Why I make my own baby food

Are baby food pouches a well-off white person thing?

 

I confess, my big crunchy habit is making baby food at home.  One of the baby's first vegetables was even kale.  But I'm nothing if not non-idological, so when we decided to go on vacation, I started looking to buy those baby food pouches.

 

Why can I not find any baby food pouches that are not organic and non-GMO?  There is this weird distinction between the pouched food and the food in cups/jars that I cannot figure out for the life of me.  It's like someone declared, "Quinoa and kale must be completely segregated from peas and carrots!  We shall package them differently so everyone knows who cares about their child's nutrition and who is too poor to be a good mother."

 

All I want is to feed my baby solids without giving him food poisoning due to lack of refrigeration.  I don't see why I need to pay the organic non-GMO premium to do it.

Is Michel Odent defending eugenics or Lamarckian evolution?

For anyone who is not familiar with Michel Odent, he is the pet OB of the natural childbirth movement.  Basically, he is to natural birth as Dr. Sears is to anti-vaxxers and as the other Dr. Sears is to Attachment Parenting.

 

Dr. Odent has some rather strange beliefs, including that the presence of the father during childbirth can cause medical complications, and that women who get C-sections or Pitocin are biologically incapable of bonding with their children.

 

The latest bit of drivel from Dr. Odent, published in the Telegraph, is that women are losing the ability to give birth vaginally due to the use of life-saving medical interventions and this is a BAD THING.

 

So, there are basically two directions you can go with this argument.  The less horrifying possibility is that Dr. Odent believes in Lamarckian evolution.  You guys may remember from your grade school biology classes that Lamarck thought that, if you cut off a lizard's tail, the lizard's offspring would be born without tails.  You may also remember that this view of evolution is dead wrong* as demonstrated by the lack of tailless lizards running around.  Giving a woman a C-section will not render her daughters incapable of delivering vaginally.

 

Here is the more horrifying possibility.  Dr. Odent is such a big fan of natural childbirth that he would rather let mothers and babies die in childbirth than allow women to pass on genes (such as those for small pelvic openings or dangerously long pregnancies) that make birth without intervention impossible or inadvisable.

 

 

*Unless you consider epigenetics, which Lamarck wasn't, and that's a whole other discussion that is also being grievously abused by natural childbirth advocates.