Well well here is something that many might find interesting. My intent is
to just share the cultural aspect of food and love. Here in SouthAsian
countries particularly India we actually do associate food with love.
Mothers actually do show their love by serving special food or dishes for
their children and insist on extra servings too. This behavior is also seen
when a guest is invited home. The guest is showered with affection and love
particularly by taking pain to serve good and exotic food with extra
servings. So much so that there is a belief that runs deep which may, almost
as much as it may sound unfair, see lack of interest by a mother to cook and
feed her children beyond basic food is lack of deep love for her children.

Take Care

Yasmin
MA,CLEC,LLLL
Mumbai, India
********************************

Yasmin,

I think you touch here on something more integral to human interaction than
"in SouthAsian countries."  My background is that I have studied Classics
(ancient western society) formally, I am an informal student of archaeology
and sociology, and I am self-taught in a great deal of cross-cultural
comparisons of ritual and culture.

Food is extremely important in human society.  It has almost always been
important what you feed a favored guest; why else would "killing the fatted
calf" be a standard in Judeo-Christian literature?  Many fairy tales with
which our western audience are familiar feature special fare for a guest.

Favored guests are fed well; we look at our children as the most favored of
guests.  Therefore, we must give the very best to our children.
Unfortunately, in the last century or so, that message has been corrupted to
tell Western (and women influenced by the idealized image of Western) women
that something other than their own milk is the ideal food for a child.

Therein lies the quandary; we have an expectation, present for millennia,
that guests (or other favored beings, like babies) will get the best of the
food available, but we have somehow come to expect that the best food is no
longer provided from the home but manufactured outside.  This expectation
unfortunately extends beyond our plans and expectations for infant feeding
and into how we entertain our guests.  Like it or not, we are holistic
creatures.  What we believe about one setting extends into others.

It's difficult to say, "I'll breastfeed my baby" while simultaneously
ordering out a batch of edible food-like substances to feed oneself and
guests for a party.

I don't truly know what "the answer" here is; my intent was to say that as
we become more used to manufactured food for ourselves and our friends (many
parents I speak to are happy to feed their own child whole foods but feel
they must provide junk food for peers), we lose touch with our roots as
humans for whom food is a bonding experience, and we give that over to the
companies who produce what we consume.

I apologize if this is off-topic for this list and hope Yasmin understands
that for me, food as love (both for my own family and for guests) is a
*positive* thing for me.  

Ellen Chase
LLLL, Palos Verdes Peninsula, CA

             ***********************************************

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