Baby Food

I. Baby Food
"Most babies could use a dose of kale: a half cup of it, and more than a day's worth of Vitamin A, C, and K, The only problem is that they [babies] hate it [kale] -- or so parents and  baby-food manufacturers seem to agree. On any given day, a quarter of American toddlers eat no vegetables. When they do eat them, the most popular choice is French fries." [1]

"Baby food is in the midst of a golden age. With the rise of two-income families, home delivery, and even pickier eaters, the global market has grown to nine billion dollars a year, sixteen percent of it in the United States. Nine out of ten Americans have eaten commercial food for some period of time."

"A third of baby food is now homemade, yet the baby-food industry is bigger than ever. Its new products have more vegetables and fewer additives. And sugar is the great override button for infant taste. A few drops can calm a baby's heart, releases opiates in her brain, and settle her usual activity into a pleasurable pattern."

"The rate of childhood obesity has tripled in thirty years, and one survey confirmed the reasons in sobering detail. American babies have been drinking soda as early as seven months. They ate a third too many calories, often from chips and fries. One in five ate no green vegetables daily, and one in three ate no fruit. American toddlers now eat an average of seven teaspoons of sugar a day, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- more than the recommended allowance for adults."

"Babies are weaned from jars at twelve months now, sip from powders well into their toddler years. Half of American children under the age of three use them [the powders]. There seems to be this window of opportunity between six and twenty months where they're just interested in food, and that predisposes them to healthy eating."


II. Trump's Pro-Pollution, Anti-Trees Policies
#The Trump administration's effort to speed up the approval of the Atlantic Coast, Mountain Valley, and Keystone XL pipelines is stalled by legal challenges from the Sierra Club and others.

#The Sierra Club and others sue the Trump administration for its attempts to strip California of the authority to set its own car air-pollution standards.

#The Trump administration moves to exempt Alaska's Tongass National Forest from road-building rules,opening the door to logging on 165,000 acres of old-growth forest.

#The Sierra Club's Environmental Law Program sues the SEC for failing to disclose why it prevents investors from demanding that energy and utility companies set greenhouse gas reduction targets and offer their plans for meeting those goals.

#Conservation groups successfully challenge the BLM's plan to raze 30,000 acres of pinon pines and Utah junipers within the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

#The DC Court of Appeals rules that the EPA is illegally failing to control smog that travels across state lines and pollutes the air in other regions.

#Trump offers to pardon officials who break environmental laws in order to construct his border wall. He talks about fortifying it with a trench stocked with snakes or alligators so frequently that his aides seek out a cost estimate for doing so. [2]

ADDENDUMS:
*There are nearly 3 billion fewer birds today in North America than there were in 1970 -- more than one in four have disappeared.
*An analysis of seafloor mud off the shore of Santa Barbara reveals that between 1945 and 2009, plastic levels in the ocean doubled every 15 years.
*Next year,Texas will produce more electricity from wind than from coal.
*British wind farms,solar panels, and renewable biomass plants, produce more electricity than    fossil fuels for the first time since the UK's first power plant fired up in 1882.
*President Trump has repeatedly suggested using nuclear bombs to prevent hurricanes from reaching the United States.
*Almost two-thirds of Americans now believe that climate change is either a crisis or a serious problem, with a majority wanting immediate action to address it. [3]



Footnotes:
[1] Burkhard Bilger, "Open Wide," The New Yorker," November 25, 2019.

[2] Heather Smith and Paul Rauber, "TRUMP WATCH: Pro-Pollution, Anti-Trees," The Sierra, January/February 2020.

[3] Heather Smith, "Up to Speed..." The Sierra, January/February 2020.