Monday, June 18, 2007

Unnatural! Unnatural, I say!

BBC NEWS | Health | Pureed baby food is 'unnatural'

When I stop to think about it, my negative reaction to this story comes almost entirely from the shrill word "unnatural."

What Gill Rapley, from Unicef, describes is pretty much the way we fed both the beans, thanks mostly to the Big Bean's immovable personality. She wanted nothing to do with anything but breastmilk-straight-from-the-source until she was seven and a half months old. (Why do I insist on including that last half month? Why not round up or down? Because when you're a working parent and your baby is a world-class refusenik, every last day sticks in your memory.) By that time, when she caught on to solid foods, she could move them into her own mouth pretty efficiently. So we let her. The second one -- who thought bottles were the bomb -- got the same treatment.

Still, I bristle. Why make parenting a minefield? We parents get it every which way, from the rice-milk-in-the-bottle-from birth fools to the breastfeeding-toddlers-exclusively fools. Maybe "unnatural" isn't a word we need to hear.

1 comment:

Amanda at Little Foodies said...

I saw that on the news too. As if we don't have enough to worry about. It always seems to be - what you feed or do with your children is in vogue for a time and then it all changes again. Every child I know was fed pureed food and they all eat fine (well, except one, but they didn't like pureed food either).

Thank you for your comment on the Daily Tiffin.

Amanda