On milk and its derivatives

Theme presentation 1.   Elsa Tamez

The lack of milk: visible chains that must be broken
The many varieties of milk: invisible chains of slavery
The militant rejection of milk and insensitivity
Towards a land flowing with milk and honey

If it hadn't been for the hunger of my seven brothers and sisters, perhaps I would like milk better. I guess I don't like it today because my brain, like a closet where memories are stored, associates milk with the image of a thin, sickly girl hiding under the table where she quickly drinks a glass of white liquid, hoping her brothers and sisters won't discover her. They couldn't ask for something they couldn't have. Why make mother suffer? She had done enough by managing to provide a glass of milk for her daughter who was more prone to tuberculosis. Now, whenever I see the boxes, bottles and bags of milk in the grocery stores, I see myself there, under the table drinking milk, in complicity with my mother, being careful to wipe off the whitemustache after the last sip.

It shouldn't have been like that. In fact, I breast-fed much longer than necessary. My resentment is not against mother's milk, rather against that of which there is not enough for all. I like the natural milk of a mother that flows from her body by the grace of God - milk that is unadulterated because it comes from the woman. This milk does not just have nutrients and minerals, such as 0.7 to 1.5 grams of protein, and glucose, lipids, fats, sodium, calcium and potassium. It also has spiritual components: the warmth of a loving body holding a smaller one close with confidence and security while he or she drinks.

In biblical thinking the word of God is like milk that flows from God's breast to nourish the daughters and sons. In the second century Hippolytes allegorically interpreted the breasts of the Shulamite woman in Song of Songs (4.5) as representing the Old and New Testaments. In 1 Pet 2.1, the author invites his readers to lay aside all malice, and to desire, as newborn babes, the milk that is spiritual and pure in order to grow into salvation.

Since milk is a vital necessity for our impoverished peoples, and has special meaning as an image in biblical thinking, I would like to introduce the theme of the assembly in a "lacto-symbolic" framework.

The lack of milk: visible chains that must be broken

There are different kinds of fasting. Is 58 refers to the voluntary practice of abstaining from food. According to tradition, the purpose of a fast was to implore the help of God, to ask for forgiveness or to commemorate a national catastrophe. This fast is rejected by God when it is not accompanied by practice in keeping with God's will. In other words, abstaining from injustice and practising justice.

But there are other fasts that God rejects. Those in which people are unable to eat because they lack the money to buy food. The image from many years ago of a little girl drinking milk under the table so her brothers and sisters wouldn't see her has probably been repeated over and over again. But it is even more probable that those little girls became the ones who don't have milk. The global economic system has accelerated the process of exclusion to such an extent that it would appear that milk and other basic food items have gone through a metaphorical process from evaporation to condensation. Food, and other basic human necessities, have evaporated for the poor and have been condensed in huge quantities for the rich. In practice, evaporated milk, condensed milk and other by-products, including housing, health and education, are becoming unreachable for many. If the breasts of our women are dry, how can we say, with the Psalmist, "out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast thou ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger".

During the last few years we have been hearing about the feminization of poverty. The first world summit on social development, held in Copenhagen in March, 1995, presented dramatic data that convinces us that poverty has a woman's face. The following are alarming statistics presented at the fourth world conference on women in Beijing: ¹

• Of the one billion three hundred million persons in the world living in poverty, 70% are women. Poverty is growing among women in rural areas. Indigenous women are the poorest among the poor;
• 66 out of every one hundred illiterate persons are women. In Africa and Asia the number climbs to 70 in a hundred;
• 80% of the twenty-three million refugees in the world are women;
• In 1990 it was estimated that women make up 32% of the world's work force, and that their jobs are undervalued and underpaid.

These are only some of the statistics. In light of this, compare other statistics: a third of the families in the world are headed by women; and the percentage of women who participate in high-level government decision-making is only 6.2%; only 3.6% of whom are in positions in ministries of the economy. In 144 United Nations member countries no women participate in the high-level decision-making in these areas. Given this reality, the feminization of poverty must be taken very seriously, as well as the feminization of the means and measures to combat this reality.

