries for other employees, 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.