This essay is part of our column, A Taste of Climate, that considers the intersection of food and climate.

I learn to breastfeed during a heat wave. In Chicago, where I live, the heat index reads almost 120 degrees in August 2023. It breaks the record of the 1995 heat wave, which killed over five hundred people. During the heat wave, the milk that sops my bra goes sour, curdling in odor to something like Parmesan. Our shower is broken. We have one air conditioning unit in the bedroom, where I sit hunched over my newborn daughter. The box unit wheezes. I jam my suddenly heaving breast into my daughter’s puckered mouth. I wear no shirts, sweat collecting underneath my breasts. I can smell myself: a dairy fridge left unplugged. An abandoned creamerie. Fetid, bovine. I drink water like my life depends on it, because her life depends on it. 

One day, we venture outside and are turned back, the temperature assaulting us like a brick wall. The next day, a heat rash spreads over my daughter’s face, blossoming little white beans over her eyelids and cheek. I fret to my sister, a doctor, over the phone. “It looks worse than it is,” she says. I squeeze milk from raw nipples onto my fingers and rub them over the rash, hoping it will heal. My mother told me breast milk heals everything, but the bumps do not miraculously disappear. Now my baby smells like sour milk too.

Here’s how a human being (typically) lactates: 

First, you have to be pregnant. During pregnancy, your estrogen and progesterone levels rise, causing your breasts to change. You grow milk ducts, your nipples darken, and your areolas widen and develop small bumps that secrete oil to lubricate your nipples. The stage is set.

Then, you give birth. After pushing out a baby and a placenta (or in my case, having both lifted out of me by a cheery doctor who chatters with her intern about their weekend plans while rifling around my spleen, which makes me feel absurdly comforted, like being filleted might be a normal physical occurrence), hormones like prolactin surge, acting as the green lights to the body to begin producing milk. 

Your hormones work in tandem with the infant who requires feeding. When a baby suckles a nipple, oxytocin is released in quantities I once heard a professor in an undergraduate class on human development describe as holy. She meant this in a literal sense, explaining in her lecture that the hormone rush of breastfeeding can be tantamount to the neurochemical release people report in religious settings, when they feel close to the divine. Like being in contact with God, the experience of breastfeeding is not comfortable or pleasant or nice, but prickles with discomfort and thrums with the sublime knowledge of aliveness. 

Your hormones and the baby’s presence work together to create something called a letdown, or when milk is released from the body. I experienced letdowns as a staticky feeling in my chest, like anticipation made physical. What followed was a gush, a release, the relief of pleasure on my infant’s chest as she gulped against the flow.  

So you see, to lactate is to work in tandem. My body and her body. One cannot make milk without someone to make milk for. 

The person I make milk for is my daughter, Midori. After weeks of my husband and I going back and forth on what we might call our daughter, her name came to me in a dream. Or rather, it was like a window had been opened in my sleep to a future time where she already existed. I saw only a hazy blur, like I was a camera left askew on the ground, lens trained on a triangular slice of sky. Around me I could hear people talking, and I knew they were talking about my daughter. They kept calling her by her name—Midori, midori, midori. After waking, I wandered into the sun-drenched living room and told my husband I dreamt our daughter’s name. It wasn’t a name we’d considered at all. I felt embarrassed and nervous to bring my half-clairvoyance to him. I expected him to scoff, to deny vehemently that I had heard her name in my dreams. Instead, he smiled, eyes crinkling, bemused. Said, Alright. I guess that’s her name.

In Japanese, my first language, Midori’s name is written 緑莉。The first character means, literally, “green,” and describes the color of new buds and shoots in spring. 莉 is an old character for white jasmine, a flower I have heard is planted in Lebanon by doorways to welcome visitors with their starry blossoms and delicate scent—a nod to my husband’s family of origin. 莉 also has the same root character as my sister’s name, another family tie, a wish that my daughter might emulate my sister’s brilliant and stubborn sense of self. 