I can't overlook domestic violence because it is the dreadful, visible and systematic sign of structural sin in a patriarchal society. Violence against women and children has worsened and escalated alarmingly. We know that unemployment is one of the serious problems of the free market system. Although the indicators of economic growth in any particular country rise, unemployment doubles or triples. Frequently the lack of basic resources leads to delinquency and domestic violence. Women and children are the ones who suffer the worst consequences of exclusion. They are the victims of the physical and psychological violence that results from the frustrations of the husband and father. Among those who are excluded, women find themselves in a more difficult situation. Their dignity and self-respect are not recognized by the system, by their husbands or partners or even by themselves.

The fast that the creator desires is one which is manifested in solidarity with women, who together with their partners want to be like broad watered gardens, like the mother earth, ready to be made fertile with the seeds of all fruits and with flowers of every color and scent. Our inhabited world should reflect the words of the poet of Is 66.10-11, when he announces the good news of the new Jerusalem as being like she who feeds her many children with abundant milk: "Rejoice with Jerusalem...For you will nurse and be satisfied at her comforting breasts; you will drink deeply and delight in her overflowing abundance."

The many varieties of milk: invisible chains of slavery

The law of consumption is one of the invisible chains that lead to slavery. It is also one of the most powerful weapons used to wound the subjectivity of women, and to impede women in the development of an identity as a free and worthy person.

Women who seek to have bodies like the models on television are deathly afraid of cow's milk or goat's milk or any other milk product. This type of fast does not please the creator because, although it may not seem to be, it is a forced fast created by the market in order to sell an image of women and men as acceptable only by western standards of beauty. When business persons engage in commercial activities every day of the week, including the sabbath, seeking their own best interests, scheming on how to accumulate more and more (Is 58.13), human beings become puppets manipulated by the propaganda that imposes the same desires for all, the poor and the rich. Alongside publicity advertising soft drinks and appealing fast foods full of fat, we find the image of the ideal woman with perfect skin and the ultimate body. One of the most prosperous businesses, not only in the United States where obesity abounds, but also in many poor countries, has to do with diets and diet products. As a result of all this, we have the novelty of many kinds of milk to choose from, provided by the globalization of the market: whole milk in liquid or powder form, 2% milk, 1% milk, skim milk, buttermilk, whole-cream, half-and-half, chocolate- or strawberry-flavoured milk, and lactose-free milk.

The greatest injustice is that while the free market presents the freedom of choice among products, the excluded don't even have access to ordinary adulterated milk. Is freedom limited to a choice of products? Does freedom mean following the norms of the free market? Does freedom of competition lead to true freedom for all? Neoliberal ideology affirms freedom of opportunity for everyone within the framework of competition; but in practice it is based on inequality. The winners in this unrestrained competitive race are the strong, the unscrupulous, those who are oriented by their own interests. The demand to triumph, to be successful, to be number one in everything, creates a climate of merciless competition that generates rivalry among women themselves. Each feels obligated to seek her own salvation.

In this context it is vital to understand, in the depth of our conscience and heart, that God by God's grace calls us sons and daughters, free and full of dignity. We don't have to acquire merits in order to be persons. Dignity is not acquired with the most expensive milk or the most famous brand names on the market. Dignity is a gift; it can't be bought. Unrestrained free competition is unhealthy because it excludes interhuman solidarity.

All of us are enchained in some way, some by not being able to buy and others by buying what the market dictates. The more freedom the market has, the less freedom there is for people. To break the chains of injustice implies discerning the road of slavery down which we are being led, to distance ourselves from it and not let ourselves be drawn along by its ideology.

Together we can open the floodgates so that all can have milk. Let us take hold of the promises given to God's people after the exile when God said: "I will extend peace to her (Jerusalem) like a river, and the wealth of nations like a flooding stream: you will nurse and be carried on her arm and dandled on her knees" (Is 66.12).

Then history will not record only Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt, as she who bathed in milk to enhance her beauty. All of us, adults, children, men and women of all colours and races, will have bathed in the abundance of milk.

The militant rejection of milk and insensitivity

There are those who fast voluntarily as a protest against an injustice. They reject milk, not because they don't want it, but as an act of pressure to achieve justice.

