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Why I’m glad I’m not a panda

admin — Sat, 24 Aug 2013 15:15:00 +0000

The district is elated over the birth of its newest panda resident, a cub born yesterday to the National Zoo’s female giant panda, Mei Xiang. This new cub reminds us of Mei Xiang’s loss back in September, when she gave birth to a four ounce cub that died only six days later, due to underdeveloped lungs that led to lung problems. But this baby is looking healthy, so let’s hope everything goes well.I’m not going to pretend that I’ve ever known much about the animal kingdom, except learning far too late in life from my friend Robyn that you should avoid (not seek, as I thought) eye contact with animals that seem hostile. But the more I read about Mei Xiang’s planned pregnancy, birth, and post-birth treatment, the horror grows.

Some reasons I’m glad I’m not a panda held in captivity, by a bunch of humans who are obsessed with my procreating to birth a child who will also be held in captivity:

After “natural breeding attempts” with the resident male Panda Tian Tian failed, zoo officials turned to artificial insemination. I believe the appropriate phrase is “no means no.”
Zoo officials inseminated her not only with fresh sperm from Tian Tian, but also with his frozen sperm collected in 2003, AND some extra frozen sperm they just had lying around from San Diego’s male giant panda, Gao Gao. How’s she going to know who to hit up for child support? (The zoo is going to conduct a DNA test to determine paternity. No joke.)
When Mei Xiang’s water broke, the zoo spread the word on twitter and Facebook, hoping people would tune in to the live panda cam to see the birth streamed on the internet. If someone had tried to stream my birth on the internet after my water broke, I’d have found new and particularly painful ways to kill with a camera.
In order to check on the cub’s health, which panda experts in China and other zoos do regularly, zoo officials will distract Mei Xiang with food and take the cub away to examine. I’m all for checking on the cub’s health and think bonding must come second in any post birth to fundamental vitals, but distracting her with food? My family tried to distract me with a burger and fries while Desmond was getting checked out and all I could think was “whatever goes in has to come out.” No thanks.

I will not endorse the video of this very private moment going viral, but I will give you an adorable photo of a panda cub getting into some trouble (a slightly matured cub, because I find the brand new ones kind of creepy. I’m an awful person, I know.):

Welcome to this crazy world, panda cub!

Leftovers for life

admin — Wed, 21 Aug 2013 16:08:00 +0000

Do you ever make a dish specifically to enjoy its leftovers for the next few days? I find myself doing this with roast chicken, which makes a wicked curried chicken salad that is perfect in this summer heat (recipe coming soon!). Curries are also better the longer they sit, allowing the spices and flavors to really seep into the meats and vegetables. But one of my favorite repurposings of leftovers has to be the frankie.

The frankie is my favorite street food from my childhood summers in Bombay. Right next to the McDonald’s down the street from my grandparents’ flat, there was a frankie stand. You would pay a guy a few rupees and he would give you a small coin that signaled either chicken, mutton or veggie to the man you handed it to through a small hole in the wall. A moment later a hand would emerge and give you the most delectable snack– spicy (always mutton for me) filling wrapped up in a tawa-fried, egg-coated roti. My cousins and I would eat them on our walk back home along Linking Road, with juices running down our elbows, and quickly mop our faces before adults could figure out what we’d been up to.

I wasn’t really allowed to have frankies. One, I was of a weak Western constitution, and two, well, did you hear about the hole in the wall? But it didn’t really matter. I ate them so often that I figured after the first dozen or so, I’d beaten the odds.

And now, in adulthood, I make my own frankies whenever I have leftover, spiced meat. My shortcut is that I use store-bought rotis, particularly the Spring Home Roti Paratha that is readily available in many of the large Asian grocers in the DC metro area. This time I had some leftover masala raan, an Indian-spiced leg of lamb that I slow cooked for 8 hours. Given that my shortcut frankie isn’t even brushed with egg (a nice touch, but one I’ve learned to forsake in a household where my mother is deathly allergic to eggs), I’ll give you the recipe for the lamb instead. It’s delicious fresh, of course, but the tender, slow-cooked leftovers pull into wonderful frankies. To assemble the frankie, though, just pan-fry a roti (if you’d like the egg-coating, just brush each side with a beaten egg and flip), fill with meat and veggies of your choice, roll up and enjoy!