But taken all together, 緑莉 is a name imbued by the greenness of living things, a name with the hope that our child will be verdant, vivid. Though I heard her name in my dreams, I gave her these characters as a wish or prayer. That she might live in the natural world, that she might breathe deeply of fresh air, drink cold water, feel rain and sun on her face. 

My milk-drinker, my baby, my darling girl. In my arms, at my breasts, in your name, I thrum with the desire that you will grow and flourish alongside your human and nonhuman kin. To be your mother, your food source, to obliterate my sense of self in the name of milk-making, is to hold on to a treacherous hope for a better future not just for you, but for every and all. I name you with the fervent wish not just that you will live, but that the earth will live alongside you.

Breast milk is a nutritionally perfect food. Without it, or something like formula that mimics it, babies will die. Infants, after all, do not eat solid food for at least the first four months of their life. They don’t even drink water; breast milk has everything an infant might need. A combination of proteins, fats, and sugars, human breast milk contains over two hundred sugars to help optimally nourish a baby. (For reference, other mammals produce forty to fifty sugars.) But it isn’t this combination of nutrients that makes it perfect. What makes it perfect is that when babies latch on to your nipple, their saliva is transferred through the areola into your body. Chemicals in the baby’s saliva alerts your body to what the baby needs. If the baby is dehydrated, about to catch a cold, or going through a growth spurt and needs more calories, chemical indicators from the baby’s spit enters your body. Like tiny letters forced through a mammary mail slot, your body then reads these messages and reformulates the next “batch” of milk to address those needs. Breast milk, then, is perfect because it is relational and responsive. 

But lactating is no joke even under the best of circumstances. It requires extra nutrition and hydration. Stressed parents cannot lactate as well as they might without stress. Poor or nonexistent parental leave policies make it impossible for a body to get the chemical input it needs from an infant to lactate well. And these are simply the barriers that exist without a warming climate.

As the world boils and the climate collapses, lactating humans are subject to myriad new difficulties. Those who are pregnant and lactating are more prone to water-, food-, and insect-borne illnesses. Rising sea levels, heavier rains, and storm patterns can introduce disease-carrying creatures into drinking water supplies, which can cause preterm labor, fetal death, and serious illness. Smog and smoke exposure from forest fires can have significant impacts on a pregnancy. And then there is simply heat. Heat exposure and heat stroke can cause illness, dehydration, and even kidney failure in those who are lactating. The list goes on.

We cannot make perfect milk in an imperfect system. And yet, breastfeeding is also the most environmentally sound way to feed a baby. It requires no packaging, no extra resources, and no extra waste. There is virtually no carbon footprint associated with the act of breastfeeding. No single-use bottles, no plastic wrappers. Not only is breast milk nutritionally perfect, but it is environmentally responsible. 

But even as I write this, I see that it is a lie. “No extra resources” are needed for breastfeeding, says the National Institutes of Health. But milk-making requires so many resources! I remember sitting in that heat-swollen room. Friends in the neighborhood brought us enchiladas so we would have something to eat, and so we would not have to turn on the stove in the kitchen. They also brought two cold beers, which we held against our sweating faces. We ate the meal on a towel spread on the bed, leaving the room smelling of garlic and spice. My husband alternated between rocking our baby and refilling the plastic water jug I’d taken home from the hospital. Another friend brought a gorgeous cat fish and eggplant salan, the fish breaking up in flaky chunks under my spoon. My mother came to hand-mop the floors, the water drying instantly in the heat. Milk is not made in isolation. I would never have been able to feed my child were it not for the extra support of these people around me. 

And I cannot even begin to broach all the other societal resources needed to support lactation. Access to clean air, clean water, and clean food ensure that lactating parents have adequate nutrition to make milk. Abundant parental leave and flexible and affordable childcare allow working parents the time required to lactate. When my daughter was a newborn, I was stunned to find how much time it took simply to feed her. It was like I was working a second job alongside my own job. Even the simple dignity of a quiet, darkened room is rare—breast milk is best produced when the lactating parent is relaxed and unstressed. And yet, how many meetings was I forced to take while pumping milk in the sterile chill of my office’s “Mother’s suite,” a euphemism for a dull closet with a lamp where I sometimes ran into building staff taking surreptitious lunch breaks? 

