It sounded like cannon fire. But where was it coming from?

Pirates,

Probably—after all, it was 1815. The Benares, a ship of the British

East India Company, was docked at Makassar, on the Indonesian

Island of Sulawesi. Its commander gave the order to set sail and hunt

Them down.

Hundreds of miles away, on another Indonesian island—Java—

Soldiers in Yogyakarta heard the cannon noises, too. Their commander

Assumed the nearest town was under attack; he marched his men there at

Once. But they found no cannons—just other people wondering what the

Noise was. Three days later, the Benares still hadn’t found any pirates.

What they’d heard but didn’t realize was the eruption of a volcano

Called Mount Tambora. When you consider that Mount Tambora is more

Than five hundred miles from Yogyakarta, it’s hard to imagine how

Terrifying the explosions must have been up close. A cocktail of toxic gas

And liquefied rock roared down the volcano’s slopes at the speed of a
Hurricane. It killed thousands. When it was over, Mount Tambora was

Four thousand feet shorter than it had been before.

Slowly, a vast cloud of volcanic ash drifted across the northern

Hemisphere, blocking the sun. In Europe, 1816 became “the year without

A summer.” Crops failed; desperate people ate rats, cats, and grass.

In

The German town of Darmstadt, the suffering made a deep impression on

A thirteen-year-old boy. Young Justus von Liebig loved helping out in his

Father’s workshop, concocting pigments, paints, and polishes for sale.

3 He

Grew up to be a chemist, among the most brilliant of his age. And he was

Driven by making discoveries that might help prevent hunger. Liebig did
Some of the earliest research into fertilizers. He pioneered nutritional science—the analysis of food in
terms of fats, proteins, and

carbohydrates.

4 He invented beef extract.

Liebig invented something else, too, something that millions of people

use every day: infant formula. Launched in 1865, Liebig’s Soluble Food

for Babies was a powder comprising cow’s milk, wheat flour, malt flour,

and potassium bicarbonate. It was the first commercial substitute for

breast milk to come from rigorous scientific study.

As Liebig knew, not every baby has a mother who can breastfeed.

Indeed, not every baby has a mother: before modern medicine, about one

in one hundred childbirths killed the mother;

it’s little better in the

poorest countries today.

8 Then there are mothers whose bodies just can’t

make enough milk—the figures are disputed, but they could be as high as

one in twenty.

What happened to those babies before formula? Parents who could

afford it employed wet nurses—a respectable profession for the working

girl, and an early casualty of Liebig’s invention.

10 Some used a goat or

donkey. Many gave their infants “pap,” a bread-and-water mush, from

hard-to-clean receptacles that must have teemed with bacteria.

11 No

wonder death rates were high: in the early 1800s, only two in three babies
who weren’t breastfed lived to see their first birthday.

12

Liebig’s formula hit the market at a propitious time. Germ theory was

increasingly well understood. And the rubber teat had just been invented.

The appeal of formula quickly spread beyond women who couldn’t

breastfeed. Liebig’s Soluble Food for Babies democratized a lifestyle

choice that had previously been open only to the well-to-do.

It’s a choice that now shapes the modern workplace. For many new

mothers who want—or need—to get back to work, baby formula is a

godsend. And women are right to worry that taking time off might

damage their careers. Recently, economists studied the experiences of the

high-powered men and women emerging from the University of

Chicago’s MBA program, entering the worlds of consulting and high

finance. At first the women had similar experiences to the men, but over a

time a huge gap in earnings opened up. The critical moment? It was

motherhood. Women took time off, and employers paid them less in

response. Ironically, the men were more likely than the women to have

children. They just didn’t change their working patterns There are both biological and cultural reasons
why women are more

likely than men to take time off when they start families. We can’t change

the fact that only women have wombs, but we can try to change

workplace culture. More governments are following Scandinavia’s lead by

giving dads the legal right to take time off.

14 More leaders, like Facebook’s

Mark Zuckerberg, are setting the example of encouraging them to take

it.

15 And formula milk makes it much easier for Dad to take over while

Mom gets back to work.

Sure, there’s also the option of the breast pump. But it can be more
trouble than formula, or so the evidence suggests; studies show that the

less time mothers have off work, the less likely they are to persevere with

breastfeeding.

16 That’s hardly surprising.

There’s just one problem. Formula’s not all that good for babies.

That shouldn’t be surprising, either. Evolution, after all, has had

thousands of generations to optimize the recipe for breast milk. And

formula doesn’t quite match it. Formula-fed infants get sick more often.

That leads to costs for medical treatment and parents taking time off

work. It also leads to deaths, particularly in poorer countries, where safe

water sources aren’t easy to come by. One credible estimate is that

increased breastfeeding rates could save 800,000 children’s lives

worldwide each year.

17 Justus von Liebig wanted his formula to save

lives; he’d have been horrified by such a statistic.

Formula has another, less obvious economic cost. There’s evidence

that breastfed babies grow up with slightly higher IQs—about three

points higher, when you control as well as possible for other factors. And

higher IQs are linked to greater productivity and lifetime earnings. What

might be the benefit of making a whole generation of kids just that little

bit smarter? According to The Lancet, about $300 billion a year.

18 That’s

several times the value of the global formula market.

19

For governments, then, it’s a public policy headache. You don’t want to

do anything that will hold back gender equality in the workplace, but you

do want a smarter, healthier population. It makes sense to publicize the

benefits of breastfeeding, at least, so mothers can make an informed

decision. And many governments do. But nobody makes a quick profit
from promoting breastfeeding. Selling formula, on the other hand, can be

lucrative. Which have you seen more of recently: public service

announcements about breastfeeding or ads for formula? Those ads have always been controversial, not
least because formula is

arguably more addictive than tobacco or alcohol. When a mother stops

breastfeeding, her milk dries up. There’s no going back. Liebig himself

never claimed that his Soluble Food for Babies was better than breast

milk: he simply said he’d made it as nutritionally similar as possible. But

he quickly inspired imitators who weren’t so scrupulous. By the 1890s,

ads for formula routinely portrayed it as state-of-the-art; meanwhile,

pediatricians were starting to notice higher rates of scurvy and rickets

among the offspring of mothers whom the advertising swayed.

20

The controversy peaked in 1974, when the campaigning group War on

Want published a pamphlet titled “The Baby Killer,” which accused

Nestlé of marketing its infant formula in Africa without enough concern

About whether mothers would be able to afford it after their breast milk

Stopped or use safe, clean water while preparing it. The boycotts of Nestlé

In the West lasted for years. Partly as a result, by 1981, there was an

International Code of Marketing Breast-Milk Substitutes. But it’s not

Hard law, and many say it’s widely flouted by companies.

21 And there was

Fresh scandal in China in 2008, when industrial chemicals were found in

Formula milk; several babies died and 300,000 children fell ill.

22

What if there was a way to get the best of all worlds, equal career

Breaks for moms and dads and breast milk for infants, without the fuss of

Breast pumps? Perhaps there is—if you don’t mind taking market forces

To their logical conclusion. In Utah, there’s a company called Ambrosia

Labs. It pays mothers in Cambodia to express breast milk, screens it for

Quality, and sells it on to American mothers. It’s pricey now—more than

$100 a liter.

23 But that could come down with scale. Governments might

Even be tempted to tax formula milk to fund a breast milk market

Subsidy. Justus von Liebig sounded the death knell for wet-nursing as a

Profession; perhaps the global supply chain is bringing it back.