Lone Cheerio

Cheerios on the table. Cheerios on the floor. Cheerios in plastic baggies ground to a fine powder by little boy banging. Cheerios after squash and peas. Cheerios after high-fat yogurt. Cheerios in the folds of the car seat. Cheerios to buy time. Cheerios goggles to make baby laugh. Cheerios race car under foot. Cheerios bit in half by tiny front teeth. Cheerios soaked with slobber, goobering down side of high chair. Cheerios on baby boy’s sweet breath.

Amy shot this poignant little Cheerio this afternoon.

Music: Traffic :: Shanghai Noodle Factory

22 Replies to “Lone Cheerio”

  1. I don’t get Cheerios as a cereal. I mean, even after two bowls mixed with yoghurt I still got hungry again after an hour or two.

    Now, Oatmeal Raisin Crisp on the other hand… chop in some strawberries, add yoghurt, and it’ll keep you going!

    …you can probably tell that I’m a strong believer in having a decent breakfast :-)

  2. i didn’t tell you about spending time with Orion, (aka Sparky) Col’s friend Wendy’s 2-1/2 y.o. boy.

    (well i may have told you about him dancing like mick jagger, and how insanely bright and hyper he is….)

    anyway, wendy was recounting a story of how he hid a cheerio in his foreskin! and of course sparky volunteered to demonstrate :) i think we laughed for 10 minutes straight hearing that.

    [btw – i discovered a gender difference: women laugh so hard they pee their pants. men laugh so hard they fart. verifiable i think, but no metrics yet to prove it]

    i spent the rest of the day lamenting my own circumcision….

  3. at the risk of getting far afield…..
    seems to make more sense to promote safer water than to condemn a company that manufactures breast milk replacements.

    i didn’t realize the WHO was more interested in politics than science. (no, not saying that formula is every bit as good as breast milk, nor that the bonding isn’t beneficial to development; however, children don’t die from *drinking formula* though they might die from associated conditions. but that doesn’t sell as well).
    b

  4. Fixing the water supply obviously is important, but easier said than done. On the other hand, encouraging uneducated mothers not to employ nature’s solution – the excellent water filter known as the breast – is wrong. Call it being political if you want, but it is an international health issue and they exist to raise awareness about this kind of thing.

  5. not everyone can breast feed.
    how about women trying to get into the workplace?
    how bout mothers with inadequate milk supply?

    seems to me that both might be issues in thirdworld countries where a) you scrape by to survive and b) mothers may be malnourished.

    pc rhetoric that guilts people into believeing there is only one *right* way to do it seems wrong to me.

  6. which is not to say that formula suppliers are altruistic and not out to make a profit and increase market share. but just becasue they want to make a profit doesn’t invalidate what they sell.

  7. Certainly you can find examples of people or even entire regions who need to use formula for one reason or another, but ultimately the scheme is just taking advantage of the uneducated women, convincing them that man has improved on nature – WHO is suggesting 1.5 million lives a year could be saved by returning to breast milk! Is that all because of the bad water supply? What would it benefit WHO to guilt anyone into anything? Why suspect that they have some kind of agenda, rather than simply wanting the best for mothers and babies? They’re close to the situation, we’re not… they have decades of experience understanding the situation, we don’t. I have no reason to doubt them.

  8. I wonder if babies can be made sick by a giant pubic hair next to their Cheerios®

    Boycott pubes.

  9. they are a large bureaucracy. that seem reason enough to me.

    menptok – if i could pronounce your name i would say “yeah mneptok!”.

    in general, as always when i get inflamatory – and i thank that guy who wrote up hte RAW flick on disinfo.com for distilling the philosophy – i am just promoting the Maybe.

  10. WHO is a large bureaucracy, Nestle is a huge company. Both have problems, but WHO has other people’s good will in mind, Nestle has only their own.

  11. baald, so you actually witnessed this cheerio insertion business? Did the foreskin cover the entire cheerio, or did part of it still hang out? Did it leave a tell-tale bulge, or was it neatly hidden away for later consumption? Did it dissolve in there, or “stay crunchy, even in milk?”

  12. ‘WHO is a large bureaucracy, Nestle is a huge company. Both have problems, but WHO has other people’s good will in mind, Nestle has only their own.

    you have no evidence to back that up.

    b

  13. Who else’s good will would WHO have in mind? What other purpose does the organization serve than to address international health issues? Sounds like you think WHO has a hidden motive that overrides their charter.

