the modernity ward

Some Mama's Baby

I read Katie Allison Granju's book Attachment Parenting a long time ago, even before I married Sean, before we started trying and I started failing at reproduction. Years before I got that positive pregnancy test, this book, and its wise and perceptive author, resonated deeply with me, and informed the way I would think about parenting from then on.

Of course I was delighted to find her reporting insightfully on the under-covered Kingston ash spill, and sent her a nice email; not long after that I friended her on Facebook and started following her blog more closely as she found herself pregnant with a fourth child.

Then something very bad happened: her oldest child, a son, Henry, in the throes of addiction, overdosed, was badly beaten and left for dead. He fought for more than a month in the hospital. You can read about it at Katie's blog (linked above), but what you need to know is how it ends: that mama's baby died today. I can't begin to comprehend her grief, or the vertigo of losing one child while eight months pregnant with another.

I've been telling Sophia, growing like a weed, that I need to pick her up and squeeze her before she gets too big to lift; I've been appreciating the vestiges of her baby-ness as she approaches five years old, kindergarten, days spent away from me, that unavoidable separation. Today I was sitting outside and she crawled up next to me on the chair, whispered in my ear: "Mama, you have to pick me up while you can."

I did.

Someone on the Internet is Wrong

Thanks to xkcd for summing up my life entire in one panel. Ahem.

Two things bugging the shit out of me today. Rather, a selection of two of the things bugging the shit out of me today. Let's be honest.

One: Meat is Murder. Murder of YOU.

When I heard this story on NPR, I was unable to stop myself from sputtering and waving my hands in impotent rage. Who the hell funded this, and why have they no respect for basic statistics? WHY DO THEY LOVE ERROR? Okay, look: red meat = muscle from large ungulates (and it looks like they include pork too? Whatev). Red meat =/= HOT DOGS and HAM and BACON and fucking PASTRAMI. At least not for the purposes of a medical study on diet! Hellooooo, interference!

Even someone utterly unfamiliar with the different vitamin, saturated fat, and fatty acid profiles of grass-fed versus conventional meat should be able to grok that even a conventional hamburger, made of plain ground beef with maybe a little salt and pepper, will have a far different short-term and long-term effect on health than a bacon pastrami dog. Salt, sodium nitrite, nitrate, erythorbate -- so hey! Why not lump them together?

You know what I'll believe? A study that compares people who consume the typical American diet with regard to meat, against people who consume only grass-fed and/or free-range meat. Don't control for fat consumption, just compare one type of meat (exclusively) against the other. That, I'd base a behavior change on.

Harrumph.

Two: Take the Local, or, Yes, Alice Waters Was Being a Dipshit, but Why Tar Organic Food with That Brush?

I love me some Shapely Prose, and a big part of what I love is the comments section. Smart, incisive, observant, challenging. This time the comments are pissing me off royally, like with ermine robes and a scepter and shit. Why? Because we've moved from the calling-out-privilege trope, of which I heartily approve, to the organic-is-silly-local-is-for-chumps trope, of which I do not.

But isn't it true that organic is boutique food for rich people? Well, kind of, these days, yes, barring a backyard garden (and that in itself could be a privilege marker, depending on where you live). Less so than it used to be, but more than it ought to be. I'm not actually disputing that organic often costs more and is more difficult to get. What I'm saying is, it shouldn't be. Organic, sustainable practices ought to be the default in food production, whenever possible -- and without agricultural subsidies artificially deflating conventional food prices, it wouldn't be any more expensive. (In fact, how about we subsidize organic farming, and drop subsidies for anything with a little Monsanto sign in the ditch?)

But but! you say (if you are the comments section). Isn't it true that organic food requires a lot more land and other resources for a relatively low yield? Well, no, it isn't, actually. Properly built-up soil, healthy living soil, can be enormously productive of the right crops. If what you want is monoculture, the same kind of corn for millions of acres, then you grow a variety optimized for high yield in a thin matrix of sterile dead soil, dependent on synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, not to mention irrigation. Sure, it looks like you're getting more bang for your buck, but you're actually spending far more than you reap, once you factor in the financial costs of all those chemicals (again, subsidies!), the environmental costs of a dead watershed (all those chemicals have to go somewhere) and water rights issues, and the health costs of all that crap being dumped into our water. Oh, and you have to drill the oil and natural gas and refine it and blah blah blah. See what I mean?
So no, it's not actually true that organic requires more resources.

Oh, and but! you may say. Local food is stupid! It's cold here! Or hot! It's a desert, or Vermont! I don't want to live on beef/turnips/nopales half the year. God, local food is d-u-m-b.

Except -- and you knew I was going to say this, right? -- it isn't. Because if you're eating nothing but beef ten months out of the year? UR DOIN IT RONG.

