Elspeth A. Lodge

Breast milk ice cream is London’s latest food double dare: the breast-milk-infused flavour “Baby Gaga,” is now available at the Icecreamists restaurant in London’s Covent Garden.

Icecreamists founder Matt O’Connor is confident that his take on the “miracle of motherhood” will catch on, even at at £14 pounds, or $22 a serving. “The Baby Gaga tastes creamy and rich,” he told the Daily Mail. “No-one’s done anything interesting with ice cream in the last hundred years. We’ve came up with a method of infusing ice-cream with breast milk. We wanted to completely reinvent it. And by using breast milk we’ve definitely given it a one hundred percent makeover. It’s just one of a dozen radical new flavours we’ve invented. We want to change the way people think about ice cream’.

“A costumed Baby Gaga waitress serves the ice cream in a martini glass filled with the breast milk ice cream mix. Liquid nitrogen is then poured into the glass through a syringe,” reports the Daily Mail. And the restaurant will serve the  the concoction with whisky and other cocktails as well, making it a bit more of an adult-oriented treat.

So what flavours complement breast milk? The restaurant mixes in Madagascar vanilla pods and lemon zest with the baby milk before the mixture is churned into ice cream.

The breast milk was provided by mothers who answered an advertisement on online mothers’ forum Mumsnet. Victoria Hiley, 35, was one of 15 women who sold milk to the restaurant.

“It wasn’t intrusive at all to donate – just a simple blood test. What could be more natural than fresh, free-range mothers milk in an ice cream?” she said.

When Ms. Hiley first saw the advertisement she thought it might be a joke, but when she found out it wasn’t, she provided the first 30 fluid ounces of milk, enough to make the first 50 servings. Women get paid £15 for every ten ounces of milk.

“Some people will hear about it and go, ‘yuck’ but actually it’s pure, organic, free-range and totally natural,” said Mr. O’Connor. “I had a Baby Gaga just this morning and I feel great.”

With files from Reuters

School authorities in England’s Oxfordshire have banned swimming goggles, relenting only for children with medical notes.

What exactly the council believes is so dangerous about goggles remains mysterious — a spokesman for the Oxfordshire County Council refused to give a specific reason why goggles have been banned.

Parents of the county in the country have branded the ruling “nutty” and “extreme,” reports the Telegraph.

“This local authority, like others throughout the UK, reflects to schools the national guidance provided by various governing sport bodies on this issue,” said a spokesman for the council.”These organisations include The Amateur Swimming Association (ASA), the Swimming Teachers Association (STA), the Association for Physical Education and the Institute of Sport and Recreation Management.”

In June of 2009 Teachers and governors at Ysgol Bryn Coch junior school, in Mold, north Wales, banned goggles. Parents told the Telegraph they thought the rule was “bonkers.”

The headmistress Lynne Williams said “It has been recognised by the British Association of Advisors and Lecturers in Physical Education that goggles can pose a real risk to children, and this has been accepted by the governors.”

Another school, Sidwells Primary school in Exeter, Devon, also banned goggles in 2009. Tracy Brock, the mother of a St. Sidwells student responded to the incident on Parent Dish: “Children are being wrapped up in cotton wool now. If it carries on like this we are going to be breeding a generation of namby pambies. As a kid, I spent every waking moment of summer vacation outdoors swimming in the deep end, climbing trees and jumping on trampolines without a safety net. As long as we got home before the streetlights came on, it was all good. I don’t advocate bringing back all the crazy things we were allowed to do back in the day. Some of them were seriously dangerous (eating candy in secrecy on the roof of my house comes to mind). But banning swim goggles is a slippery slope.”

In opposition to the parental argument, BAALPE advice states: “Head teachers should inform parents carers that goggles can be a hazard and cause permanent eye injury. Wet plastic is very slippery and frequent, incorrect or unnecessary adjustment or removal of them, by pulling them away from the eyes instead of sliding them over the forehead, can lead to them slipping from the pupil’s grasp with the hard plastic causing severe injury.”