The new lactation sensation

I can’t imagine how much fun it must have been to walk around the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream factory and ask rural Vermonters about this. PETA maintains that if we really cared about animal welfare, we’d be drinking breast-milk ice cream:

Mama’s Milk Ice Cream, Anyone?

By JOHN CURRAN – 19 hours ago

WATERBURY, Vt. (AP) — Mooove over, Holsteins. PETA wants world-famous Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Ice Cream to tap nursing moms, rather than cows, for the milk used in its ice cream.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is asking the ice cream maker to begin using breast milk in its products instead of cow’s milk, saying it would reduce the suffering of cows and calves and give ice cream lovers a healthier product.

The idea got a cool reception Thursday from Ben & Jerry’s officials, the company’s customers and even La Leche League International, the world’s oldest breast-feeding support organization, which promotes the practice — for babies, anyway.

PETA wrote a letter to company founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield on Tuesday, telling them cow’s milk is hazardous and that milking them is cruel.

“If Ben and Jerry’s replaced the cow’s milk in its ice cream with breast milk, your customers — and cows — would reap the benefits,” wrote Tracy Reiman, executive vice president of the animal rights advocacy group. She said dairy products have been linked to juvenile diabetes, allergies and obesity.

….

Jen Wahlbrink, 34, of Phoenix, who breast-fed her 11-month-old son, Cameron, said she wouldn’t touch ice cream made from mother’s milk. She remembers her nursing days — and not that fondly.

“The (breast) pumps just weren’t that much fun. You really do feel like a cow,” she said, cradling her son in her hands.

Read Full Post »

A brief foray into the Northeastern sexual character, or lack thereof

Alfred Kinsey would be proud.

I had a three hour layover between trains last spring in Washington, D.C.’s Union Station, during which I spent some quality time with Don’t Blame it on Rio: The Real Deal Behind Why Men Go to Brazil for Sex. The crux of the book’s argument, and my interest therein, was why women of the tropics were entirely more sexually satisfying in almost every respect than their American counterparts. The point of the book was not to tell American women their situation was hopeless, or to stereotype Latin American women (well, maybe it did strive to do that. But let’s be honest: anyone would want to be stereotyped as sexual Buddhas): rather, it was to highlight the – how do I put this – frigid behavior a cold climate can subtly bestow upon a Norteamericano. The volume made an effort to stress that this frigidity applies to all sexes who have the misfortune of enduring five months of winter each year. One bundles up one’s balls along with one’s summer clothing. Its Cosmo-esque prose simply lent itself to talking to “the girls.”

The book is chock full of sexual platitudes and over-advocates the use of lingerie to cover up other inadequacies, but it does acknowledge something very real, and also something that, in my guess, tends to occur a lot more towards the Arctic circle than the Tropic of Capricorn. Let me be blunt: cold weather makes you less outwardly friendly. This is not a knock on the fundamental character, of, say, New Englanders. Vermonters are some of the most genuinely warm and loving people I have ever encountered. But you wouldn’t necessarily know it if you sauntered into Montpelier and expected to be waved at in the midst of a February cold front.

Many Latin Americans (and Southerners, and Texans, and anyone else who lives in a warm climate) have asked: why do so many Americans act cold when they come down for a Christmas break? Essentially: why don’t Americans smile and wave at you and come up and offer conversation the way “warmies” might? Simply, if you live in the cold, you are used to walking around with your hands close to your tightly bundled body for half the year. For six months, you spend almost all your time inside – if you care about your blood circulating – and deprive your poor skin cells of all the delights the tropics afford. Inevitably, it takes a little for anyone to thaw.

I feel the need to briefly defend New England’s amorous aptitude. Think of Northeasterners as ice cream: cold at first, but just as delicious and libido-tingling as a pastry once they are allowed to melt in your mouth a little.

Perhaps a sexy picture of Ms. Alba will convince you of our coital prowess.

I’m not saying we’re all sexy. If you watched us dance, then you would rightly judge Vermont men and women to be taxonomically closer to naked mole rats than homo sapiens. But otherwise, we’re really a spirited bunch, once you have accomplished the monumental task of distracting us from the cold long enough to be undressed. In all seriousness, winter sometimes affords a somewhat voracious appetite for a certain sexual relationship: that is, the “comfort blanket” way of relating to someone. All I have to say about that is that when it gets dark at 4:30 in the afternoon and you’re done with work, sometimes there is little to do other than hump like rabbits until your lamb stew starts to boil over. Not quite the rocket of sexual energy the tropics, or the American summer, provide, but it’s something. Getting laid is better than not getting laid, and New Englanders haven’t forgotten that. I think.

Edith Wharton puts it more astutely. In Ethan Frome, she depicts the difference between “summer relationships” and “winter relationships,” and how we in the land of seasons naturally look for different things romantically in different climates. I’m not saying this is a good thing, but Ms. Wharton at least acknowledges the phenomenon’s existence. Ethan is not a dislikable character, nor is he fundamentally unfriendly or cold. He is simply thrust, both through his original geography and his subsequent resignation to said region, into an inevitably disappointing climate:

Ethan Frome drove in silence, the rains loosely held in his left hand, his brown seamed profile, under the helmet-like peak of the cap, relieved against the banks of snow like the bronze image of a hero. He never turned his face to mine, or answered, except in monosyllables, the questions I put, or such slight pleasantries as I ventured. He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

Wharton places Ethan’s desire for carnal warmth and fulfillment in direct conflict with the realities of the seasons and its accompanying culture. Bleak, yes. But I like to view it as both a depiction and condemnation of such a culture. Ethan Frome – and now, far removed from 9th grade English class, I am free to realize this – is a tragedy, with the hero’s tragic flaw being that he succumbed too easily to the emotional death that can accompany a long winter. That he pays the price in the form of permanent disability is beside the point. Wharton understands how profoundly the cold affects one’s ability to express desire. She also understands that such desires are not devoid in the tragic New England male: they are merely warped through the prism of February and March.

Hope? Sunlight? Hah!

One cannot help but be driven to function differently in the cold than in the heat. What’s the solution? Deal with the cold or get out? Or change your fundamental nature and go against generations of sexual frigidity? In the end, my D.C. Brazilio-American sex manual did not advocate moving to a warmer climate as the solution to one’s coital ills. Rather, it laid out a “road map to better bedroom behavior” that General Petraus would have been proud of. Essentially, “don’t blame it on Rio. Blame it on yourself.” Suggestions included saucy negligees and full-spectrum UV light lamps in which one could bathe oneself in the cold solstice evenings.

I’ll take the former, at least in theory. I won’t say I’ve put it into practice until I put my money where my mouth is. But I will say that I’m looking into becoming less of an ice cream cone and more of a delicious Argentinian almond croissant.

Read Full Post »