Friday, February 10, 2012

The Perfect Food: Part 2


Here's the thing about this perfect food, breastmilk.  Please look over your shoulder before you read on ... because ... shhhhh ... most of today's society doesn't really want you to nurse your child (and especially not your toddler!).  It's icky.  It makes people uncomfortable.  One dares not do it in public.  Many feel they can make judgments about when, where, how often, for how long, and until what age you can nurse, when this is purely a parental decision. 

This whole breastfeeding backlash (which may be as old as modernity itself) is at the heart of a growing separation, delineation, and division between human beings and their biology, their physiology, and their fucking God-given bodies.  And just like in other areas of human biology (like nutrition and sleep) where humans exist in states of being that are not complementary with their evolved physiology, lack of breastfeeding directly contributes to poor health (the very epidemic of poor health that is swallowing this country, in fact) devouring the citizenry, denying them the freedom and prosperity of good health. 

People don’t acknowledge that humans are mammals (you know, ‘cause we have mammary glands, i.e. breasts!).  This "perfect food" comes in a perfect container (containers men obsess over, perhaps because they didn’t get adequate access as a little one, or maybe just because breasts are awesome – even if many men don’t really get why). 

Evolution selected for humans to be able to easily carry their young over great distances efficiently, which meant that having a bagged lunch all the time was a great advantage for human mamas.  As I stated, there's a clear sexual obsession with these amazing vessels of life-blood, which I think clouds the view of the breast.  Many see breasts as sexual in all settings and circumstances.  The concept of the beast as a tool to feed and nurture our children creates too much cognitive dissonance for these people. 

But people need to step up and accept the complexity of the human situation.  We live in this modern world with all of its guts and glories, but our bodies were designed to live thousands of years ago.  This is Darwinism.  It's hard to deny.  Soooooo ... we need to stop fucking denying it!  Doing so is only making people fatter, sicker and deader.

We must not deny the human nature of others, either.  Breastfeeding should be welcomed into public life, and seen as the living and beneficial exchange that it is.  We need to support the mothers who are making the choice to best nourish for their young children, not ostracize and marginalize them.  In fact, we should be celebrating this beautiful exchange between mother and child (not hiding the “obscenity”).  What’s obscene is people who deny (or hate) who they actually are:  human animals.

Next up:  Part 3 of this series will look at today’s industrial food industry that claims to have created an equivalent substance (i.e. formula) that saves parents time and effort, and generates amazing profits by feeding on the disconnect between modern humans and their bodies.