feeding claire

Babble has published a Food Issue. Very interesting stuff. I haven’t read all of the articles yet; but I really enjoyed The Backlash to Breast Is Best:

But is that really what we want? Powder rather than real power? In a brilliant New Yorker piece about the rise of the breast pump, Jill Lepore questions the direction of breastfeeding advocacy, which seems to be settling on the pump as a compromise to this conflict, with tax incentives for businesses with “Mother’s Rooms” in which babies are explicitly not welcome (“pump stations,” Lepore calls them) and Baby-Friendly hospitals sending women home with manual plastic pumps, and the president of the National Organization for Women calling for more “corporate lactation” programs. “It appears no longer within the realm of the imaginable that . . . ‘breastfeeding-friendly’ could mean making it possible for women and their babies to be together,” writes Lepore. “When did ‘women’s rights’ turn into ‘the right to work’?”

What a great question. Why did American feminism evolve in such a way that we think of biology as destiny, and that destiny as a prison? Why are we so willing to surrender the parts and processes that makes us female rather than demanding that society support them? We’ve broken down doors and cracked glass ceilings, when what we need to do is redesign the building.

Also, my friend Jackie has an interview with Nina Planck, the author of Real Food for Mother and Baby – a book I haven’t read but Planck seems to have good ideas:

The term that I prefer is food poverty. A lack of good food for any reason: financial, cultural, geographical. Right now we’re seeing a very rare condition unknown throughout history, a combination of rickets and obesity. In earlier times, this never would’ve existed: overweight children with vitamin D deficiency, excess calories and malnutrition. Food poverty will always be with us in some form. The question is how to eat the best you can on the budget you have. I suggest buying only real foods — not industrial fakes, substitutes, or things engineered to be in low in one thing and high in another. I grew up on supermarket meat and I’m in great health. What I didn’t eat was fake meat, fake cheese, and Fruit Loops.

I admit that I ate Fruit Loops when I was a kid but I am in good health now. But what she is trying to say that is important is that kids don’t grow up thinking that Fruit Loops is food. I’m definitely going to check out her book.