green thoughts and lactivism

A new report from the WHO documents results of searches of the Medline and Scientific Citation Index databases. These results show that those people who were breastfed: had lower blood pressure, had lower mean cholesterol in adulthood, were less likely to be overweight, were less likely to have type 2 diabetes, had higher intelligence scores, showed better school performance in late adolescence and young adulthood. Go Ezzie and mama!


As my seed catalogs come in I am reminded of one of my favorite gardening books. Green Thoughts by Eleanor Perenyi is a collection of witty essays with titles ranging from Ashes to Woman's Place ( in which she criticizes the age old tradition of sexism within horticultural practices). Here's a tidbit from that chapter:" Altogether, it is pretty obvious that relative physical strength isn't the determining factor in most cases of divided labor but rather which tasks men prefer to do and which they have decided to leave to women. The man in charge of our Hungarian vineyard was the envy of the neighborhood on account of his ten terrific daughters, who could and did get through twice the work of any male, and he didn't hesitate to lay it on them. In peasant societies nobody worries much about overtaxing women's strength. I doubt if they do in any society. What men fear is competition and losing the service of women as drudges." She goes on to describe how women invented horticulture, foraging for plants while men were out hunting beasts. Eventually when the men retired from hunting and took over the gardening, women were relegated to growing the ornamentals. Okay, this may bore some of you to bits. I have read every chapter and she combines her love of writing and her love of gardening in a beautiful way. Her Mulches chapter was 6 pages long and I read all of it and I was probably doing the dishes, nursing ezra and watering my tomato plants at the same time.