[img]139|left|Jessica Gadsden||no_popup[/img]Google has stepped in for our mothers, grandmothers, sisters and even a favorite aunt. Intimate knowledge that used to be shared between family members must now be gathered, ad hoc, from the first ten websites that appear in the search results.
How is it that Americans have allowed their collective memories to be replaced by marketing and advertising—products instead of people? How did “Googling” our way to answers replace knowledge passed down from generation to generation?
Until the 1950s, the average American child was potty trained by one year. Today’s children linger in their urine-soaked diapers until two or three years old. And with the advent of super-dry, and cleverly disguised training pants, children can push this first milestone well into childhood. During my recent pregnancy, I happened upon a book that talked about “elimination communication.” I’d never heard the concept before. You can anticipate when a child needs to go? You can shorten the time a child is in diapers? They can be potty trained by one? Who knew? Suddenly, years of cloth diapering disappeared before my very eyes.
I Won’t Await His First Signal
Of course, like anything else one chooses to see, the idea of early toilet learning is patently obvious once one thinks about it. Humans didn’t make it through the last 10,000 years of civilization (or before) with paper diapers. If that were the case, we would be up to our ears in landfill waste (which is growing too fast as it is). Nor do the billions of humans in developing nations, living on less than a dollar or two a day, spend what little money they have on diapers. The light bulb moment came, and I splurged on a European-made potty for our infant. I debated the idea of waiting for our little one to signal when he was ready to go – in a few years – but just couldn’t see the logic of that. I wouldn’t let him make decisions on driving, eating, or even sleeping – so the idea that a toddler can make a decision about when he or she is “ready” to use the bathroom eluded me.
When I decided to go the elimination communication route, I asked some of the moms I knew for their advice. I got the collective blank stare. No one, it seemed, knew how to potty train their child before age one. Understandably when I reached back to ask my grandmother, whose youngest child is sixty-six, her memory was a bit hazy. In just sixty years, something that had once been common knowledge among women in our country is now lost.
Of course, there is no shortage of American businesses or products to fill the gap – whether it be a mountain of disposable diapers, plastic potties or a wide array of books on potty learning, from birth through first grade.
Not just child care issues that have faded from our collective memory. The same can be said about food. I’ve recently had the good fortune to have a grass-fed beef purveyor set up shop at our local farmer’s market. In addition to all the now popular cuts of meat, he sells something for which I’ve searched high and low (mostly unsuccessfully) – offal, innards, the good-for-you, cheap parts of any animal. With glee, I forked over my money for tongue, heart, kidneys, even beef cheeks – the cuts of meat I usually have to purchase prepared at “ethnic” restaurants around the Southland. If I could do it myself, I thought, I could save myself the drive and some money.
Who Can Remember?
But there they all sit in my freezer, uncooked because every single time I think about making a meal from one of those cuts of meat, I can’t quite figure out what to do with them. I asked my mother, whom I remember preparing tongue when I was a child (it’s the only food that can taste you back, she’d joke). But that was not much help. She didn’t seem to remember any detail. The same holds true for my mother-in-law (who swears she used Canola oil in the sixties and seventies – well before it was available in 1986). When I asked my grandmother, the oldest of nine children – who reminded me that she’d hated kitchen duty and escaped it whenever possible – just shrugged. No cookbook I’ve acquired in my adult life addresses this aspect of real cooking.
But how could we, as Americans, have moved, so quickly from days of austerity that forced us to rely on traditional foods, and preparation methods – to “better living through chemistry?” Instead of traditional foods that have the right proportion of fats, and nutrients for the humans we have evolved into – almost all our “needs” can be fulfilled though one kind of product or another. Need fat? Take a pill. Need to lose fat? take a pill. Need vitamins? Take a pill. Need calories? Here’s some denatured, shelf-stable food that will need to be supplemented by several – you guessed it – pills.
As important and fundamental as food is to the organisms we are, it’s as if Americans’ memories have been wiped clean.
Yet this is not the case in other countries. In my travels to almost any country (Canada excepted), food, and food tradition have been, and remain – despite a persistent American corporate influence – an integral part of the culture. No matter the region, the local population has evolved to use the foods available to them to strike the right nutritional balance, whether that be fish or fowl, pork or pickles. Foreigners seem more satisfied with their food, proud of their traditions, and much healthier than Americans (although some of that may be access to health care). When I ask about food abroad, often the answer is that “we’re eating this because we’ve always been eating this.”
Where are our traditions? The idea that our nation of immigrants (and lest they be forgotten, of slaves and natives, too) should abandon their traditions and become Americans, has not served us well. Rather it has served us up on a platter to any and every corporation that claims to have a product or pill to meet our every desire and solve our problems. Yet we become fatter and sicker, untethered from our pasts, and ill equipped to pass anything onto the next generation.
I want something more than McDonald’s, Disney, Cheerios (the unofficial triumvirate of American childhood tradition) to pass on to my son. Now, to Google “tradition.”
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
