Michael Pollan on food marketing sheds light on baby formula discussion

An interview on Alternet with best-selling author Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food) ties in to our recent discussion on breastfeeding and formula marketing. Emphasis mine:

Michael Pollan (MP): I remember my mother dutifully giving us all margarine instead of butter. She would say, "Some day they're going to figure out that butter is actually better for you than margarine," and we thought she was nuts. In fact, it turned out that margarine was lethal and butter is fine.

Alternet's Terence McNally (TMN): She was still feeding it to you suspecting that would happen...?

MP: The authority of mothers was essentially destroyed by the food industry. The $32 billion a year in marketing muscle out there has undercut culture's role in determining what we eat, and culture is a fancy word for your mom.

TMN: Just to emphasize that number, that's not the food industry, that's the food marketing industry.

MP: That's advertising, studying us, packaging, figuring out how to get us to eat more.

TMN: Food industry folks say, "We don't think we should regulate this sort of thing because Americans believe in individualism and free choice, but we're all for public education." So maybe we'll throw $100 million of education up against that $32 billion of marketing.

MP: $100 million is one snack food's annual budget. The entire USDA/FDA effort to educate people about food equals one chip. [laughs] There's no contest. They control the information about food.

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Reading the "Little House" books

I've been reading the Little House series of books to my seven-year-old son Y. He loves them, even the rather slow descriptions of the prairie landscape in The House on Plum Creek.

I remember a discussion on a Jewish blog about whether the description of killing and cooking a pig in the first book, Little House in the Big Woods, was appropriate for Jewish children. I felt comfortable explaining to Y. that Laura's family is not Jewish so they eat pork. Learning about how they prepared it is educational, if a bit disgusting (which is fine). The only part I've skipped so far (besides the entire second book, Little House on the Prairie, because I don't have a copy) is the discussion about Santa Claus and how he represents the generosity in all of us, etc. When the Ingalls family goes to church for the first time I got a little nervous, but Reverend Alden just "talks to God" with no mention of Jesus.

I handled the lengthy discussions about Christmas by saying that the Jews have fun holidays throughout the year, but the Christians wait all year long for their one big celebration. Even back then Christmas seemed to be mainly about the gifts.

Even if we skip the parts that are blatantly Christian, by exposing our children to secular literature we are also exposing them to a secular/Christian lifestyle/outlook or what have you. So unless you plan to allow only "frum" books in your house that is an ongoing concern. Then you have to worry about not having exposed your children to good writing.

The Little House books are good mussar about making do with a little bit. The girls share a reader by holding up pages in the middle; Laura starts from the beginning while Mary looks at the more advanced material. My son was intrigued when Laura and Mary get money from their parents for a new slate, but realize they don't have enough for a pencil until they remember their Christmas pennies from a couple of years back. They decide to spend Mary's penny on the pencil, and Mary will own half of Laura's penny. My son and I discussed why they didn't just buy two pencils. Pencils aren't really a luxury. But slates were, and they only had one of those. So another pencil would have been superfluous.

We're about to get to my favorite scene in the entire series, from the chapter "Grasshoppers Walking" in On the Banks of Plum Creek. Here's an excerpt:

...Across the dooryard the grasshoppers were walking shoulder to shoulder and end to end, so crowded that the ground seemed to be moving ...

...Grasshoppers were walking over Carrie. They came pouring in the east window, side-by-side, end-to-end, across the window sill and down the wall and over the floor.

...That whole daylong the grasshoppers walked west. All the next day they went on walking west. And on the third day they walked without stopping.

...They walked steadily over the house. They walked over the stable. They walked over Spot until Pa shut her in the stable. They walked into Plum Creek and drowned, and those behind kept on walking in and drowning until the dead grasshoppers choked the creek and filled the water and live grasshoppers walked across them.

...The fourth day came and the grasshoppers went on walking. The sun shone hotter than ever, with a terribly bright light. It was nearly noon when Pa came from the stable shouting: “Caroline! Caroline! Look out doors! The grasshoppers are flying.”

