Breast milk cheese the topic du jour

New York City's health commission has advised the chef of a local restaurant against making any more cheese from his wife's excess breast milk.

"It's not intended for adults or for wide public consumption," a Health Department spokesperson told the New York Post this week.

Chef Daniel Angerer has created a firestorm of commentary afterdescribing on his blog how he made cheese from excess milk that his wife had pumped for their infant daughter, Arabella.

"My cooking instincts are rather natural," he wrote on his blog, www.danielangerer.com, last month.

"But THIS is a whole other level of 'natural' - Mommy's Milk, from a human mommy not a cow, sheep or goat."

Angerer, who owns the restauant Klee Brasserie, wrote that he decided to experiment with mother's milk after his daughter celebrated her one-month birthday.

"We are fortunate to have plenty of pumped mommy's milk on hand, and we even freeze a good amount of it," he wrote. "My spouse actually thinks of donating some to an infant milk bank, which could help little babies in Haiti and such, but for the meantime ... our small freezer ran out of space. To throw it out would be like wasting gold."

The chef considered the ethics of making cheese out of mother's milk but concluded it didn't cross any line.

Other experiments include pie, pancakes, cornbread

Once Angerer blogged about the experiment, customers at his restaurant began asking for samples. He has never sold it and has no plans to put it on his menu, he said.

Since then, hundreds of people have weighed in, commenting on his blog and on the hundreds of news stories that have been written about him this week.

People have expressed shock and horror at the prospect of eating cheese made from mother's milk. Others have written about their surprise that people are so prepared to eat cow's milk cheese but express disgust at eating cheese made from human milk.

Some commenters posted about their own experiments with breast milk cuisine, describing how they made key lime pie, pancakes and cornbread.

One woman from Singapore detailed her own failed attempt back in 2006 to make cheese from breast milk. The blogger, who goes by the name rani, could not get the milk to curdle, which is a necessary step in cheese making.

Breast milk doesn't curdle because it doesn't have enough protein content. Angerer got past this problem by adding cow's milk to the breast milk ingredients. He has posted his recipe on his blog.

And what does breast milk cheese taste like?

"It tastes like cow's milk cheese, kind of sweet," he told the New York Post.