The situation with feeding babies in this country is indeed a mess and a tragedy.

In my humble, nominally male, and poorly experienced opinion, there’s a deeper tragedy underlying the one all the journo-bots are nattering about uselessly.

My proposed deeper tragedy is this.

How did it ever come to pass that something as basic as the feeding of infants ended up thrown onto the brutal mercies of a capitalist machine?

For millions of evolutionary years, there was no such thing, and no need for … “formula”.

Even today, it’s not normally a necessity, provided the mother is rich enough to have the time and luxury for breastfeeding.

The LA Times reports that in rich West Los Angeles, 70% of babies are on mother’s milk. But in impoverished South LA, that’s reversed. The same percentage are on the now-scarce canned stuff.

Mostly, the rich babies are fed for free, straight from the mammalian tap.

Mostly, poor moms have to pay for formula because their time is not their own. It’s been sold off to an employer, so that she can afford things like rent. And … formula. The ‘convenience’, of some synthetic brew that will make a profit for someone, at her expense.

This isn’t about convenience, any more than paying twice as much for a plain gallon of milk from a ‘convenience’ store is about convenience.

She’s rushed. She’s harried and pressured from a thousand directions every day. This is about Survival. She can grab the milk, and the formula, and a Coke to slide down her parched throat, at inflated prices while her gas pump is ticking, far faster than it used to. The JiffyMart will even take her WIC card now.

Except when the ‘supply chain’ fails her.

We, and by we I especially mean people without much money, live in such a fucked up way on so many different levels that it is sometimes very hard to even see the fuckedness.

She is landless and unrooted and always will be, on the garbage wage she gets in return for her years. So, rent money turns into an absolute necessity, just like the formula.

There’s no place to garden at the apartment she can barely afford anyway. So it’s a grocery bill, and once in a while a treat for the kids at McBurgerland. It won’t kill them, at least not in the short term like starvation would.

She will never invest in a Tesla or a nice solar system because they cost too much up front. So: Electric bill, gas bill, water bill, sewer charge, sanitation pickup fee–at the very bare minimum. Plus some old car that breaks down and chugs a lot of ever more expensive oil and gasoline.

***

I wrote five more sentences at this point and then I trashed them, because they didn’t have that calm sound.

Anyway–you have my independently composed theory of the deeper tragedy.

If you want more data for testing its validity, I would suggest starting here.