I found the excerpt in an article by researcher Charles R. Bomar about the extinction of these locusts: This represented the last stand of the Rocky Mountain Locust on the Great Plains, and no major swarms were recorded again in the Great Plains. The last specimens collected were recorded from southern Canada in 1902.

Reading through the series by Laura Ingalls Wilder, we can see how the self-sufficient lifestyle represented in Little House in the Big Woods also becomes extinct, as Laura's family becomes more prosperous yet more dependent on credit, hard currency, and store-bought goods.

Every family needs at least one

My son, A., spent half an hour early this morning searching for his wallet. Finally I gave him money for a new bus ticket. After lunch I asked my 4-year-old whether she knew where his wallet was.

"Yes!" she answered. "But it's in a place where I can't reach it." She skips into my bedroom and points to my nightstand. I pull it out, but there is only a dust-bunny underneath.

"Is this where it is?"

"No, it's in-between and I can't get it."

Sure enough, the wallet and a paperback (Ami McKay's The Birth House) are lodged between the bed and the nightstand.

Both she and my older daughter are really, really good at remembering where they last saw things. They must have some kind of gene for visual memory.

Michael Chabon and Yiddish

Michael Chabon got the idea for his book, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, after discovering a Yiddish phrase-book called "Say it in Yiddish" from the 1950's. He embarrassed himself by writing an essay treating the book as an anachronism and making fun of people who wanted to learn to say "I need a tourniquet" in Yiddish. He lateer laerned that the book had been commissioned by a publisher for the benefit of tourists to Israel, where Yiddish was still widely spoken. Chabon might find it interesting that Yiddish is still spoken in Ramat Gan today (and, of course, in many charedi communities). You can find more in the afterword of his book.

Jet lag and secondary jet lag

I handle jet lag well upon arrival in the US. We function during the day, despite waking up at 3 am for several days. By the second morning the kids already woke at 7:30. The return is different. Typically we are all awake at night the first week, then I suffer for an additional week. It's not just the jetlag; it's having to jump back into the summer "routine." I find myself not remembering things that happened during that first week at home. And my husband complains about "secondary jet lag" from everyone else's night-wakings.

We arrived yesterday afternoon. My 7yo then slept all night, getting up in time for my husband to take him to camp. Go figure. My 4yo slept for a while then lay quietly with her head on my lap during the wee hours, and then slept again from 4am to 1:00 PM. I slept only from 6:30 to 10:30 am.

I am determined to beat the jet lag this time. I have to order school books, prepare sheva brachot, and plan a vacation, while keeping the house running with everyone home all day. I read that when fatigue hits, one should drink coffee and take a nap until the caffeine kicks in. I plan to try this approach, but am open to other suggestions.

More on Rashi's Daughters

The Rebbetzin's Husband gave a talk in his shul on what is actually known about Rashi's daughters.
We appreciate him taking the time to put it up.

Rashi's Daughters: Joheved - Myths and Facts: Part I and Part II

Rashi's Daughters, Book I: Jocheved

My friend, who ordered Rashi's Daughters, Book I: Jocheved by Maggie Anton for our book club, asked me to read it and tell her my thoughts. Not having read any reviews I didn't know what to expect.

Anton introduces us to the life of the renowned classical Biblical and Talmudic commentator Rabbi Salomon Isaac of Troyes (Rashi) and his family. The oldest daughter, Jocheved, studies Talmud with her father and borrows her father's tefillin (phylacteries) to say morning prayers.

We learn about the family's meals, bathroom habits (they collect moss to use for toilet paper), menstrual cycles, parchment making and wine-making (Anton assumes that Rashi is a vintner, although this may be a myth).

It's fascinating to speculate on the daily life of an important Jewish family in the 11th century, even though the portrait of Rashi's family is too intimate and completely unbelievable. But as Anton states in the afterword, ". . . because I am writing fiction, I can say whatever I like."

