Ode to moms

I returned home Tuesday from a trip to Woodlake where I dropped my son off at high school, then took an hour out for a run. The phone was ringing as I walked in and it was my son informing me he was having a minor medical problem that needed my attention.

So back to Woodlake I went.

When I returned, I went to the computer to start my workday. A quick check of my email found a note from my daughter (who’s away at college) asking me to proofread a paper. I opened the attachment and saw it was 12 pages long!

And this is what I call a “Good Mom Day.” My kids are getting older and my assistance isn’t needed as much anymore, so when I get a double whammy like this, I’m thrilled.

Being a mother isn’t always as simple as this, even in the United States. According to the eighth annual “Mother’s Index,” which ranks the best — and worst — places to be a mother, the U.S. ranks 26th out of 140 countries.

In 2006, we were ranked seventh. The report is compiled each year by Save the Children, a U.S.-based independent humanitarian organization.

More children die in the first month of life in the United States than in any other developed country, except for Latvia. What gives our country such a dismal ranking is the inequality in providing access to healthcare.
Sweden and Japan provide free healthcare to pregnant women and newborns. In the U.S., healthcare is big business.

Here are the Top 10 countries (from 1 to 10) in which to be a mom based on mothers’ and children’s health, educational, and economic status: Sweden, Iceland, Norway, New Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, Spain, Germany.

Here are the Bottom 10 (from 131 to 140), which means conditions in these countries, all but one of which are in sub-Saharan Africa, are grim: Djibouti, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Chad, Yemen, Sierra Leone, and Niger.

In these countries, one in 13 mothers die from pregnancy-related causes. One in five children die before his/her fifth birthday (in Sweden, it’s one in 150), and one in three suffers from malnutrition.

In Niger, only 16 percent of births are attended by skilled health personnel. A typical mother has less than three years of education, and the life expectancy of a girl born today is 45 (in Sweden, it’s almost twice that number).

Also in Niger, only four percent of women use contraception; in Sweden, 72 percent of women use some form of modern contraception.

Did you have a little one that was up all night? Two siblings bickering? Tough day to be a mom, huh?

What if you had to raise those children in Darfur, Sudan? Mothers and their children are suffering from poverty, disease, and malnutrition, if they happen to survive the genocide.

They are dying at tremendous rates from preventable deaths due to poor access to routine healthcare. The leading cause of death among Darfuri women is complications during pregnancy.

Here is some of what mothers and their children are currently enduring in Darfur due to the ongoing slaughter by the “Janjaweed” militia. This report is from The Sunday Times of London: “Dozens of screaming toddlers in the Darfur region of Sudan were ripped away from their mothers and shot to death. Older children who tried to save their brothers and sisters were hunted down…”

Now let’s travel about 1,000 miles north to Iraq and consider the mothers raising their children in a war zone. Healthcare in Iraq is no better than that of a Third World country these days.

Prenatal care is almost nonexistent because just traveling to a hospital is a life-threatening task with gun battles, suicide bombers, and improvised explosive devices being the norm. Going into labor at the wrong time is another danger due to curfews and road closures.

Here’s one mother’s story as published in The Boston Globe earlier this year: “Noor Ibrahim felt labor pains at 9 p.m. … [She] decided to bear the pain until morning. At 3 a.m., her water broke. Once the sun rose, she, her husband, and her mother-in-law drove to the public hospital…

“When they arrived… a surgeon had just been kidnapped and the doctors refused to go to work. That left the nurses to deliver Ibrahim’s baby.
“For several hours, Ibrahim pushed. But her baby was big and she got tired. The nurses used forceps to try to pull him out. When that didn’t work, they told her to go to another hospital.

“The ambulance driver refused to take them to a private hospital in Baghdad, even after they offered to pay him.

“[The trio] got back into their own car and drove for 30 minutes as Ibrahim’s baby languished…”

Ibrahim’s son weighed nearly nine pounds. The mother survived this time; the baby did not.

Every woman, no matter where she lives, deserves to have access to education, adequate nutrition, healthcare, and family planning. Imagine a world or, for that matter, our own country, that provided these basics equally to all.

Mother’s Day is about celebrating our own mothers, but also take time to honor mothers around the world who are struggling everyday to keep their children and themselves alive.

Scary air

QUESTION: What is the most polluted city in the world?
Answer at the end of this blog…

Unless you live in a complete haze, and apparently we do, you may have already heard about the American Lung Association’s report that was released this week. It is a discouraging study that without even mentioning Three Rivers essentially says we are in dire straits.

The organization’s annual State of the Air report lists the most polluted urban areas in the nation. Even though we here in Kaweah Country are nowhere near being classified as urban, we are in close proximity and there’s no escape.

Los Angeles retains top honor as the smoggiest city. It also spewed its way to number one in 2003, 2004, and 2005.

Also in the top 10 for air quality to die for is Bakersfield (number 3) and Visalia-Porterville (number 7). And that’s not all — the Fresno-Madera area is in 15th place while Hanford-Corcoran made 17th. That means Three Rivers is between Moro Rock and a polluted place.

Now here’s where it gets downright depressing. The other metropolitan areas that round out the top 25 as having the unhealthiest air to breathe are all either along or east of the Mississippi.