Eating local doesn't mean eating what's locally produced on a mass scale. The way we've optimized and specialized means that all the farms near you might grow nothing but soybeans or feed corn or factory-farmed chickens, but that is not what eating local means. That is, in fact, missing the point entirely. The point of eating locally is to explode that specialization so that there's a great variety of locally adapted food available in any given place. It's not something that's easy to do on your own; it's part of a societal shift. And it also demands a more wholistic way of looking at the food year. If you don't preserve the summer harvest (or whenever your harvest is -- spring and fall in a hot area, maybe), then yes, you'll be living on rutabagas all winter. But that's not how people ate when they ate local out of necessity. Maybe they had rutabagas every night, but they also had different meats, dried beans, canned tomatoes, dried vegetables (all those make an awesome stew!), bread, fruit preserves, all kinds of grains. The list goes on. You can have green peppers all winter, provided you froze them or dried them. And nowadays, aren't we lucky to have the option of freezing food to preserve it, or safe pressure canning? My point is, it's not easy or convenient the way we're used to, but it is possible to get a decent part of your diet locally. (Some things make sense to transport -- grains, pasta, beans, flour, spices, coffee, um, soy sauce.)

Remember: people have lived in all sorts of environments all over the world, all before modern food transportation and homogeneity of diet. There are all kinds of things to eat that will grow in pretty much any climate.

And just to add a pinch of doom: We'd better get back to using those things while it's still a choice, and not a matter of necessity. /doom

As for the class factor, I am never, never going to blame any individual without the income to buy local or organic food, or the time to grow it. Never. Because that's not how societal oppression works. That doesn't mean that you can't eat quality food if you're poor, though. In some places you have options; Philadelphia is one, with community gardens and farmer's markets that accept EBT cards. This isn't the norm, and frankly it's the responsibility of the community as a whole to provide good food options for everyone who lives in it.

It's late and I'm starting to ramble, but there you go. My answer to the internet. 

(Some people are saying the same things I am saying, there. I don't wish to pick on any one commenter, either. It's just that these things keep coming up, in my world, and I finally hit my "lash back" point with the comments there.)

Today's Assignment:

Bounce on over to Shakesville for an amazing post about adoption by a birth mother. And take the time to read the comments. Best. Comments. Evah. (And thanks to Aunt B. from whom I lifted the link.)

Housewifery on the Periphery

I'm going to send you to Marta's last two posts at my goodly heritage, because 1) it's something I've been thinking about a lot lately and 2) she says it better than I could. As someone who is most definitely a homemaker, I find the discussion fascinating, not just in a navel-gazey way, but as a what-makes-the-world-work issue.

Okay, You're Right, I Won't Shave My Head. Yet.

Waiting until the Postpartum Pee-Out is a very, very good idea. And since all this talk (okay, my talk) of Javier Bardem is starting to infiltrate my dreams, IF you know what I mean, AND I think you do.

No, seriously. It was more than a little disturbing. Anyway.

I'm feeling terrifically boring, and all I can think of to tell you is that I saw two commercials that made me proud to be an American. The first was a credit card commercial with this opening line, in a mom's voice: "My kids are normal kids. They're plugged in twenty-four hours a day!"

After I dislodged the chunk of burrito I had sucked into my windpipe, I was able to pay attention to the rest of the commercial, which was all about how the parents had financed themselves into oblivion to take the kids to Costa Rica or some shit, and finally after a week in the jungle the kids finally stopped texting their friends and noticed they were swimming in a phosphorescent bay. And there were exotic birds, maybe. Anyway, it was all worth it, the ten thou at 14.9% APR, because the children put down their phones for an hour! The phones...that their parents bought them...with the credit card they maxed out...trying to get the children...to put down the phones. I love this country!

The second one looked as though it had been produced in somebody's half-finished basement office, and starred a bearded old gent as the doctor. Holding a gloved finger up to the camera, he stated: "If a prostate exam is uncomfortable for you, just think how your doctor feels!" The complete absence of tone in his voice left the latter up to interpretation: Does your doctor feel equally embarrassed? Disgusted at having to weasel a digit up your aging ass? Is he restraining himself from cracking off-color jokes? Does he maybe have a sympathy plug up his own rectum? We shall never know. I, for one, would hope my doctor was professionally indifferent to the upholstery, if you will, and concentrating entirely upon the matter at hand (snork!). That did not, however, seem to be one of the choices.

The man went on to say a lot of things about prostates, but he kept his finger at the ready, slightly crooked, held right about shoulder level as though he were gearing up to get some serious leverage. The effect was distracting. And awesome. If they'd been selling something I could buy, I would have; as it was, I had to content myself with scheduling prostate exams for my husband and a handful of male friends whose last names I could remember.

So if you get a confirmation call for an appointment you don't remember making, you should probably just go, and not ask a lot of questions. After all, just think of how your doctor might feel.

Tee to the Motherfuckin' Vee

Y'all.

I've been addicted to hulu.com for a while. If you are unfamiliar with this terrific convenience for the cable-less, it is a website that streams tv shows, with "limited commercial interruption." I've caught up on back episodes of House, The Office, 30 Rock, and Family Guy.

And now they have The Daily Show and Colbert Report.

I'll see you in a couple days.

Sleep is for the Weak

Out of sheer laziness concern for your uncluttered reading pleasure, I have never festooned my website with ads. I don't insist that you Paypal me a brewski every time you like my post (yes, I saw this on a blog once). I don't ask for much, beyond undying devotion and constant clicking around the occasional drop-in.

