Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood is holding its fifth annual summit in Boston, October 26-28.

Presenters will include: Alvin F. Poussaint,MD, Harvard Medical School and Judge Baker's Children's Center; Enola Aird, The Motherhood Project; Robin Blair, Children's Center for the Common Good; Michael Brody, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry; Brita Butler-Wall, Seattle School Board and Citizen's Campaign for Commercial-Free Schools; Nancy Carlsson-Paige, Lesley University; Richard Daynard, Public Health Advocacy Institute; Walter Eddie, Boys Club of New York; David Elkind, Tufts University and author of The Hurried Child; Lisa Fager, Industry Ears; Julie Frechette, Worcester State College; Roberta Friedman, Massachusetts Public Health Association; Jon Hanson, Harvard Law School; Allen Kanner, The Wright Institute; Joe Kelly, Dads and Daughters; Jean Kilbourne, author of Can't Buy My Love; Velma LaPoint, Howard University; Diane Levin, Wheelock University and author of Remote Control Childhood; Susan Linn, Judge Baker Children's Center and author of Consuming Kids; Alex Molnar, Commercialism in Education Research Unit; Sharna Olfman, Point Park University; Julie Taylor, United Methodist Church, Women's Division; Michele Simon, Center for Informed Food Choices; and Rob Williams, Action Coalition for Media Education.

Ronald McHummer

I am officially undecided on a leading food policy question of our times: Can fast food restaurant chains engage in labor, nutritional, and environmental reforms in response to public pressure, or does their corporate constitution make them structurally incapable of real improvement, such that all one can ever expect is lies and public relations?

But I may not remain undecided for long.

As McDonald's introduced salads, better nutrition labeling information, and half- hearted progress on trans fats (not eliminating trans fats, but at least ending the corporate falsehoods about trans fats), my family began to visit occasionally while traveling by road. But, as a passionate advocate of cycling, tiny cars, and public transportation, I was nauseated by the recent Hummer toy in my boy's Happy Meal and the corresponding girlie toy that was given to my daughter. My family will now return to full boycott status.

See boingboing for a link to a funny website called Ronald McHummer, which lets you create your own McDonald's road sign.

Appetite for Profit, by Michele Simon

Michele Simon, the editor of the Informed Eating newsletter in our sidebar, has a new book, Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health, and How to Fight Back. She also has a new weblog, Big Food Watch.

Bedtime stories: the Little House series

For several years, a colleague has been recommending the Little House on the Prairie series, by Laura Ingalls Wilder, to incoming graduate students in food policy. These true stories of frontier life from a young girl's perspective offer minute detail about every aspect of 19th century food and agriculture.

I have been reading a couple chapters nightly to my kids, who seem completely engaged. We are now on the third book, On the Banks of Plum Creek. Of course, the gritty and irrepressible main character of Laura provides much of the appeal for them. She tries half-heartedly to be an "angel" like her far less interesting sister Mary, but when pressed to the limit by the cruelty of a snobby girl in town, extracts a just revenge with the help of some bloodsucking leeches.

For my part, I want to sign up for Pa's fan club. What a man. On a patch of prairie in Indian Territory, after the family builds a perfect home and farm through a year of hard manual labor, simultaneously backbreaking and profoundly skilled, Pa bravely acknowledges defeat when the federal government, in a rare and temporary attack of honest dealing, forces the settlers to return to their home country. (The case of American frontier settlement suggests a new perspective on contemporary arguments about illegal immigration.) As the family leaves for its return trip, on the long trail by which it had arrived 12 months earlier, Pa observes wryly that at least they are returning with more than they came with. Ma is astonished at this comment, considering that they are sitting in the same covered wagon filled with exactly the same possessions as before. Sure, Pa points out, one of the two ponies pulling the wagon had given birth to a colt.

Will the family's next endeavor be more successful? In the book we are currently reading, after Pa takes on debt to build another perfect home on a Minnesota farmstead, and yet more backbreaking labor to plant a large wheat field, the grasshoppers arrive. Had enough, Pa? A chapter later, the grasshoppers lay eggs in such quantity to make the land useless for the next season also. And Pa must leave to walk several hundred miles on foot in search of several months of wage labor while Ma and the girls struggle to get by on the farm.

I haven't seen the TV show for years, but I certainly don't recall it having such guts. What a fine set of stories to entertain and inspire kids and adults together at reading time.

Promoting breastfeeding

A front-page article by Jodi Kantor in the New York Times last week described the "2-class system" for working mothers who breastfeed: one class has improving though still imperfect options for professional women in office settings, while the other class offers awful few options for most other women.

Nearly half of new mothers return to work within the first year of their child's life. But federal law offers no protection to mothers who express milk on the job -- despite the efforts of Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, who has introduced such legislation. "I can't understand why this doesn't move," she said. "This is pro-family, pro-health, pro-economy." ...

Public health authorities, alarmed at the gap between the breast-feeding haves and have-nots, are now trying to convince businesses that supporting the practice is a sound investment. "The Business Case for Breastfeeding," an upcoming campaign by the Department of Health and Human Services, will emphasize recent findings that breast-feeding reduces absenteeism and pediatrician bills.

In corporate America, lactation support can be a highly touted benefit, consisting of free or subsidized breast pumps, access to lactation consultants, and special rooms with telephones and Internet connections for employees who want to work as they pump, and CD players and reading material for those who do not. According to the nonprofit Families and Work Institute, a third of large corporations have lactation rooms....

In contrast, said Dr. Lori Feldman-Winter, an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics' committee on breast-feeding, her patients cannot afford a basic $50 breast pump -- an investment, she said, that "could prevent a lifetime of diseases." The academy urges women to breast-feed exclusively for six months and to continue until the child turns 1.

Many of her patients learn about breast-feeding through the government nutrition program Women, Infants, and Children, which distributes nursing literature to four million mothers, and also provides classes and lactation consultants. Because of this and similar efforts, 73 percent of mothers now breast-feed their newborns, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But after six months, the number falls to 53 percent of college graduates, and 29 percent of mothers whose formal education ended with high school.

Here is a link to the status of Rep. Maloney's breastfeeding promotion bill, currently stalled in Congress.

The Nation tackles food policy

I read at Accidental Hedonist that the Nation this week offers a special issue on food, with input from Alice Waters, Peter Singer, Marion Nestle, Eric Schlosser, and many more.

Tired of the politics? Take heart.

Reflecting on the debates over the School Wellness Policy here in Arlington (see previous post), and on some recent excruciatingly long arguments about arcane provisions of a faculty appointments policy, I began to get discouraged about how "politics" were taking too much time and distracting me from "important work" such as research and teaching.

Then, as part of class preparation this morning, I read John Roche's 1961 article, "The Founding Fathers: A Reform Caucus in Action" (anthology link). While we are accustomed to thinking of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention as brilliant inventors of a new federalist political theory, Roche describes them as mere democratic politicians hammering out clumsy compromise after compromise in exhausting detail. It had me laughing out loud to imagine that something good could come from this type of painful labor.

The Constitution, then, was not an apotheosis of "constitutionalism," a triumph of architectonic genius; it was a patch-work sewn together under the pressure of both time and events by a group of extremely talented democratic politicians.... For two years, they worked to get a convention established. For over three months, in what must have seemed to the faithful participants an endless process of give-and-take, they reasoned, cajoled, threatened, and bargained amongst themselves. The result was a Constitution which the people, in fact, by democratic processes, did accept, and a new and far better national government was established.