Masala Raan

2 tsp freshly cracked black pepper
1 tbsp ground coriander
2 tsp ground cumin
1 tbsp ground fennel
6 green cardamom pods, husks removed and discarded, insides crushed
1 tsp ground cinnamon
2 tsp turmeric
1 tbsp minced garlic
1 tbsp minced ginger
5 tablespoons olive oil
4-5 lb leg of lamb, stabbed all over
3-5 red chillies, dried or fresh
4 sprigs rosemary
4 whole cloves of garlic
15 whole cloves
2 large onions, sliced
1 – 2 tsp sea salt
1/2 cup water or stock

Combine the first nine ingredients. Add four tablespoons of olive oil and stir to make a paste. Rub the paste all over the leg of lamb. Set aside to marinate in the fridge for at least 4 hours, preferably overnight. Allow the lamb to come to room temperature for 1 hour before inserting cloves, rosemary, and red chillies into the meat’s slits. Spread the onions, garlic cloves and rosemary sprigs over the bottom of a slow cooker. Place the lamb on top, sprinkle with salt and douse with the water or stock. Cover and cook on low for 7-8 hours, or high for 4-6 hours. Try to baste every hour or so, if you’re not using the slow cooker for convenience in your absence in the first place.**

Speaking of the wonder of leftovers, one of the most inspiring social campaigns I’ve seen recently fights child hunger on the streets of Bombay. Share My Dabba is a fantastic initiative that takes advantage of one of the most efficient food delivery systems in the world. Over 200,000 dabbas (lunches) are delivered to people across the city each day. While this adds up to 120 tons of food each day, more than 16 tons are left uneaten, so SMD started handing out sheets of stickers to see if their patrons would be willing to share their food with the city’s 2 million starving children. A little red circle with the simple word “share” designates the dabbas with remaining food. Once the tins are collected again after lunch, those with the stickers are sorted by volunteers and shared with hungry children.

I used to work at a school that provided a home and education to impoverished children in Bangalore. Mealtimes were my favorite–they were spirited and loud and the kids always used to light up (unless bittergourd was on the menu). This program reminds me of Ananya’s efforts to make sure that children who were hungry were fed, period. If you’re anything like me, you won’t be able to watch this video without getting teary. And, hopefully, without donating to this wonderful initiative. Please consider it. And please let me know if you do!

We should all Expect Better, and then ask some more questions

admin — Tue, 20 Aug 2013 19:54:00 +0000

Yes, I know about Emily Oster’s new book released today that questions conventional pregnancy wisdom.Yes, I think her work is quality and that a social scientist’s interpretation of the data around pregnancy restrictions and recommendations is much needed in our discourse about women’s health.

Yes, I agree with a number of her conclusions–namely, that moderation is key. One of my favorite lines is “It isn’t that complicated: drink like a European adult, not a fraternity brother.” I think the most important conclusion that I share in common with Oster is that neither of us is actually making recommendations for other women’s pregnancies–we both study, research and investigate common pregnancy do’s and don’ts to navigate our own pregnancies and make our own decisions. In the end, though, readers should be left to their own decision-making mechanisms. In the case of my work, at least, I just hope they’re armed with enough information to make a decision based on knowledge and not fear.

Yes, Joe Scarborough makes my head hurt:

Emily Oster on Morning Joe

Do I think Oster’s work scooped my own project on the politics of pregnancy? No.

After a couple of weeks of indigestion, I calmed down and realized that the major do’s and don’ts that Oster tackles in her work are typically about ingestion and exposure to a long list of substances traditionally banned from pregnant women’s diets and lifestyles: alcohol, caffeine, raw milk cheese, hair dye, exercise, etc. She applies an economist’s eyes to the randomized trials and peer-reviewed research out there on these topics and comes to her own conclusions about the restrictions that seem hysterical and those that seem reasonable and evidence-based. Applying reason to pregnancy? Kudos to her.

I also tackle some of these debates, particularly when it comes to food and drink restrictions. For instance, I examine KRAFT’s involvement in lobbying for stronger pasteurization regulation and discuss how this shaped the average American’s taste for cheese.

But the do’s and don’ts of pregnancy include so many more decisions than randomized trials can help us study. There are decisions about the medical care you choose–an OB or a midwife?–which raises questions about the increasingly prominent role of insurance companies and medical associations in these matters. Then there are often difficult conversations to be had at work when first announcing a pregnancy and thinking ahead to negotiate leave entitlements, given our nation’s historical failure passing paid family leave legislation. Even finding out the sex of the baby can easily be politicized, with gendered assumptions and a blue-pink dichotomy that not only confuses history, but defies the logic of the color wheel itself. And, as I’ve discussed, there are child care concerns that parents have to consider far before the baby is born–that is to say, during pregnancy.

