Not really a book review, but a reading review.
Michelle and I went to the reading by Jennifer Block, author of PUSHED: The Painful Truth About Childbirth and Modern Maternity Care (read excerpts). The author is young, attractive and very trendy-urban-hip, unlike the proponents of physiologic birth of the 60s and 70s with their flowing cotton dresses, unshaven legs, trailing the scent of patchouli. What she read of the book was factual and told from a journalistic point of view devoid of the stridency of the previous era. She has obviously done her research and I noticed none of the awkwardness that sometimes comes in describing hospital birth. She could "talk the talk". I didn't walk out with a copy of the book for the same reason I haven't seen Sicko-I live it everyday. Just today I shared with a patient that if I were having a baby today, it would be born at the Birth and Women's Health Center. Not that what we do is bad, it's just not the best way, not the family-centered way and it's not what everyone wants or needs.
Real cheese smells ("like the feet of angels" as I've heard some described), can be strong, earthy, nutty, and is not always pretty. But when you bite into it, it touches every taste bud and the sensory neurons light up; you know you have something real, the flavor lingers you realize that food can be an experience. Much like birth.
Compare to Kraft cheese food: ingredients processed beyond recognition, squeezed out in uniform slices and packaged in nice shiny paper. That's what we do, the Kraft cheese food version-there's a market for it and I just try to make sure those purchasing our "product" get the safest and best cellophane wrapped "delivery" out there.
Give me a good Gorgonzola, pungent, crumbly with streaks of green mold! Now that's cheese.
As we looked around the room, Michelle whispered to me: "Looks like she's preaching to the choir." And she was right, those attending were already believers, there were no altar calls or converts that night. But it was an enjoyable evening rubbing elbows with some ghosts from the past
Just for fun, check out this site: Belly Tales
2 comments:
Ooooh, I like the cheese analogy.
I had been working on one about McDonald's versus Grandma's homemade Sunday dinner: convenient, fast, filling, tastes ok, probably sort of safe, but not the least bit special;
versus special, made just for you, fresh, rich tasting and nutritious and made with love just for you by Grandma.
Care to take a stab at rates of food poisoning for either choice? I've got no clue...
I was never poisoned by MaMaw (that was Grandma at my house). Food was much fresher then-she knew where everything came from, most of it from her garden and Hermann's Meats on Market Street. The old fashioned butcher with the big glass case and a scale. As she walked in the door, the counter man would holler: "Daisy, how are you? What do you need today." Then she'd scrutinize everything in the case, turn her nose up at most, choose a few pounds of this and a pound of that. Give the guy a hard time and off we'd go, next door to Count's Bakery, for the best Cream Horn's you ever tasted. Pastry so short, oh my! What wonderful Saturdays those were...
Judy
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