>> Et tu, offspring? Children come with a high carbon cost: “With rising future emissions, each extra child in the US would eventually result in eight times the lifetime carbon footprint of the average US resident today. Even with constant per-capita emissions, it’s nearly six times – or nearly 10,000 tonnes of CO2.”

>> Et tu, breast feeding advocates? The Case Against Breast-Feeding: In what’s certain to become a controversial article in The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin argues that while popular lit treats breast milk as a magical elixir that makes kids smarter and healthier for life, more scientific medical lit shows that the benefits of breast feeding, if any, are much more tenuous and uncertain. “So how is it that every mother I know has become a breast-feeding fascist?” Hanna asks:

In her critique of the awareness campaign, Joan Wolf, a women’s-studies professor at Texas A&M University, chalks up the overzealous ads to a new ethic of “total motherhood.” Mothers these days are expected to “optimize every dimension of children’s lives,” she writes. Choices are often presented as the mother’s selfish desires versus the baby’s needs. As an example, Wolf quotes What to Expect When You’re Expecting, from a section called the “Best-Odds Diet,” which I remember quite well: “Every bite counts. You’ve got only nine months of meals and snacks with which to give your baby the best possible start in life … Before you close your mouth on a forkful of food, consider, ‘Is this the best bite I can give my baby?’ If it will benefit your baby, chew away. If it’ll only benefit your sweet tooth or appease your appetite put your fork down.”

Hannah also delves into a fascinating look at the role breastfeeding plays in pushing childrearing duties primarily on the woman, a la The Second Shift or The Bitch in the House:

Even in the best of marriages, the domestic burden shifts, in incremental, mostly unacknowledged ways, onto the woman. Breast-feeding plays a central role in the shift. In my set, no husband tells his wife that it is her womanly duty to stay home and nurse the child. Instead, both parents together weigh the evidence and then make a rational, informed decision that she should do so. Then other, logical decisions follow: she alone fed the child, so she naturally knows better how to comfort the child, so she is the better judge to pick a school for the child and the better nurse when the child is sick, and so on….

The debate about breast-feeding takes place without any reference to its actual context in women’s lives. Breast-feeding exclusively is not like taking a prenatal vitamin. It is a serious time commitment that pretty much guarantees that you will not work in any meaningful way. Let’s say a baby feeds seven times a day and then a couple more times at night. That’s nine times for about a half hour each, which adds up to more than half of a working day, every day, for at least six months. This is why, when people say that breast-feeding is “free,” I want to hit them with a two-by-four. It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing.

A highly recommended read. Despite having written this article, Hanna’s still breastfeeding her third child.

>> Et tu, BBQ chicken? A sassy animated short film looks at a nice old couple’s chicken meal — as a way of showing all the problems with consumerism and uneco global trade. It’s like the Story of Stuff, except less shrill and a lot shorter.

Photo by JulianBleecker

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