Lactation exists, after all, on a removal system. The body only makes more milk if the milk it already made is removed, whether by hungry child or sucking breast pump. To cease lactation for the duration of my work day would be to send a message to my mammary glands that there was no longer a child to feed. So it was paramount that I continue to make milk, even when away from Midori. But of course when I returned to work and tried to pump milk for my child I found that my supply dropped dramatically. 

I was stressed, grasping for time I did not have, not eating or drinking enough. In the end, I turned to supplementing breast milk with formula. 

The literature on breastfeeding’s environmental impact can at times lean decidedly toward vilifying formula as less environmentally friendly. Most formula is a byproduct of cow milk production, and is therefore intimately linked to the environmental ravages of the dairy industry. Formula must also be transported by road, using carbon-emitting vehicles. And then there is the packaging to speak of, the plastic tubs and bags, not to mention the waste, the overuse of water, the purchase of plastic bottles and machines to mix the formula. 

But I don’t want to join these conversations that shame those who use formula. After all, I am one of them. Instead, I want to point to the stink of misogyny that permeates this entire discourse. A chorus of voices saying something like: It is natural to lactate, it is natural to be a food source, and because it is “natural”—that word forgiving of so many sins—it is easy, and therefore need not be acknowledged as labor. How does one perform their “natural” function when humans pervert and destroy nature all around us?      

When formula-using parents and breastfeeding parents are pitted against each other in the realm of the environment, I yearn to point to the hands that build the arena of our conflict to begin with. Is it the fault of parents feeding their children that the environment has collapsed, continues to crumble? Or is it perhaps factors beyond their control?  

(I want, here, to talk about the predatory tactics companies use to market formula in Vietnam, China, among others, discouraging breastfeeding in an attempt to feed their own bottom line. I want to talk about how uneven it seems to discuss the environmental impact of formula-feeders versus breastfeeders while the U.S. military emits more carbon than entire nations. But these are essays, even books, in their own right, and I would do these arguments a disservice to discuss them briefly here. I suppose what I want to say to you is that my gaze roves while my child suckles at my breast. I see the many world-eaters around me and want to point a finger, call them out by name.)

I have fed my child with my body and I have fed her from a tin and I know a person might turn to formula for many reasons: because it works, because their child has a sensitivity, because they do not have the adequate support from their doctors, their workplaces, their communities. I read journal article after journal article discussing breast milk versus formula, and I feel that everything profoundly misses the founding conundrum, which is to say: 

I am a mother and an animal, and I would do anything to feed my daughter. But, precisely because I am a mother and an animal, I want my daughter to live in a world that is green and alive. And I cannot choose one over the other because they seem, to me, to be one and the very same. 

Even if we are not capable of huge environmental change, if we live in tune with each other as kith and kin, we cannot help but work toward a shared, more inhabitable world. If I think of my daughter and think of the world I want for her, and act accordingly, that might be enough. Or at least, the start of enough. 

Over a year has passed since I sat in that swollen room, learning to lactate. Now, I am embarking on the end of that journey, weaning my daughter, teaching my body to stop becoming a food source. Outside, there is no heat wave, but it is unseasonably warm for winter. My father sends a photo from a business trip to our homeland of Japan: First time in 130 years no snow on Mt Fuji. Occasional fruit flies flit around our trash cans, no cold snap to kill them. The forecast promises snow on Thursday. Yesterday it was 65 degrees. My husband wears sandals to take my daughter on a walk. Last week, no green onions or carrots—things my daughter loves to gnaw on—in the grocery store thanks to an E. coli outbreak. I throw out her mold-infested plastic bath toys, in fear of chemicals that might leach into the water. Even as I stop being her food source, I yearn toward the world her name paints. I am trying to live, just live. We are trying together.