These are the questions that my book is going to answer. Building on Oster’s excellent work for sure, but asking a set of questions that asks how we got to this place of misinformation and fear in the first place.

You can’t fix something unless you know what exactly is broken.

Considering childcare

admin — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 21:23:00 +0000

Alissa Quart has a piece in The New York Times today that looks at the financial burden, and often impossibility, of child care on American families. Given that one of my chapters tackles exactly this topic, it piqued my interest. Why would a book on the politics of pregnancy discuss post-birth child care? Because we put our son on a daycare waitlist five months into our pregnancy—twenty months later, our number (a pessimistic 35) has not budged.

If parents are lucky enough to gain admission for their children, Quart discusses the crushing costs. Citing research from University of Massachusetts at Amherst sociologist Joya Misra, she writes that the cost of center-based day care surpasses one year of tuition at a public college in thirty-five states, as well as DC.

But it’s not only the price tag that has parents in despair. Despite resounding evidence that investing in young children’s care reaps huge social benefits, the United States is currently suffering from a severe scarcity of decent day care facilities. A survey conducted by the National Institute Child Health Development deemed only ten percent of facilities to be “high-care” nationwide and a recent cover story for The New Republic by Jonathan Cohn described the overall quality of day care in our country as “wildly uneven and barely monitored, and, at the lower end, Dickensian.”

An expose like this, on the dismal state of American child care, surfaces once every year or so. In general, comparisons are made to other industrialized nations, where states invest heavily in quality child care facilities and parents are even offered tax incentives if they stay home to take care of their own children, given that it is considered to save the state a huge sum of money.

Pamela Druckerman also discusses the American day care dilemma in her comparison between parenting in France and the United States, Bringing Up Bebe. As an American expat in Paris, she compares the quality of care that her first daughter receives from state run crèches with day care back home in the States.

At least half of any crèche’s workers, Druckerman writes, must pass rigorous tests in reasoning, reading comprehension, math, human biology, and psychological reasoning. Another quarter must have degrees in health, leisure or social work.

But what really wins Druckerman over with her own daughter’s experience in the crèche is its dining experience. Again, the rumored four course meal: “a cold vegetable starter, a main dish with a side of grains or cooked vegetables, a different cheese each day; and a dessert of fresh fruit or fruit puree.” Lunch is prepared by an in-house cook from scratch each day. Soon Druckerman admits to thinking of her daughters’ caregivers as the “Rhodes Scholars of baby care.”

The first day cares were established during the Industrial Revolution in both countries, because women simply had no choice but to leave their homes and enter the workforce. Horror stories of children being tied to bedposts all day while their mothers worked in factories became so common that the crèche was established in France in the mid 1800s. News of this arrangement spread to States soon thereafter. In France this child care system was seen as a state investment in helping create responsible new members of society, and enabled mothers to participate in the workforce with confidence that their children were in good hands.

In the U.S., however, born more out of necessity and continued for dubious reasons such as “Americanizing” the children of immigrants, child care never developed as an institution that could help socialize children into well-adjusted, independent and developmentally advanced individuals, as it did in other industrialized nations.

We do ourselves a disservice if we just think that this set of circumstances that conspire to disproportionately punish women in the workforce are happenstance. American day care is so dismal because the state has long seen the care of children outside of the home as inferior to a mother’s care—the proper place for a woman is in the home, tending to her children’s needs, so significant state subsidies have been nearly unimaginable for the majority of our country’s history.

Let’s not even deign to discuss the wild possibility that a father might also be considered a parent. When the government collects data on parents and work life balance, for instance, the mother is termed the “designated parent” and the father is a “childcare arrangement.” Yes, you read that right.

How might things have evolved differently in this country had our government established an agency that oversaw child care facilities, similar to the Mother and Infant Protection service that the French state formed after World War II? What might it take to convince our state that child care is a responsible investment, given the huge social benefits to not only children, but their working parents and the economy as a whole?

I’m not quite sure what my husband and I would have done had we not had an amazing network of family to care for Desmond while we both worked full time. He really hates bedposts.