In August 1973, New Internationalist published an interview with leading child nutrition experts who talked of a ‘worrying swing away from breastfeeding’ in favour of commercial breast-milk substitutes. The ‘Baby Food Tragedy’ article, along with a 1974 War on Want report called ‘The Baby Killer’ and the 1975 documentary film Bottle Babies, drew widespread attention to the issue and led to an international campaign that continues today.
Henri Nestlé’s ‘Milk Food’ was invented around 1867 and was soon being exported to European colonies. In the 1930s Dr Cecily Williams described the alarming rise in illness and death amongst babies whose mothers had been persuaded not to breastfeed and by the 1960s Dr Derrick Jelliffe, an expert in infant nutrition, had coined the term ‘commerciogenic malnutrition’.