The second half of the book, leading up to the wedding of Yocheved and Meir, includes long discussions about the characters' sexual frustrations and quotations of what appear to be every existing Talmudic passage relating to sex. Anton throws in some quotes from Tractate Kallah (Bride), which her readers probably think is an ancient sex manual. In fact, after reading this book you might think the Talmud is entirely about women and sex with a bit of winemaking on the side.

In one scene, Rashi catches Meir and Yocheved kissing. (The yeshiva bachurim, or unmarried students, board in Rashi's house.) After he orders her to review the fourth commandment (either Anton means the fifth commandment, honoring one's parents, or she assumes her readers follow the Christian numeration), Jocheved blames Rashi for both delaying her wedding and being away so much when she was small. Thus chastised, Rashi takes Meir aside and shares in graphic detail the difficulties he experienced on his own wedding night, because he had relied on texts with no father or brother to explain things. Finally, Rashi indicates to the engaged couple that he will look the other way if they fool around in the future.

I couldn't finish this book.

Seven reasons I haven't been blogging over the holiday

I started several posts but could not be inspired to finish any of them. Below are the main reasons, one for each day of Pesach:

1. House guests.
2. H.A.D.
3. Husband and children on vacation.
4. A trip to the Hula.
5. Hot potatoes--cooking them, that is. Lots and lots of them.
6. Hordes of delicious book club books imported by said guests. The best so far is The World to Come by Dara Horn. And not just because her name starts with an H.
   
7. Hanging loose and enjoying the fun.

Hope you are having a wonderful holiday.

Our English Story Hour

My town doesn't attract a large number of new English-speaking olim, having been eclipsed by Raanana, distant Beit Shemesh and Modiin. But we now have a new attraction--an English story hour.

Our group consists of six or seven families. Some I knew before, and the rest met through our community's email list. Each week a different family hosts, chooses a book and plans a related activity. I was impressed with J, the most recent hostess. Despite having only one child, she managed to welcome the crowd and make us all feel comfortable. When I had only one or two small children I couldn't imagine inviting over one large family, much less a few small ones (most parents bring one or two children).

Today's story, The Gruffalo, is a cleverly written rhyme about a mouse who avoids getting eaten by the other forest animals and J provided materials for making a forest collage. I don't know where J got the idea, but the internet is full of activity ideas for popular children's books so non-crafty parents like myself don't have to scramble. When we hosted we read Pancakes by Eric Carle, and made pancakes. (No, I didn't have to search the internet for that idea.)

My kids (age 4 and 6) look forward to the story hour all week, and until I realized that my older children all end late that day I thought I would send them to supervise. But like all successful cooperative ventures, the story hour turned out to be as much fun for me as for the kids. I've even made some new friends, which doesn't happen often at my stage of life ("virtual" present company excluded).

We had something similar a few years ago but I never dreamed of finding enough parents to start it up again. So now all we have to do is await the influx of English speakers to our fair town. (Even though my location is an open secret, I hope you'll forgive me for being annoyingly circumspect.)

For those with low housekeeping standards: She Got Up Off the Couch by Haven Kimmel

If you are depressed about your housekeeping standards, you might take comfort from the memoir She Got Up Off the Couch by Haven Kimmel. It's the sequel to "A Girl Named Zippy." Zippy's father decides to lower the ceiling to save heat, and his family is so impressed by this improvement (". . . we were astonished to discover that finally, one single thing in our house looked normal. . .") that her mother invites her church friends to the house for the first time. The family goes about making the house as respectable as they can. The women arrive and notice the father's weapons and ammunition, the collection of animal teeth, and the sanitary napkins in the open cabinet. Soon the guests hear an unusual sound coming from the ceiling. "It was mice, and from the sound of it, about fifty of them. They were apparently being disgorged from one of the holes in the original ceiling that Dad hadn't bothered to patch when he hung the new one. . . All of our cats leapt up on the backs of the furniture in agitation, staring at the ceiling and making growls deep in their throats. The dogs watched the cats, interested."

When they find rats in the basement, so the father loads the place with poison and collects the dead ones daily in garbage bags.

So do you feel better now?

