Mamacita linda feeds the baby:

1. Get out your handy “baby nutrition needs” chart provided free of charge by your friendly local pediatrician, courtesy of Nestle and Abbott Labs.
2. Run to grocery store and buy the recommended baby cereal. Interesting! This cereal is made by Nestle.
3. Stop at the pharmacy on way back from grocery store, buy recommended baby powder milk. Hey, look at that, powder milk is manufactured and sold by Abbott Labs!
4. Boil water, get out the blender, read the instructions, throw it all together and listo! Yummie baby cereal is ready.
5. Put bib on baby, wipe her hands with Huggies no-alcohol wet wipes because you never know when the dog might have licked her or drooled on her. Es capaz!
6. Feed baby.

Papucho feeds the baby:

1. Get whatever food is on the table.
2. Mash it, add a twist of lime. Nah, just kidding about the twist of lime.
3. Feed baby.

Now it isn’t that I don’t care about proper nutrition for my baby, only that I don’t believe some big multi-nationals know better what my baby needs than the Pachamama. We eat fresh and heathy foods, so if baby craves it, I figure it must be good for her.

Here in Peru multi-nationals and their slick marketing campaigns are still fairly new, people tend to put a kind of innocent faith in what they see in commercials on TV. It must be good for your baby because the trustworthy pediatrician (tall and white, of course) in the TV commercial said so. I think people in the industrialized countries have become so accustomed to the consumption society that they take for granted but also with a grain of salt the constant marketing thrown at them. Some commercials are cute, most are just good bathroom breaks. You understand it affects your buying habits yet you don’t take the commercials very seriously. By contrast, here in Peru I’ve had more conversations with people where they were trying to convince me of some point of view very similar to one being made in a current advertising campaign on TV.

Not saying multi-nationals are all bad, I’ve worked for one and it’s true that you can do great things by combining the talents of many people. I happen to believe that human beings should put their intelligence and creativity to use, I don’t believe in the noble savage of old. Having said that, big business answers to their shareholders first and in countries like Peru that is not something the average consumer is always aware of.

Many moons ago, when Brianna Nayaraq was just a baby.