    I’m not quite getting how or why you want to cast Nestle as the good guys and WHO as the bad guys. Do you know something about WHO we don’t know, or are you playing devil’s advocate here?

  14. Whoa – just saw your other email on this topic. Lots to digest there. After reading it through once, I still don’t see what a motivation might be for WHO to have anyone but mothers’ and babies best interest at heart, but I will read it more carefully and post a separate entry on it.

  15. my point is that there is probably NO wholly “good” or wholly “bad” guy. because nestle wants to make a profit doesn’t necessarilly make them bad. there are things that they could do that if substantiate would make me change my opinion on that behavior, though you’d have to show me that the overwhelming majority of their business decisions are abhorent before i’d say the corporation is bad. (oh – this really gets into what constitutes a corporation, too – stockholders? management? employees? as far as the gubment goes, they are just another taxpayer ID….just like you and i (ok, not entirely acurate, but still illustrates the gulf betwqeen legal status and…ontological status of the “corporation”).

    and similarly, i’m not saying that the WHO is necessarilly some nefariouys organization, just that its a political organization, thus subject to typical political behavior. they have a mission statement, which may or may not be wholly supported in practice. as i wrote in a private comm to you – sure, they may have only the interest of the world’s health in mind, but deciding what constitutes that is a political process.

  16. > because nestle wants to make a profit doesn’t necessarilly make them bad.

    Certainly not. But when you look at the allegations — and I have no reason to suspect they’re falsified or exaggerated allegations; they were taken seriously enough to initiate a very large-scale international boycott, which was rekindled in the late 80s — it appears that Nestle is acting to the detriment of mothers and babies.

    http://www.breastfeeding.com/advocacy/advocacy_boycott.html

    “In order to sell more of its infant formula in third world countries, Nestle would hire women with no special training and dress them up as nurses to give out free samples of Nestle formula. The free samples lasted long enough for the mother’s breast milk to dry up from lack of use. Then mothers would be forced to purchase the formula but, being poor, they would often mix the formula with unsanitary water or ‘stretch’ the amount of formula by diluting it with more water than recommended. The result was that babies starved all over the Third World while Nestle made huge profits from this predatory marketing strategy. ”

    If that’s true, and again, I have no reason to suspect it isn’t, it’s really bad. We can mince words all day and night, but that’s classic greed-driven evil. The thing about formula is that if you wait long enough to introduce it, you can do so safely. The baby has already learned to latch, the milk flow is solid. But mothers who give up trying to get the latch going too early risk the milk drying up and never being able to return to it. That’s one of the primary goals of La Leche League — making sure that doesn’t happen. The stakes are very high for every mother/baby.

    >there are things that they could do that if substantiate would make me change my opinion on that behavior, though you’d have to show me that the overwhelming majority of their business decisions are abhorent before i’d say the corporation is bad.

    To be clear, Amy and I have not joined the boycott. This is all news to us and we’ve been discussing it. But this one practice, if it still goes on, is enough to make us not want to support the company, even if they’re not “all bad”. Corps like that are too large and complex and multifaceted to be all good or all bad. Just like people – but we still punish those who do bad even if they’re not “all bad.”

    >and similarly, i’m not saying that the WHO is necessarilly some nefariouys organization, just that its a political organization, thus subject to typical political behavior.

    I’m just not sure what that means. I mean, all orgs are political, if you want to look at it that way. But what does that mean? If by political you mean they’r susceptible to pressures, well… what kinds of non-positive pressures would drive them to care about the decline in breast feeding and subsequent damage? It does seem quite altruistic to me.

    > to you – sure, they may have only the interest of the world’s health in mind, but deciding what constitutes that is a political process.

    OK, so it’s political, but the end goal is still good, and Nestle, if these practices continue, is working to the detriment of moms and babies.

    Does political correctness get out of hand? Sure it does. But people *should* vote with their wallets — god knows it’s probably more effective than trying to use the “other” poltical system. Why is it so egregiously P.C. to simply buy other brands to try and add your little drop in the bucket in favor of people who don’t have money to vote with? Sorry, that was convoluted. All I mean is that the allegations are very serious, and I can see no reason to be bothered that some people care enough about it to refrain from supporting the company.

    Unless of course the boycotters are wrong about what Nestle is doing. But I think that if that were the case, the boycott would not have lasted 20 years.

  17. I tried the Heritage Oh’s… thought they were too firm! Had to let them soak in milk for five minutes before they were as soft as Cheerios…

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