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In 1939, a British doctor stood up in front of Singapore's businessmen and told them their tinned milk trade was killing babies, and that the deaths should be recorded as murder. Then she named the product. Cicely Williams had earned the right to say it the hard way. In the early 1930s, working in the Gold Coast, she kept seeing toddlers arrive at her clinic swollen, peeling and dying, always the same story: a new baby at home, and the older child moved off the breast and onto maize gruel. The local Ga mothers already had a name for it, kwashiorkor, the sickness of the child deposed by the next one. Williams worked out what it was: the gruel had no real protein in it. Take a growing child off milk and put him on a plant paste, and he falls apart from the inside. Her superior, a celebrated authority on tropical medicine, informed her she was wrong, that this was merely pellagra, already described, nothing new, and certainly nothing discovered by a junior woman. She published anyway, in The Lancet in 1935, and she was right, and it took the profession the better part of 2 decades to admit a condition that was killing children by the hundred thousand had been identified by the one doctor who actually sat with the mothers and asked what the child ate. Then Singapore, 1939, and the second fight. The shops of Malaya were stacked with sweetened condensed skimmed milk, sold with a fat, beaming white baby on the label, and mothers were being persuaded off the breast and onto it. Skimmed: the fat removed, and with it the vitamins, from the one food a baby cannot do without, sold to the poorest women in the empire as modern and superior. Williams watched the infants come in blind and dying, and delivered the speech that follows her name around: Milk and Murder. Misguided propaganda on infant feeding, she told the Rotary Club, should be punished as the most criminal form of sedition. The audience contained men who sold the stuff. She had checked the guest list first. Three years later the Japanese took Singapore. She spent the war in Changi, and 5 months of it in the hands of the Kempeitai, and came out at 6 stone, and went straight back to work. In 1948 the new World Health Organization made her its first head of maternal and child health. She died in 1992, at 98, having outlived nearly everyone who had corrected her. Her Singapore speech was dug out and reprinted in the 1970s, when the formula companies had moved from tins in Malaya to powder across Africa, and it lit the fuse under the Nestlé boycott and the 1981 marketing code the industry has been treading on ever since. She kept saying one thing for 60 years, and it is the whole argument: the animal food is the food. The baby needs milk and the child needs protein, real protein, and every fortune ever made steering mothers away from that fact was built on a mound of small graves. Turn today's formula tin round and read the ingredients. Seed oils, up near the top, in the first food of millions of children. She told a room full of salesmen what that trade was called. Nobody has ever improved on the word.