On the eve of May 10th, we analyze the implications of the maternal figure's role in the nourishment of the family nucleus.
Clearly, the act of eating for all of us begins with total dependence on being fed by someone else, and in the vast majority of cases, it is our mother who feeds us. The comfort and satisfaction that a baby experiences after being fed by their mother creates a bond that psychologists and sociologists have studied for a long time.
How can we not associate food with emotions and feelings, if from birth and at an early age, it is the way in which well-being is transmitted to us? It is a cultural invariant, almost worldwide, that the mother is associated with the primary figure of satisfying the needs of newborns, partly due to her ability to produce, from her own body, the ideal food for infants. Sometimes, so many myths are created around maternal feeding that they are taken as scientific facts, requiring anthropological counterarguments to combat them. For example, one argument against the consumption of cow's milk is that humans are the only mammals who drink milk from another species. This is false, because Bishnoi women in India breastfeed their own children and also baby gazelles, as part of a doctrine of life that includes respect and preservation of animal species. However, around this biological fact, anthropologists have studied worldwide the cultural components that determine why maternal feeding carries a weight that extends throughout almost the entire life.
Let us consider, for example, the importance given to the maternal figure from our Mexican idiosyncrasy, as Octavio Paz pointed out in The Labyrinth of Solitude: the role of the mother in Mexico is full of mythifications that both elevate and demean her. In most Mexican households, a woman is in charge of family nourishment or the domestic unit: whether as wife, mother, daughter, or, in the case of men living alone, the lady who assists with cleaning. This division of labor, according to some anthropologists, no longer responds to a biological issue, but a cultural one: we remain essentially patriarchal societies.
Imagine, for example, the mother's food. The food prepared by the mother, for many people, is something like the El Dorado of childhood: a mythical place, full of pleasure and happiness, which can never be accessed again because there is only one mother's cooking. In many instances, having these culinary references is comforting, but in many others, it can cause harm and tension in relationships established with kitchens after the maternal kitchen.
It is a fact that family nourishment largely determines our tastes, practices, and emotional anchors around food. However, in contemporary times, in which women, besides being mothers, develop in a multiplicity of fields, it is anachronistic that the primary responsibility for family nourishment falls on them. When a child is poorly nourished, the blame immediately falls on the mother, but not on the father. It is also common that many food programs are directed toward mothers, which only perpetuates these roles. Not to mention all the media portrayals of mothers who "manage" to work and have children at the same time. This would have to be considered an achievement only if we start from the principle of shared responsibility with fathers. When these responsibilities are shared, we will also be able to advance as a society in the nutritional well-being of families.
#mothers #breastfeeding #food #childnutrition #nutrition #family #habits #wellbeing #emotions #affection #culture
— This article was originally published in Spanish by Liliana Martínez Lomelí. Translation generated with AI from the original text.