Welcome to the Hotel California
BY THOMAS FLEMING · PUBLISHED MAY 12, 2022 · UPDATED MAY 12, 2022
Arriving back in the States and spending over two hours being pushed around by Immigration flunkeys who can't speak English or manage to be even minimally polite, I decided to check out the news. What's the big story in America? Young parents going hysterical over a shortage of baby food. And what is the Republican response? Not that American children should grow up before having children of their own, but "We shouldn't be sending baby food to concentration camps for illegal aliens, when American children are being deprived of fundamental right to be raised (I use the word advisedly) by corporate America."
What am I missing?
I thought baby food was that disgusting slime you take on a trip or save for emergencies. Once milk no longer provides sufficient nutrition, then normal parents make their own baby food. What do you think parents did for the past million years, P.G. (Pre Gerber)? These days, with blenders, mixers, processors, any plain and wholesome American dinner can be converted, with very little trouble, into an edible pap for babies that not only tastes far better than canned baby food but is vastly more nutritious.
When my wife and I were feeding small children, we relied on a wonderful contraption called the Happy Baby Food Grinder, a small hand-operated food mill we could take to restaurants. Obviously we did not feed them highly spiced, salted, or sugared dishes. It actually tasted perfectly palatable, and, being a sort of ricer, did not turn the food into mush. The children particularly liked roast chicken, rice and gravy. When my wife had gum surgery, the children were delighted that their mother now had to have her food milled by the Happy Baby. An added blessing was that our children, from the first, were developing a palate for real food and, as they grew old enough to defy peer pressure, refused to eat at fast food joints.
As usual, the media is mostly misreporting the crisis, and what they are generically labeling baby food is really several big brands of formula, but this hardly changes the picture. Formula is given to babies for 12 months or more, while food, properly minced or mashed, can be given at six months. Formula is a bit like those canned diet beverages that are supposed to supply all the vitamins and minerals you need, as you try to strip away the accumulated fat from fast food gluttony. A mother who can nurse her baby should, and if she has a job that makes it difficult or impossible, she should either quit (if that is possible) or give her baby up to adoption.
Apparently the current generation of parents cannot feed their children unless the food has been manufactured as a culinary toxic waste. Of course, for the food industry, baby food is a great introduction to the industrial cuisine of MacDonald's and Pizza Hut.
But, I should not be complaining. People of my own generation not only cannot face the rigors of old age, sickness, and death without committing suicide, but they can't even kill themselves without government approval and help from the medical industrial complex.
I used to blame the infantilism and dependency of Americans on California, but I guess we're all Californians now.
Thomas Fleming is president of the Fleming Foundation. He is the author of six books, including The Morality of Everyday Life and The Politics of Human Nature, as well as many articles and columns for newspapers, magazines,and learned journals. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a B.A. in Greek from the College of Charleston. He served as editor of Chronicles: a Magazine of American Culture from 1984 to 2015 and president of The Rockford Institute from 1997-2014. In a previous life he taught classics at several colleges and served as a school headmaster in South Carolina
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