When the Outside World Enters Your Baby's Mouth
Excert from Green Babies, Sage Moms by Lynda Fassa
We started our first baby on solids under very weird and stressful circumstances. Like many milestones in my journey through motherhood, the experience was very different from what I had imagined, or planned. It was the winter of Layla's first year, and we were still living in our apartment in Manhattan. The news was filled with reports of a huge impending snowstorm that would blanket the Northeast. What that meant for most (smart) New Yorkers was a quick trip to the neighborhood grocery store or corner bodega to stock up on staples like milk and bread. But what a blizzard meant to my husband-who had spent many of his vacations from British boarding school in the Swiss Alps-was an opportunity, a siren call, really, to go skiing. So he rented an SUV (we were unaware of global warming then), and we headed off to Stowe, Vermont, with our five-month-old in tow. Well, the trip up was downright terrible. There was zero visibility. A huge portion of the other silly people who had ventured out were stranded in their cars to our left and right, with their hazard lights blinking like sad old neon bar signs.
About two hours into the trip, which would take at least five hours on a good day, Layla started crying. Howling, really. We pulled over and I took her out of her car seat to nurse her. I had exclusively breast-fed her since birth, and she had never had any other sustenance of any kind. (And she ate all the time! That's how I got rid of my extra baby weight. You cannot possibly eat enough to keep extra pounds on if your baby exclusively breast-feeds, believe me. I used to chow down at least a quart of Haagen-Dazs every night, and I still effortlessly shrank back to a size six!)
OK, I'll wrap up the story of the Long Day's Journey into Food. Layla continued to scream and cry. We stopped at a little gas station/mini-mart with my shrieking bundle. The kindly old lady at checkout told me she thought the baby was hungry and suggested we get some Gerber cereal; for some reason, even though I thought she was daft, I bought the cereal! We continued our journey, with me now sitting in the back attempting to console, distract, and shut up my baby in a nice, motherly way. When nothing else was working, I mixed the cereal with some bottled water and spoon-fed it to her. She ate it all, smiled, gurgled, and zonked out.So that was the beginning of my baby becoming her own person—and also the beginning of the stinky poops. (No one had told me that my baby's sweet-smelling doodle, which didn't smell at all when she was only on breast milk, would immediately become stink bombs as soon as she started eating solid foods!)
But those weren't the only sad parts. Because my baby was eating "something else," her insides were exposed to the whole wide world of agriculture and technology. I realized I now had to be specially vigilant about knowing what was passing by her sweet little lips, and where it came from, because that was the "stuff" that would grow my baby.
We never fed her conventional baby food again. Thank goodness the people of Vermont were forward-thinking enough, even back then, to have Earth's Best, the first certified-organic baby food. I've since had two more babies and many, many years of feeding children (in fact, I still am). Let's look at some of the reasons why organic food is the best choice for babies and kids:
• Pesticide use has increased thirty-three-fold in the United States since the end of the Second World War.
• Children eat, drink, and breathe more pesticides, pound per pound, than adults; plus their bodies are growing and developing.
• A study of Seattle schoolchildren showed that those who were fed nonorganic diets had six times the amount of pesticides in their urine than children who were fed organic diets.
• Recent studies have even linked behavioral difficulties with some food additives.
• In an editorial in the Chicago Tribune, Professor Robert Hatherill of the University of California, Santa Barbara, wrote, "A rapidly expanding body of research shows that heavy metals, such as lead and pesticides, decrease mental ability and increase aggressiveness. Rather than directing all of our attention to bitter debates on gun control and the violence in the entertainment industry, let's also consider the pressing need for a cleaner environment."
• According to the National Children's Study, which was mandated by Congress in 2000, ADHD and developmental disorders collectively are estimated to affect eighteen percent of all schoolchildren-nearly one in every five. Childhood-cancer rates jumped twenty-one percent from 1975 to 1998 and continue to rise about one percent each year. Cancer is now the leading disease that kills children under age fifteen in the United States.
• According to Charles Benbrook, the chief scientist at the Organic Center (www.organic-center.org), "New information from the USDA's Pesticide Data Program shows that from 2004 to 2005, there was a significant increase in residues of synthetic pyrethroids in milk. Today, about forty-five percent of conventional milk samples contain a residue of a pyrethroid insecticide." Pesticide exposure poses a very significant risk to the development of babies and children. There just isn't a magic garbage barge that takes these poisons off the planet. We are at a critical point in determining the health of children in the United States. It's time we cleaned up our act, and one of the easiest and most certain ways to do it is to choose organic products. Consider it a deposit in your green bank. As others do the same, our combined resources create a healthy playing field for all our children to grow and flourish on.
For lots of great information, check out the industry-leading nonprofit organization the Organic Center (www.organic-center. org), which researches the scientific reasons organic is better, and shares its research with the world.
I've got Green Gurus galore for you in this chapter, because one thing is for sure: Your baby will be eating food every day for the rest of his life! And I want to share with you the best info from the smartest green foodies in the baby biz, so you can make the most informed decisions about the building blocks of your baby's body.
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