More on Multatuli

Branshea's comment to my last post piqued my interest in Multatuli even more.

I found this site devoted to him:

http://www.multatuli-museum.nl/en/

To read it in Dutch, take the /en/ off the end of the URL. And then of course there's always the Wikipedia entry.

I found the duck eggs quote here:
http://books.google.com/books?id=tnZTYuvdijsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=oyster+eagle&ei=y5B-SLX3GYLGjgHc0KC_CA&sig=ACfU3U0hutAr0gapygsroUQVth6Ald2zmw#PPA21,M1
in a "limited preview" online of "The Oyster and the Eagle: Selected Aphorisms and Parables of Multatuli" by E.M. Beekman, 1974.

It can be found on page 102, listed as No. 852.

Presumably Beekman selected the quote from some other Multatuli source material, but I can't identify it from the online preview.

Reading through the pages available for preview on the Google Books site, I was instantly fascinated and drawn to this figure. He's irreverent, forthright, dry, darkly humorous. A writer who belongs in the company of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Mencken.

Right away I found another comment about parenting, although the aphorisms are mostly about all sorts of other things. This is on Page 49.

A mother who does not have nourishing milk is to be pitied.

A mother who does have nourishing milk and forces it back into her disappointed glands, robbing her child, is criminal.

Wow. That sure beats the heck out of the modern pussyfooting so common around this issue. I get angry every time I hear or read the suggestion that "this decision is a very personal one," cast as an answer to the question of whether or not to breastfeed.

I hate that "personal decision" garbage. Well, of course it's personal. Very personal. No duh. What do I need anyone to tell me that for? It's as if the writer, or organization, putting forth the statement imagines they're bequeathing on me the right to think through and ultimately make that decision for myself. I have that right already; I already know about that right; to suggest otherwise is downright insulting.

Beyond that, the statement is devoid of useful content. It's really just a cop-out, a way for parenting-related books and articles to sound wise and encompassing, while backing away from taking a stand.

In effect, "it's a very personal decision" translates to, "It doesn't matter either way." But it does matter. It's a huge deal, for nutrition, for normal human development: emotional, social, psychological. Sure, many babies can grow up happy and healthy enough without mother's milk and the comfort of mother's breast. But why should they have to?

Hooray for real food - and common sense!

Here's my Amazon.com review of this book, which I haven't read yet. I discovered it poking around on the site after reading most of The Way We Eat by Peter Singer -- which I plan to write about on this blog. I saw this book, and that it had only 19 reviews. Mostly I just wanted to say a word or two and do the good deed of making the number of customer of reviews 7% longer. But of course I got carried away.

Real Food, by Nina Planck
Bloomsbury USA
ISBN: 1596911441
My one-line summary: If you need a factory to make it, it's probably not real food -- and really not good for you.
Link: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product//1596911441/ref=cm_rv_thx_view/102-3621894-2157723

Hooray for real food - and common sense!, November 15, 2006
Reviewer: Vesna Kovach "duonexus" (Madison, Wis. USA) - See all my reviews
Hooray! I'm thrilled that there's another voice crying in the wilderness, joining the likes of Sally Fallon (Nourishing Traditions) and Uffe Ravnskov (The Cholesterol Myths) in promoting real food over the fabricated analogs so in vogue in modern health literature.

So much dietary advice comes at us from all media these days, and much of it just seems founded in bizarre suppositions: the idea that we can be so darn certain about the long-term effects of food products and eating habits that are, relatively speaking, brand new.

For instance, we're told that a certain nutrient is essential, but that it's impossible to get enough of it from its natural food source. Three bushels of kale, 1200 tomatoes, that sort of thing. So we should eat some factory-made product that's fortified with the proper amount of the substance. Now, how could this possibly be? How could our bodies require any dosage that has been, for all but the last five minutes of human history, technologically impossible to ingest?

Here's another. The mainstream recommendation today is for low-fat dairy products for everyone who has reached the age of two. But consider this. I was a child only a few decades ago. No kid was subjected to low-fat anything. Low-fat versions of this, that and the other thing didn't even exist then. Yet, it was very unusual for any kid to be overweight. There would be one or two obese children among a given age in an entire elementary school. Today, children are increasingly fed low-fat (read: fake) versions of everything, and childhood obesity rates continue to climb. If full-fat dairy makes kids fat, why isn't it the reverse? Why didn't the childhood obesity epidemic occur when children ate full-fat products?

Book: Inventing the Child

Following is my review of:
Inventing the Child: Culture, Ideology, and the Story of Childhood (Children's Literature and Culture)
Author: J. Zornado
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0415979668
Genre: Literature & Fiction/History & Criticism
Pages: 256
Summary: 400 years of children's literature teaching authority, obedience and violence

To use the type of language that quickly becomes familiar to a reader of this book:

The dominant culture reproduces itself by telling itself stories about itself. These stories tell of the rightness of obedience to authority, of the natural order of hierarchy, of power, of the obvious right of the strong to use violence and force to coerce the weak, of the need of the subjugated to be controlled. Children learn these stories, which reinforce the realities that they themselves experience and that they see around them.

By telling these stories about children (or stand-ins for children, as Curious George the monkey represents a child), adults create the notion of what a child is. The child grows into an adult who is shaped by lessons learned -- through stories and through experience -- at so fundamental and unconscious a level that these precepts seem to be reality itself. Nurture is taken for nature, training for instinct, and so on.

Zornado reviews 400 years of children's literature, as well as pedagogy and mainstream thinking about the nature of children and childhood, in the Western world. The results are eye-opening and can be more than a little disturbing.

It is easy to feel outrage and to distance ourselves from the cultural world revealed in earliest examples given, among them the school primer alphabet that read, in part: "A: In Adam's fall we sinned all...J: Job felt the rod but loved God," when learning how extensively beating was used to make children behave and remind them of their sinfulness and inferiority. The interpretations of more modern texts are more apt to make us squirm, from the readings of Babar as a celebration of colonialism and Barney as a lesson in happiness through group conformity and consumerism, and the Lion King as a text of racial hierarchy and dinine monarchical right.

Some are sure to protest that children's stories are by their nature innocuous and that Zornado's whole enterprise is overblown, perhaps silly. But the interesting fact remains that children's literature, as Zornado points out, is the only category of literature produced entirely by people who are not its own target audience.