I’m not sure what I can say to make this sound funnier than just quoting PETA‘s own press release title:

PETA Asks Ben & Jerry’s to Dump Dairy and Go With Human Milk Instead

No offense to vegetarians or vegans (looking at you, mom and Iris), but seriously, how fucked up are these people?  Either they are complete idiots living in a fantasy world or else they are attention-starved media whores looking for some cheap exposure.

I did a quick search, and apparently Americans eat an average of about 12.9 quarts (US) of regular ice cream a year.  Add to that an additional 6 quarts of reduced-fat, light, lowfat and nonfat ice cream, and you are talking about almost 4.75 gallons of ice cream per year, per American.  For the record, frozen yogurt, water ice, sherbet, and some miscellaneous treats make up the rest of the 21.5 quarts of frozen desserts we consume a year.

It appears that babies take in between 19 and 30 ounces of milk a day, so I would expect that the average nursing woman produces somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-30 ounces of milk per day.  If that’s right, one woman would produce 70 to 85 gallons per year.

If  we assume there is about a 1-to-1 match between raw milk and ice cream output (which probably underestimates this) then by my made-up calculations it would take about 14 million gallons of tittie juice to account for 1% of the US market share for all types of ice cream.  Even if we assume a heroic 50 oz. per day per “supplier”, it would take the output of 100,000 lactating women to make enough breast milk for 1% of the US ice cream intake.

I’m having trouble confirming this, but I believe Ben & Jerry’s has a market share percentage in the teens, so multiply the above number accordingly.  My sources are shitty and my math is suspect, but they should at least be somewhere in right order of magnitude so you can see what sort of scale we are looking at here.

Coming back to my original premise, for this to be a serious request PETA must either assume Ben & Jerry’s can somehow drastically increase the per-person production of breast milk, or else that they will tap the milk output of the developing world.  I have to assume that putting a million lactating Chinese peasants in barns is not what PETA meant to suggest, but it looks to me like that is about what it would take.

Oh, and they have to assume that HUMAN BREAST MILK ICE CREAM would be acceptable to enough US consumers to not kill off the Ben & Jerry’s brand.

I guess that leaves the “whores” thing…