Another thing that struck me about the book is how the heroine, who is fazed by nothing (and why not after growing up in that house), hates school and is a terrible student. She has to sit on her hands to keep from fidgeting, and visits the emergency room regularly. If she were growing up today, she would have been tested, analyzed and put on Ritalin. But they left her alone and she became a brilliant writer.

Fitting Housework into Life

When I had only two children, born eighteen months apart, I didn't spend a lot of time on housework. My oldest enjoyed scattering toys around the house, crumpling any paper he could find, and biting his baby brother when I got distracted for a moment.

My husband and I developed a system to manage the house: He would start a load of laundry before leaving for shul in the mornings, and hang it afterward. In the evenings, he cleaned up the scattered legos and washed the dishes. We ate mainly potatoes and cottage cheese for dinner. On Fridays, his day off, I frantically cooked and cleaned while he shopped.

At some point this stopped working. I had more children, more cooking and laundry, and more "stuff." And a lot less tolerance for mess. I no longer had the luxury of compartmentalizing the different areas of my life: childcare, housework, time for myself. I had to find a way to make everything work together.

When I decided I needed to learn more I came across Sidetracked Home Executives by Peggy Jones and Pam Young, sisters who complained that housekeeping books were written by and for people who already knew how to keep things straight. Jones and Young divide homemakers into two categories: BOs, "Born Organized," and "SHEs," from the book's title. They decide to clean up their mess and share their hilarious experiences with their readers. My favorite part is when the sisters beg their born-organized neighbor for just one tip, and she asks them whether they reuse teabags. The sisters say no, so the neighbor suggests they throw out the teabags instead of leaving them on the counter. This is a revelation for Pam and Peggy.

As usual with these self-help books, I started off gung-ho. I prepared the cumbersome filebox of color-coded cards, each containing a daily, weekly or monthly task. What ended it for me was an episode in the book when one of the sisters decided she could not face the scheduled floor washing. The other sister couldn't talk her into it, so they added a new rule: If you really, really, don't feel like doing a particular job, you can skip it. Twice. I soon found that my "weekly" chores (which, needless to say, were never weekly in the first place) started getting done once every three weeks.

Even though their original system had problems, it made me think about my approach to home management and I still use many of their ideas.

Toward the end of the book the sisters realize that they had taken pride in their (formerly) messy homes because they imagined their creative, artistic side would be thwarted. Many people struggle with issues relating housework (not to mention those of our family members).

We have been conditioned to put career first and family second; homemaking doesn't even make the list. But while you can pay someone else to clean your house, a housekeeper alone won't make your house into a home. Someone needs to be thinking about the big picture--what kind of family life and home do you want?

Next: I discover Flylady.

Related posts:
Do Kids Care if Your House Is Dirty?
The Truth about the Jewish Superwoman
Career and Motherhood--Intro
Career and Motherhood--Part I

The Lost by Daniel Mendelsohn

I've been reading Daniel Mendelsohn's book, The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. Mendelsohn grew up in an assimilated family in New York. In the background of his visits to his older relatives in Florida lay a story about a great uncle who remained in the family's ancestral town of Bolechow, Ukraine, only to be murdered during the Holocaust along with his wife and four daughters. The writer's grandfather and the other siblings had already emigrated to Israel and the US.

The author intersperses his story with an analysis of Rashi's commentary on the Torah and that of the modern commentator Rabbi Richard Elliot Friedman. Mendelsohn continuously revisits the theme of sibling rivalry-- in the Torah, within his grandfather's family, and among his own siblings (he broke his own brother's arm as a child). I'm only about a third of the way through, but we can already see that the relationship between the brother in Bolechow and his American siblings is central to the story.

When Mendelsohn travels to Bolechow, Ukraine with his family, a man named Alex serves as guide and translator. Is this the same garrulous Alex with the hysterically convoluted English that appears in Jonathan Safran Foer's book, Everything is Illuminated? Everything is Illuminated is a (semi-fictional?) book about an American Jew's search for information about relatives from the Ukraine.

