I have to start this with an apologia (or a mea culpa)-- I am a staunch advocate of breastfeeding, but after a near-bout with starvation due to dietary restrictions, I had to start supplementing with a bottle. One pull on the silicone nipple, and my son never wanted to breastfeed again. So it's bottles for us (or babas as we like to say around here).
My son loves his baba. He drinks about 2 quarts a day from it, almond milk at first, which nearly ran us into the poor house (~$4/ quart). Now he can tolerate soy, but he also likes apple juice. Since we're close to the poor house anyway, I do give him "juicy babas" about half the time. In fact, he just woke up, asked for a "juicy baba" and after giving it to him, and cuddling him back to sleep, I was so overwhelmed with fear and guilt that I had to get up & write this diary.
The first indication that my son's beloved babas were bad for him was when I read that regular old plastic bottles leach hideous toxins, particularly if you run them through the dishwasher.
Environment California Research and Policy Center Report
So, OK, a girlfriend gave me a case of glass bottles that her daughter refuses (good on ya, Lillie!). So no creepy bisphenols for my boy. No man boobs, shrunken testicles or whatever. Silicone nipples, of course.
But today my partner sent me a link about the safety of Chinese products (1 in 5 products are unsafe) and about a woman who has taken to not buying anything from China. She writes that it's nearly impossible to not buy food with ingredients made in China, because the origin of the ingredients is not listed, only the place it was packed.
The killer for me was towards the bottom:
Take an American staple like apple juice. The USDA says 50 percent of the apple juice imported in the United States today comes from China. That's an estimated 161,000 tons of apple juice compared to the 110,000 tons produced in the United States, according to the USDA.
So what about those juicy babas that make my darling son so happy? We buy the concentrate that's 90 cents a can, so I know it's not nice, locally produced, organic apple juice. With a 50% chance that those apples were grown in China, and a 20% chance that the products are unsafe (based on what the ever-honest Chinese government says), and a 99% chance it hasn't been inspected in the US, what are the odds that my baby is sucking down something evil in his 2 quarts a day? Pretty good, I think.
I'm furious, frankly. When my partner sent me the link, he wrote "Do you want to try this?" meaning, can we stop buying shitty shit made in China? My answer: Hell, yeah! Starting now, I say, fuck everything made in China, and every packaged food product that's not clearly labled with the country of origin. In the morning, I'll be figuring out who to write nasty letters to.
Can we do it? I don't know-- it's almost impossible to know what the component parts of things are, but we have a good start with our CSA programs, buying from local vendors, or just not buying. But I am sure going to try. This is one of those things that's just not worth the risk.