While Hokkaido is well known for its dairy products, Jemie Lim, 29, probably didn't have many opportunities to try them as she was too busy drinking her own breast milk.
Lim, who gave birth to a baby girl on Sept 13, took to TikTok to share how she ended up downing some 4,450ml of milk during a recent holiday to Japan with her husband earlier this month.
At the start of the one-minute video, Lim showed herself pumping her breasts during her flight en route to Singapore.
After which, she alternated between drinking the expressed breast milk (EBM) and water from a flask.
Other clips showed her consuming milk in places like her hotel room and even in public.
"There wasn't any nursing room nearby so I just [pumped] at a random place," she explained.
In the video captions, she explained that her initial plan was to store her EBM in the hotel's freezer.
However, due to "unexpected circumstances", she wasn't able to freeze some packets of EBM successfully. She only managed to freeze and store some from the first day of her trip.
At the end of her trip, she collected the frozen EBM and packed it into a cooler bag so she could bring it back to Singapore to feed her baby.
Speaking to AsiaOne, Lim said that prior to her trip, she had emailed the hotel to check if she could store her breast milk in their freezer.
While they gave her the green light, they "[made] it very clear" that they don't recommend it as they couldn't guarantee the quality of the breast milk.
True enough, on the morning of her second day, when she checked the first day's batch of milk, she found that some were not frozen.
"Very strange as it should not take so long to become frozen," she recounted.
Worried her breast milk would be spoilt by the end of the trip, she decided not to risk it and drank it all herself.
While Lim admitted that the thought of binning the milk did cross her mind, but she decided to press on and ended up drinking every single drop.
"I kept telling myself I should dump it for the next pump. But in the end, I [didn't] do so because it is all my effort, my hard work," she confessed to AsiaOne.
Not used to drinking milk
In general, Lim doesn't consume milk, so downing 4,450ml of it throughout her trip was quite a feat, she confessed.
Prior to this, she would usually just drink a few drops of it to ensure the temperature is right for her baby.
"I am not a milk person, I don't drink milk at all. Only drank some during pregnancy because my gynaecologist said [the] baby needs calcium," she shared.
She added that this was the reason why she needed to drink the breast milk with water, to dilute the milky taste.
Curious to know how it tastes? Lim, who has since returned to Singapore, revealed that fresh EBM is actually sweet with not much taste.
However, frozen breast milk is "very fishy" and she almost puked the first time she tried it.