Mendelsohn gives Henry James a run for his money with his sentence structure:

And I might add that virtually all of the information provided by the same important source, the central database at Yad Vashem, for "Shmuel Yeger" (or "Ieger") and "Ester Jeger" (and the three daughters the database attributes to them: "Lorka Jeiger," "Frida Yeger," and "Rachel Jejger") is demonstrably wrong, from the spelling of their names to the names of their parents ("Shmuel Ieger was born in Bolechov, Poland in 1895 to Elkana and Yona," an error which, I thought when I first read this, eradicates my great-grandmother Taube Mittelmark from history,* and with her the sibling tensions that may well have resulted in Shmiel's decision to leave New York in 1914 and return to Bolechow, a decision to which his presence in this error-filled archive is attributable) to the years in which they were born and died.

*Presumably he figures out that Yona is a Hebraicized version of Taube (my own mother's name), meaning dove.

Despite its length, the passage is readable, and is an example of the way the author maintains suspense by hinting at later-to-be-revealed surprises.

I'm looking forward to reading the rest.

Crawling: A Father’s First Year Blog Tour

Mom Central invited me to participate in a Blogtour for Elisha Cooper's book Crawling: A Father’s First Year.

Elisha Cooper (no, he’s not Jewish) is an artist and children’s author living with his wife Elise in Berkeley, California. Elisha documents his journey through the first year of fatherhood after the birth of daughter Zoë.

We have all the usual milestones: The initial shock of being solely responsible for another human being, the first time alone with a baby who won't take a bottle, the first trip to the emergency room. But he moves from humorously casting himself as a clueless father to examining his ever-changing emotions. He admits how inadequate he feels next to his wife who seems to know instinctively how to calm and care for the baby. He describes his jealousy of Zoë’s and Elise’s intense feelings for each other.

What makes the book special is how he comes to terms with these feelings and refuses to let them interfere in his relationship with his growing family. Toward the end of the year when he is caring for Zoë full-time, he writes (p. 144) "I will never replace Elise. The intensity of the look she and Zoë share when they see each other at the end of the day is not replicable. But I'm needed." He never stops trying to find unique ways to connect and interact with his daughter, and develop his relationship with his wife as they adapt to their new roles.

Another thing I liked is that certain "controversial" aspects of parenting were presented as a given. Elise nurses, with never a thought of formula (Cooper even uses breastmilk in his coffee). When Elise travels, there's no thought of leaving baby with dad. They take Zoë to restaurants regularly, and even attend weekly "baby night" at the neighborhood movie theater. In a funny scene Cooper describes a dating couple who accidentally turn up on the wrong night. Why didn't anyone in Israel ever think of welcoming babies to a movie showing?

As a mother, I felt uncomfortable with what seemed to be a cry-it-out episode when Zoë is one month old (!).

Sometimes Cooper's writing is a little crass. And even if he believes passersby who say that Zoë is the cutest baby in the world, he should have the good taste to play it down.

At first I found it disconcerting that Zoë's age is rarely mentioned; I kept wanting to check how old she was at any given point. But as I often say to mothers struggling with breastfeeding, “Watch your baby, not the clock.” Cooper focuses on his own feelings, without comparing his family and their decisions to those of others.

Crawling: A Father's First Year is attractive and well designed with short chapters. New parents will enjoy flipping through it during those late night feedings.

Terrific book by Lipstadt on Holocaust denial

"No, I'm not a child of Holocaust survivors." Thus begins Holocaust scholar Deborah Lipstadt's fascinating tale of self-defense against a libel charge by the notorious Holocaust denier, David Irving. This is one of those rare non-fiction books that's hard to put down (I admit I didn't finish it yet!). Originally Lipstadt and her counsel were certain that Irving would drop the case, but Irving, who had many ties with neo-Nazi groups, was convinced of his ability to speak out of both sides of his mouth and persuade a judge that he was maligned. Also of note was how the various Jewish philanthropic organizations overlooked their differences in order to quietly raise funds to cover the substantial costs incurred by the defense. Highly recommended, even when you know the ending!!