Baby formula crisis: As the cost of living bites, meet the parents struggling to feed their infants

Charlotte Lytton explores the unimaginable choices facing parents who are struggling to meet their babies’ most basic needs

The skyrocketing price of baby formula is leaving some families in a desperate financial situation (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

When her son was born with a tongue-tie and couldn’t breastfeed, Payzee Mahmod’s “lifeline” was formula. But last month, a report showed that the price of formula had skyrocketed by 24 per cent, leaving some families in so desperate a financial situation that they were resorting to theft, and even the black market. Horrified, Mahmod quickly set up her first-ever crowdfunding campaign, wanting to help those in dire need. She hadn’t expected that within days, donations would hit £5,000 – and that weeks on, messages from vulnerable families would continue to pour in.

The campaigner’s inbox is now filled with stories of parents sharing the desperate measures to which they are being driven: watering down formula in order to conserve stores, spacing their baby’s feeds further apart, or forgoing their own meals in order to afford the next tub. Others have begun using tins of condensed milk instead of formula, while in one particularly distressing case, the mother of a six-month-old little girl used cow’s milk – which is highly dangerous for babies. “Oh my god,” was Mahmod’s reaction to reading the latter message. The mother had explained that she “felt terrible, because it made her baby really unwell”.

With food inflation hitting 18.4 per cent in May, and the UK’s inflation across the board at 8.7 per cent – almost three times that of a comparable economy like the US – struggling parents are resorting to increasingly risky measures. Nothing paints the current level of despair so starkly as that mother, who told Mahmod that “I didn’t have any choice”. Just as she had no choice but to return to buying formula once her baby had recovered – and has since been cutting out meals for herself, or eating only crackers and biscuits, “because she can’t not buy formula for her child, but she just has to save money elsewhere”.