Two years ago I was walking through the park of the White House in Washington, DC. Far away on the grass I could see a small, lonely green tent. I asked my friend what it was. She told me it must be somebody on a hunger strike. The answer made an impression on me because I could see that nobody was moved by those who militantly abstained from milk. The scene reminded me of Kafka's story called The Artist of Hunger that begins: "During the last decades, interest in those who fast has greatly decreased. It used to be a good business to organize large shows of this kind as independent spectacles, something that today, though, is totally impossible. Those were other times. Then, the entire city had something to do with the person fasting." ²

Kafka's story refers to a totally different kind of fast in which a person fasts only to demonstrate his or her will power. There is no underlying purpose, unlike those in the tent on the White House lawn. But changing times mark the similarity. Near the hunger strikers was the wall with the names of 50,000 fallen in Vietnam carved in beautiful marble like part of the decoration. It made me think of the enormous solidarity in the effort to end the war in Vietnam and avoid more death, and wonder what became of it. Both the wall with the names of those who fought and died in the Vietnam war, and the enormous solidarity of the struggle to end it seemed to be thought of as relics of some distant past that is barely remembered.

I never found out what the hunger strike was about or how it ended for the inhabitants of that small green tent; but the final words of Franz Kafka's story narrate a frightening end. It takes place in front of the cage where the person fasting, lying on a pile of hay, demonstrates his dignity by abstaining from food, to a public that is not at all interested. "Clean this up," the inspector yells, "and bury him in the hay."

One of the greatest challenges facing the church today is people's insensitivity in all parts of the world. Some are insensitive because they have never experienced solidarity, others because they are tired of giving themselves to their neighbour in solidarity without ever seeing signs of any progress toward the land of milk and honey. To this we add the lack of faith that prevails in these times of messianic drought. For many, to speak of breaking the chains of injustice sounds old-fashioned, even in the face of evidence that poverty has grown, that the gulf between rich and poor has widened alarmingly, that violence claims lives daily in many parts of the world. In Colombia, during the past ten years there have been thirty thousand murders a year, victims of political violence, of common crime, of intolerance toward street children and prostitutes (the so-called "social cleansing") and of domestic violence. In spite of this, the insensitivity and lack of solidarity grow.

For a Christian, it cannot be old-fashioned to speak of the struggle for a glass of milk, as in the project born of the efforts of women's organizations and mothers' clubs in Peru to provide their children with food. Now there are thousands of feeding programmes there giving out rations of milk. A number of government officials have tried to eliminate this project, but the women have not given up and continue to struggle to multiply the glasses of milk in all the feeding programmes. More blessed than the breasts from which Jesus drank are those who drink from the word of God and put it into practice. (cf. Lk 11.27-28)

Toward a land flowing with milk and honey

We need to discover how to globalize the "glass of milk project" for all those in our great village that is the world - good milk, unadulterated, like mother's milk, made up of more than just chemicals and minerals. Human beings don't live by bread alone, but also through affection and pleasure.

To break the chains of injustice means to have faith in the possibility of breaking them. Heb 11.1 defines faith as the conviction of what is not seen. But what is it that we cannot see that makes it possible to wait with assurance, even though we can't see it? This is not clear, but it has to be something that is much desired: a dream, a promise hoped for, infinite healthy nipples of all sizes and colours. The gospels call it the kingdom of God, Isaiah and the revelation of John talk about a new heaven and a new earth. It is a place where there is no sorrow or pain, no oppression or deceit, no hunger or humiliation, no discrimination or exclusion. It is a place where we live in mutual respect, where no one seeks his or her own good at the expense of others, or is afraid of losing, or commits suicide because of not being able to respond to the demands placed by someone or something. It is a place where we won't suffer from unrequited love.

We dream of a land flowing with free milk and honey. We read in the Scriptures about the breasts to which God calls all those who are thirsty saying: "Come all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come buy and eat; come buy wine and milk without money and without cost!" (Is 55.1).

We dream of that place where we can breathe grace and koinonia - where God is breathed. A sick little girl will no longer have to hide under the table to drink a glass of milk. Her brothers and sisters, her entire family and the neighbours too, will drink.

Notes