Of course, if we are talking about a woman who has lived her entire life in a tiny village in a forest, hundreds of miles away from any industrial centers, drank only the water from a clear, unpolluted stream, ate only the food she grew herself in an unpolluted patch without using any chemical substances on the plants, spent all her day in the fresh unpolluted air, never suffers from stress, anxiety, let alone depression, and never took any medication, I might agree that her breast-milk is better than formula.

However.

If we are talking about a woman who spends her life breathing in polluted air, has consumed a mountain of junk food and processed foods, has devoured a barrel of over-the-counter and a bucket of prescription meds, suffers from anxiety and mood swings, has smoked a little, has drunk some alcohol, is not averse to drinking a soda now and then, spends hours every week in a car and most of each day sitting in front of a screen, and eats genetically modified crap, there is no way her breasts can produce anything healthier than what a formula company can.

So the idiotic “breast is best” propaganda is nothing but an attempt by the ultra-conservative organizations to force women back into housewifery. It feeds into the consumerism of the immature, and a myth is born.

As for me, I am planning to breast-feed. The only reason is that my mother says it is more convenient than bottle-feeding, and I trust her. Then again, my sister says it is less convenient that bottle-feeding, and I trust her, too. So I will try and see what works for me.

Of course, if breast-feeding becomes onerous or doesn’t work out, I will stop. A self-sacrificing Mommy is a tragedy for a child and will haunt her for as long as the child lives. And if it doesn’t work out immediately, I’m not the kind of a monster who lets a child scream in hunger – dooming her to all kinds of eating disorders, alcoholism and a smoking addiction later in life* – just to please some imaginary controlling authority.

If it does work out, I have asked specialists and they unanimously insist that there is absolutely nothing in maternal milk past 6 months that can be even remotely beneficial to a baby. So there is no logical reason to breast-feed past 6 months.

Now the only problem I will have to face is fighting off a crowd of crazed La Leche League harpies who, as I keep hearing, bully and persecute women in maternity wards. I plan to quote the Constitution at them and promise to sue for violating my freedom of religion. I hope this complicated sentence will confuse their tiny little brains so badly that they will leave me in peace.

If anybody has any experience with defending yourself and your baby from the LLL freakazoids, please share. I hope that I don’t have to specify that La Leche League folks are not welcome on this blog.

Continue reading “Breast Is Not Best” →

Reader n8chz left a link to a curious article. It discusses an experiment that aimed to find out whether other cultures “shared with the West the same basic instinct for fairness.” Whenever I hear of cultures sharing instincts for anything but food and sex, I become suspicious and with good reason, too, since the basis for the conclusion that there is such “basic instinct for fairness” is nothing short of bizarre.

It turns out that a bunch of weird folks conducted a very strange experiment that was later used to make an outlandish conclusion about Americans being more fair than other cultures:

In each game there are two players who remain anonymous to each other. The first player is given an amount of money, say $100, and told that he has to offer some of the cash, in an amount of his choosing, to the other subject. The second player can accept or refuse the split. But there’s a hitch: players know that if the recipient refuses the offer, both leave empty-handed.

Think about this game and consider what you would do if you were one of the participants.

And this is what the study claims most North Americans did:

North Americans, who are the most common subjects for such experiments, usually offer a 50-50 split when on the giving end. When on the receiving end, they show an eagerness to punish the other player for uneven splits at their own expense.

I have no idea what kind of an over-entitled, spoiled, immature brat believes that strangers should be obligated to give him or her half of what they have and throws a hissy fit when they choose not to. I also fail to imagine who can possibly see this infantile insistence that strangers share what they have equally with you as “fairness.” There is nothing fair in the belief that the property of others belongs to you by default. I refuse to believe that Americans are like this. The experiment was probably rigged, or it tested too few people, or there is something we don’t know about the way it was conducted.

The Machiguenga people of Peru, however, seem a lot more normal than these imaginary Americans when they had a chance to play the game:

It became immediately clear that Machiguengan behavior was dramatically different from that of the average North American. To begin with, the offers from the first player were much lower. In addition, when on the receiving end of the game, the Machiguenga rarely refused even the lowest possible amount. “It just seemed ridiculous to the Machiguenga that you would reject an offer of free money,” says Henrich. “They just didn’t understand why anyone would sacrifice money to punish someone who had the good luck of getting to play the other role in the game.”

I must be an average Machiguenga because I’m just as appalled that anybody would refuse money just to spite somebody else out of a ridiculous sense of over-entitlement. I don’t think anybody owes me anything in this world. If people want to give me something – no matter how small – of their own free will, I will be extremely grateful. I would never stoop to calculating whether they take more for themselves than they give to me. Doing that would be both unfair and extremely vulgar.

So, Americans, am I right or are the people running this experiment right? Would you act like the Americans or like the Machiguenga in this experiment? Do you agree with me that this experiment was rigged to reflect the experimenter’s own prejudices?

The reason why there is so much passion in the completely inane breast-feeding vs bottle-feeding debates is consumerism. People want a happy pill, a magical simple solution for all problems, a potion, a very basic easy instruction that will make everything good with minimal effort. So they convince themselves that it is crucially important how you deliver food to a baby’s mouth, and once that magical button is pressed, a happy, healthy, smart, well-adjusted child will be delivered to them at no extra charge. The immaturity of people who use this stratagem to avoid the hard work and the effort of being parents is mind-boggling.

Of course, when you have nothing else but food to offer, it becomes crucial that this minimal contribution should get blown out of all proportion. A lot of noise will help mask the meager nature of the offering.