Baby formula shelves were nearly empty May 12 at a CVS drug store in San Francisco amid a nationwide shortage.

Our first thought, when we learned of the infant formula shortage currently plaguing our nation, was not: “Oh no, what about all those wretchedly hungry infants and their distraught parents?”

It was more along the lines of: “Lord help us, here comes a tsunami of bickering over what constitutes decent child-rearing in the post-industrial, post-capitalist, history-bereft social media hellscape we call a culture.”

Which is not to say we’re insensitive to the plight of wretchedly hungry infants or distraught parents.

But the surface problem — an industrial food system has become insecure — and the deeper problem — we are a species with a checkered past when it comes to efforts at besting “nature” — are apparently not as interesting as the drama now predictably unfolding on every peak and in every crevice of media: bottle versus breast! It’s Mommy War time. Come and get it, folx. Free (non-GMO) popcorn for all.

There are tons of reasons people don’t breastfeed: They’re too busy. They don’t want to. They try and hate it. They try and it doesn’t work out. They don’t have breasts. Their babies are adopted. Their babies have special needs. Paid parental leave is still a fantasy, and pumping (i.e. machine milking) is objectively awful.

Formula is a necessary tool in a complicated world, we’re thankful it exists, and we’d like to see corporations that produce it held to the highest regulatory standards (including a free market so that consumers have actual choice and are not dependent for their babies’ sustenance upon literally two for-profit entities).

However, to ignore the significance of this crisis in the context of what led us here is lazy and irresponsible.

Industrially produced artificial infant food was a concerted capitalist bid in the early-mid 20th century to co-opt and profit massively off what a lot of, if not most, women could do much, much better themselves, for free. As such, it was (and still is) heavily marketed and advertised. Doctors were conscripted to advise their (mostly well-off) patients not to breastfeed. Breastfeeding is gross! It’s unladylike! Boobs are totally offensive in non-sexual contexts! Modern, special, white, well-off women don’t have to do that dirty work! The stain of racism in obstetrics and gynecology, to say nothing of wet nursing, found its apotheosis in the way a well-respected Los Angeles OB/GYN encouraged one of our mothers to use formula in the late 1960s: “Breastfeeding is for the natives!”

By the 1970s, the manufacturers of infant formula had tapped out the American market, so they turned toward “third world” countries, notably sub-Saharan Africa, where they undertook an unconscionable (and tragically successful) campaign to convince the “natives” that formula is awesome and modern and look, all those rich white women in America are doing it, and everyone knows rich white women can’t be wrong. The result? In lots of places where clean water wasn’t consistently a thing, a whole lot of babies died of dysentery.

“Brief history of food,” Jill Lepore wrote in the New Yorker in 2009. “When the rich eat white bread and formula feed, the poor eat brown bread and breast feed; then they switch places.”

Breastfeeding is characterized these days as either a bourgeois entitlement (who has the time or luxury to devote oneself to behaving like a mammal!?) or some kind of biological essentialist, sadomasochist punishment (“I shouldn’t have to! You can’t make me!”).

It is obvious to the point of absurdity that “fed is best,” but thought leaders who intentionally misrepresent vast evidence to offer false equivalencies are lame ideologues. And if we’re going to have a serious conversation about any of this, we must face our collective complicity in upholding an appalling system in which the freedom to nurse one’s own children is now dependent on belonging safely to the leisure class.

A 2020 study from the University of Connecticut revealed that as social capital around breastfeeding increased, formula manufacturers invested more advertising dollars in pushing “toddler milk.” From 2006 to 2015, sales of this “next stage” formula more than doubled from $39 million to $92 million. Is there medical justification in the toddler market to the tune of $92 million for a product composed mainly of powdered milk, corn syrup and vegetable oil!? Obviously there is not, and this greedy, malfeasant “market expansion” has undoubtedly factored into the shortage for infants whose lives are on the line.

If the last two years have taught us anything, it’s that we cannot count on gas being cheap or hospital beds being available or big-box shelves being stocked. What is the safest, healthiest, most secure and equitable way forward? We have a few more weeks, even with the Biden administration doing its utmost, until formula is restocked and our current alarm recedes into the comfortable delusion that everything can be bought. It’s a reckoning we’re having about fossil fuel reliance, climate resilience, food justice in general and environmental sustainability, and somehow we’re having it without shaming people who live in food deserts or drive cars because they have no access to public transportation.

Formula isn’t shameful any more than antibiotics for a staph infection, C-section for placenta previa or stitches for a gaping wound. Formula is a lifesaving, life-giving tool. But given that the industrial production line is beyond our purview, and supply chains have weaker links than most of us ever imagined, let’s refocus the inquisition on mammalian vulnerabilities and needs over invented reality. Industry, science and technology should serve people, not the other way around.

Elisa Albert is a full-spectrum doula and the author of the forthcoming novel “Human Blues.” Jennifer Block is a journalist and author of “Everything Below the Waist: Why Health Care Needs a Feminist Revolution.”