Edible Mothers, Edible Others: On Breastfeeding as Ambiguity Sara Cohen Shabot Associate Professor (Senior Lecturer) and Chair of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, The University of Haifa In 2016, the World Health Organization, together with UNICEF, provided new guidelines for breastfeeding, emphasizing its importance for the health and well-being of babies and mothers. The organizations’ recommendations included putting clear messages on formula packages, strongly warning the buyer of the harmful consequences of feeding breast milk substitutes to babies, and stressing once again the uniqueness of human milk. 1 This reinforcement of the message that nursing babies is the best option—if not in fact the only moral or healthy one—has only brought more vividly to the fore a question that has furiously divided feminist mothers for the last three or four decades: whether breastfeeding might be empowering for women or disempowering. There are clear arguments presented on both sides. Mothers defending a more essentialist and/or radical feminist view claim that breastfeeding must be reclaimed as an empowering experience that unites mothers and babies, combats capitalist notions of what should be considered productive work, and creates a feminine space exempt from patriarchal laws and demands. Feminist mothers representing more liberal views, meanwhile, consider this feminist reclaiming of breastfeeding to be a mere trap, in which the patriarchal policing of women’s bodies is continued and reinforced, romanticizing breastfeeding to convince women that dedicating themselves to feeding their babies at home is sublime, beautiful, and meaningful enough: that is, worth renouncing action and the pursuit of power in the public sphere.