Like most stories it's actually less funny than the stinger makes it sound, but I did just remember it lately and think huh, that's strange, I guess?
So my betrothed's exes are now married to each other. This story is about North. She and her husband have a baby together. These people are family to us, so that little girl is our niece and we love the shit out of her. Her name is Zelda.
When she was born it turned out Zelda would not, under any circumstances, drink milk that had been pumped. It was really weird, she'd nurse just fine but when offered bottles she'd just cry and cry.
North pumped religiously trying to find some method of actually using this excess milk, but Zelda remained adamant. North researched the phenomena after months of trying, and pumping, and stockpiling, and freezing. Some breast milk apparently has enzymes that turn it sour on contact with air? Or some variety of: the second the milk hit the air it became disgusting.
So then North had a freezer full of breast milk the baby wouldn't drink. I think even after finding out that her milk couldn't be consumed she had to keep pumping cause a baby only drinks so much. She didn't want to waste all the milk, but the baby was no help at all. She did what any reasonable person would do, and googled ways to dispose of excess breast milk. There's co-ops for breast milk, but no baby was gonna want her milk, as Zelda had proved.
That's when things got. A little less mainstream. Some people suggested making cheese from it. That's a real thing. Breast milk cheese. But again, North was pretty sure her milk would not taste very good, so she dove deeper.
Her husband did regularly drink kefir, and he wasn’t afraid of stinky milk so he decided to try to make kefir out of it. But breast milk is a fucking beast, and it was so antimicrobial that it killed all his bacteria. He attempted to boil it and break down the proteins and not only did it smell rank but it still killed his kefir.
What she eventually found was soap. It turns out that breast milk makes amazing soap, it has tons of good skin properties and doesn't go bad. More importantly no one would have to consume it.
But North had. A lot of milk. When faced with the prospect of waste milk or make soap, North grabbed soap making by the throat and made it her bitch. She bought molds, stocked up her essential oils, and went to work.
She made piles and piles of soap, because again, there was so much milk. At a certain point she goes, "Hey, do you guys want soap? One thing though, it's made of my breast milk."
And we did have a moment of like. Hm. That's weird, but is it? It's soap, it'll smell nice, it'll be good for our skin. Sure.
So then, being a lovely thoughtful person, she customized soaps for us with scents we specifically favored. It arrived in a massive box, all wrapped up and pretty, and we had to store them in the freezer until we were ready to use them cause they were a little melty by nature but man it was good soap. It smelled lovely, she got great scents into them.
They lasted us about a year and I was pretty bummed when they ran out.
