Mining liquid gold: The lively, contested terrain of human milk valuations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As global health organizations and national governments tout "breast is best," the value of human milk is being calculated - and profited from - in increasingly diverse forms. In this paper I chart three of the major ways in which human milk is being economically valued: calculating breastfeeding as a contribution to a country's GDP; buying and selling human milk to hospitals for profit; and manufacturing key components of human milk and the infant gut. In exploring these bioeconomies, I draw together two approaches to biocapital not often put into conversation with one another: a focus on the micrological generative capacities of biological material, and attention to the macrological biopolitical governance of populations. I argue that juxtaposing these bioeconomies demonstrates key features of human milk biocapital: the multi-scalar workings of reproductive biopolitical valuation and governance; the human and more-than-human ecologies (and labours) on which biocapital depends; and the feminist geographical contestations that shape, and sometimes undermine, these valuations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".