Abstract
In 2016 the Chinese infant formula company Feihe International signed a deal with the Canadian Dairy Commission (CDC) to process Canadian cows’ and goats’ milk for infant formula export to China. Our purpose in this paper is to understand how this deal – and the new Feihe formula factory located in Kingston, Canada – is underpinned by a series of multispecies entanglements across cow, human and goat mothers in China and Canada. To do so, we analyse official correspondence between the CDC, Feihe and City of Kingston; market reports for the dairy, goat and infant formula industries; and news articles about the Feihe infant formula plant. Conceptually, we develop an anti-colonial, multispecies entanglement framework to chart the violent inclusions, exclusions and typologizations that make milk and formula economies possible. We are specifically interested in how the Feihe–CDC deal (re)configures entanglements across species, nation, race, science and motherhood. To understand these relations, we heuristically imbricate two different sets of entanglements that underpin this deal: milk drinking, empire and genetic purity across race, breed and species; and motherhood, science and technology across humans, goats and cows. We use our threefold entanglement framework to better understand the violence of these imbrications and to work towards a multispecies feminist ethic in the infant formula industry.
Highlights
In 2016 the Chinese infant formula company Feihe International signed a deal with the Canadian Dairy Commission (CDC) to process Canadian cows’ and goats’ milk for infant formula export to China
Goats and humans across the globe are implicated within this transnational network of infant feeding: cows’ milk generally serves as the base of human infant formulas; increasingly, goats’ milk is used for premium formula products (‘Feihe-Presentation’, 2016; Paramio and Izquierdo, 2014); and Chinese mothers are targeted by breastmilk substitute (BMS) companies to feed their infants this animal-based formula
We argue that nation-building projects are themselves entangled and relational, often trucking in meanings of race, purity, genetics and nature that manifest through historical and emerging typologizations of people and animals, which have come to underpin the economic logics of the infant formula industry
Summary
In 2016 the Chinese infant formula company Feihe International signed a deal with the Canadian Dairy Commission (CDC) to process Canadian cows’ and goats’ milk for infant formula export to China. We use this threefold anticolonial, multispecies entanglement analytic attentive to inclusions, exclusions and constitutions in order to explore how the Feihe/Canada Royal Milk transnational economy is borne of more-than-human relations shaped by power-laden, hierarchical entanglements across species, empire, race, technology, nation and gender.
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