But now, I must sell to you this most awesome thing of which I am but a tiny part. See this book? See it (at Barnes and Noble)? See it (at an indie bookstore)? Look over there on the right. ===>

Yeah, people. It's a book! And I am IN IT!

But that's not why it's awesome. It's awesome because I am in it it's jam-diddly-damn-packed with truly excellent writers who outstrip me both in talent and daily hits. It's awesome because a certain very wise woman thought to put the thing together. I ride on the coattails of giants, gentle readers, and you'd do well to get yourself a copy.

TGIF! OMG! LOL!

Yeah, so I farted a whole lot yesterday, and Sean gave me a shoulder rub, and voila! All better. Thank you all for your words of commiseration and understanding. And also for thinking I am funny. Because after reading over my pregnant-with-Sophia posts (Leery Polyp archives, beginning in December 2004), I am thinking my funny must have squirted out my hoo-ha along with an eight-pound baby, a somewhat elderly placenta, and what felt like forty quarts of gakk.

So, over the interminable weekend, allow me too suggest the following reading:

A stark yet evenhanded rundown of recent events by v. smart lady Sharon Astyk. Very important.

A tiny bit of awesome news -- funnier still, I realized it was written by one of my old runnin' crew. Cheers to you, other v. smart lady. Fight the good fight. By the way, Grist in general is good if you like some good news along with your horrifying Monsanto-related news about the environment.

If you haven't been to I Can Has Cheezburger? yet, you better go. Now.

Have a good weekend, y'all. I'll check in Monday.

New-ish to Jewish

Sophia is sick, oozing and/or hacking clear mucus products from at least two orifices. She has applied a home remedy of her own device, which involves multiple Band-Aids taping her toes together and palms painted bright turquoise. I know I'm feeling much better.

Commenter B on the last post pointed out that Jewish Grandma might have been providing not an Easter basket, but Mishloach Minot -- a gift of food for Purim. And I would have agreed, if I thought that said Grandma knew about the tradition (and if the basket had not been in the shape of an egg and contained a large chocolate bunny as well as Reese's peanut butter eggs). Oh, and it was also presented at Easter dinner with not-Jewish Great Grandma. Dinner, in case you were wondering, was Chinese takeout. This was Manhattan, people.

Which neatly illustrates my point: our family -- or more precisely, Sean's side of the family -- is a mishmash of religions and traditions. Sean's mother's side of the family is Jewish, all of the Reform variety, many of the atheist variety, and generally of the minimally observant variety. That is, we have a Passover seder, but I have yet to hear a word of Hebrew spoken. Though there is Manischewitz.

And then Sean's father's side of the family was Russian Orthodox (immigrants, y'see) except that his uncle is now regularly attending Catholic services. Uncle's girlfriend, is, I think, Jewish. Maybe. I'm not sure. Sean grew up celebrating Easter, Passover, Christmas, Chanukah, attending some Hebrew school but not church.

Meanwhile, I was brought up Presbyterian, a sometimes-regular churchgoer, even a youth group leader before sin/the devil/utter indifference/awareness of total hypocrisy on the part of my elders kicked in. I am not now a Christian. I've played around with paganism, and while I find celebrating earth holidays meaningful and restorative (equinox, anyone?) and love the fragments of British Isles holidays (Samhain!) that survive, I can't get with the whole pray-to-goddess thing.

Here's what I long for, in addition to a belief system that lines up with mine: tradition. Ritual. A group of like-minded people to engage in same with. A sense of belonging to something ancient yet thoroughly alive. I loved going to one church in Norfolk on Christmas eve, a three-hundred-year-old stone building rendered more majestic by the candlelight and echoing with the King James "And it came to pass in those days..." No matter that I don't think Jesus was the messiah -- I just love that story of a baby born humbly, long ago.

And I want Sophia to have all those things too -- a community, a framework to mark the year and the stages of life, a sense of comfort and belonging. Not the God-will-fix-everything-for- you-if-you-just-ask-nice false comfort that inevitably brings disillusionment, but a we're-all-in -this-together comfort. Life goes on, for someone, somewhere. The essence of the universe is unfathomable, but have a little brisket.

I had the good fortune to come to Philadelphia, epicenter of the Jewish Reconstruction movement, and to meet a woman whose husband was a rabbi in that tradition. The more I learn, the more perfect a fit Reconstruction Judaism seems. But I have a lot to learn. I haven't even managed to get us to the synagogue yet -- we've been out of town for the past three Saturdays, and then some obligations upcoming. (Obviously that sort of thing would have to change, no?)

I want to know more about Judaism (in general -- not limiting myself to any particular movement). I've done some basic reading, but get overwhelmed at the library and the bookstore. And I am afraid I've exhausted Sean as a resource. Here is what I'd love to know:

-Are there any books about Judaism or Jewish life that would be especially useful or helpful or moving?
-Any especially good books for little children?
-If you're Jewish: What traditions do you observe? What are you passing on to your children, and what are you changing?
-Have you converted (to any religion)? What has your experience been?

And finally:
-Do you have a really good tzimmis recipe?