How mundane becomes exotic

I came across this story in the news about making your own yogurt. It talks about these special “heirloom” cultures from European countries. The story makes yogurt-making sound exotic and wondrous. We Indians can roll our eyes at it, given that making yogurt is an integral a part of our daily lives, but I see an omen of things to come. Our mothers have probably never even thought about how old their yogurt culture is. My mother’s is older than I am for sure, and I have been using the same culture that I brought from India about ten years ago. But in a country where food has been industrialized for many generations now, making yogurt at home becomes a newsworthy item. 

Raw milk is another such thing. When I was growing up, we got raw milk delivered home every day. We boiled it to kill all contamination, drank it the same day, turned the leftover into yogurt, and started the process all over, the next day. In the US, pasteurized and homogenized milk is considered the cause of many dietary and allergy problems by some, but you have to jump through hoops and pay through your nose to get raw milk. Advocacy groups have been established for this once simple thing.

Then there is the ‘eat local’ movement in the US. My Indian friends will remember their parents going to the “sabzi mandi” regularly to buy locally grown seasonal produce without upping their noses and calling themselves ‘locavores’. Specialty, and very expensive, restaurants have opened that profess to serve only locally grown fruits and vegetables. It really is quite difficult to find locally grown and seasonal fruits and vegetables in the US.

Now I see globalization not only bringing convenience foods to India, but actively trying to change dietary habits to sell more breakfast cereal and doughnuts. Modern Indians look forward to be able to buy packaged milk that lasts for a whole week. Children are growing up eating industrially-produced breakfast cereals and fast food, guaranteeing that food habits would have completely changed in just one generation. I want to scream, to shout, “Learn from other people’s mistake. Don’t do it!”. Here I am in a 'developed' country, struggling to feed my family seasonal and fresh food, and fighting an expensive uphill battle to achieve that, and there are people on the other end of the world happily giving that up to be 'modern'! The society in America has already seen what convenience food can do to a culture, the health of a populace and to the environment. It has changed crops to the extent that we have to seek out heirloom seeds to get tomatoes that have some flavor. Food industrialization has destroyed a way of life beyond recovery in the US, and bringing it back has turned into a legal, and political battle. That way of life is still healthy, and not forgotten in other countries, but it will be destroyed even faster in a mad dash towards consumerism and modernization. 

Is obesity and environmental damage an integral part of providing equal opportunities to the children of India? Do things have to come full circle again, if they have already been there once? Do we have to destroy a way of life, and then be forced to discover it as ‘exotic’ once again?

Are the French better parents?

A new year and a new parenting formula! Last year we were told that the Chinese way was better and this year’s hottest parenting methods come from the French via Paula Druckerman in her book Raising up bebe. I haven’t read the book, but read her article in Wall Street Journal. Does this not strike you as ironic, that as per authors of parenting books,  parents in China or France do such an excellent job without ever having read a single book on parenting, and those in the USA have no clue despite the market being glutted with books on the subject. And so we go write more! If you stop and think, maybe the problem is not of having enough advice, but too much of it, that makes us question our values instead of following our inner compass. 

One country’s parenting way in not better than other’s. What is common among any of the “old” countries is that parents there still have a deep sense of their roots, and that combined with the local culture, guides the way for them. If there is a magic formula that produces wonderful children, it is parents with a clear vision of what kind of adults they want their children to grow up into. Ms Druckerman, a helicopter parent by her own admission, went from New York to Paris and was amazed at the fact that the parents actually had some long term goals for their children that they followed up on. They saw themselves as the means for their children’s success instead of wringing their hands in exasperation of having no control on what their children did. French parents actually exerted their parental authority! Ms Druckerman could have as well gone to a small mid-western town in the US, or any other country in the world and made the exact same discovery. “How mid-western US parents are better than neurotic New York parents” doesn’t make a very good book title though. 

The problem is not that American parents are bad or that the French have discovered a secret sauce. It is not at all culture specific - parents who misguidedly look for a secret formula, some magic recipe in a book that will help them parent better, have already ceded their inner authority to be the best guide for their children. 

In most other countries of the world, parenting is driven by culture, not by research or parenting books. Parents are guided by a deep set of values imbibed form the culture they live in and the culture as a whole instills these values in their children. Sometimes parenting is driven simply by “what will people say”, because the culture clearly defines right and wrong. In India, where I grew up, a child would get a dressing down for making her parents look bad in front of neighbors and extended family by behaving badly. It was very deeply instilled that your behavior reflects on the entire family going back many generations, and you better not mess that up. My parents did not learn that from a book.  They did not have to explicitly teach it either - we met enough role models daily to emulate from.

America is a different country. Individual is more important than the collective family. The country is a melting pot, and there is no set of uniform cultural values that we are judged by. Here we raise our children in an isolated environment. We rarely meet our neighbors or extended family, so that constant threat of somebody watching and judging is removed. This isolation also mean that neither the parents nor the children see any regular real time role models to emulate. And lacking our own inner compass, we go trudging through books and newspapers to find that magic formula.


On a side note, it is bizarre that WSJ is the new outlet for parenting advice - even the 'tiger mother' article was published there!