As a student, I was a devoted follower of Cas Clarke, author of Grub On A Grant
I liked Cas’s casual style, and the recipes were always easy, interesting, cheap, and quick: perfect for students. So when I saw that she had also written a book called Great Grub For Toddlers
We start with some general waffle about making mealtimes fun for kids, not forcing them to eat stuff, etc etc; all well and good. Then the first chapter, entitled Helpful Hints, gives a lot of detail about the first few weeks of breastfeeding. She tells us that it might hurt, but you must persist as it is the best possible food for your baby. She doesn’t mention that if it does hurt, then you should contact a breastfeeding counsellor, because there is probably something wrong with the position of the baby, and with a little help, you can stop it from hurting. Sigh.
She compounds this oversight with the following advice: After you have been breastfeeding for a while you will have to try and express your milk because until you do this you are always tied to the baby… – and this I have a problem with. For one thing, some people actually don’t resent their children, and have no problem with being tied to them. So many women are stuck with the chore of unnecessary expressing because they are advised to escape their babies as soon as possible. Expressing and cup- or bottle-feeding WILL have a detrimental effect on the mother’s milk supply. Cas Clarke is not a breastfeeding counsellor, not a paediatrician, not a nutritionist. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Writing a recipe book is one thing, but giving ridiculous breastfeeding advice in a book aimed for the mothers of toddlers seems a bit stupid. Between crash dieting and formula supplementing, it’s impressive that she managed to feed her children to four or five months, which is a relatively good stint, statistically speaking.
Her breastfeeding advice ends with the following sop to formula feeding mothers:
Just hold on to the fact that when you look around you, can you spot the people who were breastfed as children? I know I can’t!
Because appearances are all that matter.
The next chapter is on weaning, and granted this book was written over ten years ago, when advice was to wean around four months. But she didn’t even manage that:
I first tried James on baby rice at eleven weeks old – and he wasn’t content with just a teaspoonful, from the beginning he had two tablespoons! [...] I thought we were going to have to wean Helena even earlier. At nine weeks old she was showing all the signs, chomping anything that came near her mouth, long bouts of crying and generally driving her parents completely round the bend.
She appears to be quite unaware that babies chomp, cry and generally drive their parents round the bend because they’re babies. Not because they want to eat solids. Their guts are not mature enough to process solids, and they are at increased risk of allergies and obesity for such ridiculously early weaning. This all comes from the school of Generations Of Mothers Can’t Be Wrong. Oh can’t they? I do believe that the generations of mothers to whom we are referring here, are those mothers who were first sucked in by the manufacturers of wonderful, convenient, better-than-breastmilk baby formula, back in the fifties when it really was just a dairy industry by-product.
Clarke goes on to recommend hungry baby formula if the solids and milk feeds aren’t satisfying the baby. Myth! Babies are designed to be hungry so that they feed little and often to grow properly. Giving hungry baby formula gives their brain receptors the wrong signals for being full. Then, she says, at six months it is best to swap to a ‘follow-on’ milk as these have a higher iron content which babies of this age need. Myth! Follow-on milk is totally unnecessary, and was only developed to allow formula manufacturers a loophole in the law that says they cannot promote formula that is intended for newborns.
Obviously the baby part of the book is dedicated to mush, and there are fifteen pages of “recipes” for cooking and pureeing different vegetables and fruit. All the weaning books pad out their first few pages in the same way, when in fact all that is necessary is a general instruction on how to cook, puree, and freeze a piece of fruit or a vegetable. There are very few things that need specific advice, and even they can be covered in a single paragraph (banana, avocado, mango).
The remainder of the book is given over to the toddler recipes, most of which look suspiciously like the ones I used to love in Grub On A Grant, but with more marmite. I already own that book, so I really didn’t need this one. The moral of the story: don’t buy books on Amazon, because you can’t see inside them and find out how much they are going to irritate you!
Oh. I thought this was going to be about food.
Still, many good points I am sure but cannot fully identify with as my breasts are still mainly there for fun and clothes-fitting purposes. But yes.
Boooo, Caz.
On a side note, I always thought Grub on a Grant was rubbish. But then, I did mainly eat popcorn at university. And pasta with peanut butter and sweetcorn. But I didn’t get that from no recipe book. Nonono. I made that up Myself.
I never liked GoaG either; I might have been skint but so much nicer to follow Nigel’s suggestion of rice with vinegar than her weirdy “spaghetti with margarine” (and yes, I did just look that up). Perhaps there’s a reason this book is out of print.
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