So it’s L.A. and the Central Valley that can’t get a grip on the pollution problem, then clean-breathing for 2,000 miles until St. Louis, Missouri. Well, not really “clean” because almost half of the U.S. population lives in counties with unhealthy levels of pollution, even if they can’t quite make the top 10 like we can.

Around these parts, we can’t even agree on whether global warming is real or not. Although we can argue that pollution is or isn’t affecting the earth’s processes, we can’t dispute that it’s unhealthy for us to inhale 28,000 times each day.

Actually, we in Kaweah Country don’t have time to save an entire planet; we need to save ourselves. But being that we live in one of the dirtiest air basins anyway, if we reduce local pollution, we tremendously help the planet.

That is, unless we collectively decide to continue our consumptive lifestyles, but get rid of the rest of the state’s pollution that blows our way. A giant, hydroelectrically-powered turbine at Lake Kaweah blowing west might do the trick.

But, seriously folks, it’s time for a lifestyle change so our kids and grandchildren don’t sit around breathing into their ventilators and discussing how uneducated and out of touch we were.

First step: Be aware. Anything that is driven, uses electricity, was processed or manufactured, or has been delivered has consumed fossil fuels and emitted carbon dioxide. Reduce the use of any of the above and, voila, pollution is reduced.

Second step: Be vocal. Call the air district when you see polluting vehicles (they should be smog-tested or off the road), offensive ag burning (debris should be chipped and mulched), or uncontrolled dust (work the land during the wet season or water it down). Also, write to legislators and let them know we want to see Alta Peak, not the air we breathe.

According to a British government study just released, high levels of air pollution reduced life expectancy more than the radiation exposure suffered by survivors of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster.

ANSWER: Linfen, China, is the most polluted city in the world. The 3.5 million residents wear breathing masks to protect themselves from pollution.

Food for thought

When I was 20 years old, I somehow came to own a used copy of Adelle Davis’s groundbreaking book, Let’s Eat Right to Keep Fit (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1954). It forever changed the way I view food, diet, human nutrition, and physical activity.

Ever since, educating myself about optimum health through nutrition has been a lifestyle. Although Adelle’s book is timeless — disdaining white sugar and flour and heralding whole grains, good fats and proteins, and vitamins and minerals — there have been continuing changes in the science of nutrition over the years.

Chapter 1 of Eat Right to Keep Fit starts with this: “Your nutrition can determine how you look, act, and feel; whether you are grouchy or cheerful, homely or beautiful, physiologically and even psychologically young or old; whether you think clearly or are confused, enjoy your work or make it a drudgery, increase your earning power or stay in an economic rut.”

To this day, I believe this is basically true. But presently, there is even more thought that needs to go into every meal.

Two years ago while on a camping trip, my family had nightmares as I read them excerpts from Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (Harper, 2005). We haven’t eaten corporate fast food since.

More than 50 years ago, Adelle Davis’s book ended with a chapter entitled, “Is Our National Health on the Down-grade?” As we all now know, the answer to that question was, and is, yes.

The book recently added to my all-time favorites’ list is The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, by Michael Pollan. Another groundbreaker, Pollan personally follows four types of meals from source to dinner plate.

The meals that have their origins traced are: a McDonald’s feast eaten in a car on a freeway; a plethora of “Big Organic” ingredients purchased at Whole Foods Market; chicken and side dishes from a self-sustaining Virginia farm that uses no pesticides, antibiotics, or synthetic fertilizers; and the most basic of banquets consisting of ingredients Pollan hunted, gathered, and grew.

At the risk of revealing the climax, the McDonald’s meal proves severely lacking in both nutrition and eco-sustainability. The Whole Foods meal contains the unwanted ingredient of corporate compromise. The small-scale farm meal was delectable and eco-friendly. And the hunter-gatherer meal was down-to-earth with a side of guilt.

Then again, this book could also be titled, “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Corn But Were Afraid to Ask.” The beginning of the book is a meticulously researched exposé on corn, which isn’t just the innocent, all-American summer vegetable anymore, but an exploited, government-controlled ingredient that finds its way, in one form or another, into almost every food and beverage we ingest (it makes up 13 of the 38 ingredients in a Chicken McNugget).

Before reading this book, I thought I was a conscious grocery-shopper and an intelligent eater. I’ve been forced to re-examine some of my strategies.
Writes Pollan: “Perhaps most discouraging of all, my industrial organic meal [from Whole Foods Market] is nearly as drenched in fossil fuel as its conventional counterpart.”

And food really has become a dilemma. Big organic has sold out; industrialization is here to stay; not everyone can be self-sustaining and off the grid; small farms are priced out of the industry because of regulations, subsidies, and processing; and wildlife and wild plants couldn’t support an entire population that went foraging for its supper after clocking out at the office.

In this book, it is explained that food has become much more than sustenance; it has political, economic, psychological, moral, and public health implications. Because of this, we’ve created what Pollan calls a national eating disorder.

“How could it come to pass that a fast-food burger produced from corn and fossil fuel actually costs less than a burger produced from grass and sunlight?” asks the author.

In the end, the omnivore’s dilemma is two-fold: what we choose to eat and how we allow that food to be produced. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t provide a clear-cut answer but it reveals the true cost of food.

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