When Chris’s parents had booked their trip to come visit us this summer, Chris suggested that it might be a good idea for us to look up well-rated infant formulas available in Australia for them to cart over to supplement the baby’s diet. Australian food regulations are just as strict as EU food regulation, so we knew the infant formula would be of much higher quality than the Similac and other mainstream American infant formula brands here. Plus, I wasn’t sure if/when my milk supply would start decreasing whenever my period would come back, so I wanted to be prepared. And well, I’d rather be prepared with Australian formula rather than American formula.
In Australia and the EU, corn syrup or high fructose corn syrup are pretty much unknown ingredients, and so they aren’t used as empty and cheap calories used to fatten up babies the way it is here. I also think that dairy in Australia is overall, just far higher quality than that in the U.S. because again, corn is not the main ingredient used to feed cows there — grass is, as that’s natural and normal for them to eat. In Australia, when you buy a carton of cow’s milk, it’s just assumed (and from my perspective, taken for granted) that the cow who produced that milk for you ate grass, not corn, and therefore, that milk tastes much different than the average cow milk here, which came from cows primarily eating grain/corn, unless otherwise stated.
I chose three brands for them to bring back: two of them are organic and one of them is a goat milk based formula, which Chris got excited about – I’m sure he wants his own bottle of that! The one we opened first was Bellamy’s Organic, which is the first certified organic infant formula in Australia, founded by a Tasmanian mother. It’s made with grass-fed cow milk from New Zealand, specifically A2 milk, which is supposed to be easier to digest for babies and more nutrient dense than A1 milk (I guess that’s regular milk….?). When Chris first opened the can and smelled it, he reveled at the scent and had me come over to get a whiff. As soon as I smelled it, I started giggling nonstop almost — I couldn’t believe how good it smelled! It had a scent that was reminiscent of a sweet Asian milk biscuit (no, there’s no sugar in this!!). It was so pleasing and nice to smell, unlike the formulas here. Bobbie has a pretty nondescript smell and isn’t offensive at all, but it doesn’t hold a candle in terms of “pleasantness” of scent like Bellamy’s.
It wasn’t even just the scent of the formula that got us: the way it mixed with water was so, so different. As soon as you add the formula powder to a bottle of room temperature water, it almost immediately dissolves. Then, when you shake it, almost no bubbles or foam appear; in fact, the color and the viscosity of the formula appears almost exactly like breast milk. When we put a bottle of the Bellamy’s next to a bottle of my breast milk, you almost couldn’t tell the difference between the two. That would NEVER be the case with any American formula, even Bobbie, which markets itself to be like European formula. Bobbie foams up like crazy, so I could spot the difference in Bobbie vs. breast milk from across a room.
Chris mixed the baby’s first ever bottle of Bellamy’s formula while we were out at lunch on Sunday, and she seemed to enjoy it. Her initial expression was one of “Hmmm, this is new. What is this?” And then, she seemed to lap it up and really relish each slurp. When Chris stopped halfway through her feed to burp her, I opened the bottle to take a smell again, she started yelping, as though to get mad that I might be taking her Bellamy’s milk from her!
“She might end up preferring Bellamy’s milk over your breast milk,” Chris said to me, tauntingly.
Uh-huh. Sure, she will….
I told our nanny that Chris said this, and she laughed and said, “Chris! Nothing is better than mommy’s booby milk! Nothing!!”