Minding my own business

Photo: Shirley Henderson as Moaning Myrtle: "Don't ask me, here I am minding my own business and someone decides to throw something at me." Moaning Myrtle in: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
Are you being happily minding your own business, someone sure will find it a necessity to break in to your personal space and throw in a request for attention for his business. especially mothers are quite used to this phenomenon, because the idea seems to exist that everyone has to mind to the business of raising other people’s children. Sometimes to ‘’help them raise the kids’’, sometimes because it is financial profitable to have moms listen to them. Unsolicited advice from family, friends and the neighbor can easily been put aside with a ‘’Please, mind your own business’’. Advice from health care providers should, but not always is, accurate, and they can be advised to better mind their own business until that is up-to-date. The combination of conflicting advices from relatives and professionals results in internal conflicts in mothers about when to start weaning (Arden, 2010). Unsolicited and undermining advice by those who earn money from it is tricky. Advising them to not bother you when you mind your own business  and to go mind their own business isn’t going to work: manufacturers of infant formula and baby and toddler foods actually make it their business to provide mothers with ‘’information’’ on their ‘’fabulous and indispensable’’ stuff, aiming at selling more and more and then some of it. Manufacturers who mind their own business do exactly that: their business, their wallets and those of the shareholders have their primal, most important and all overlooking attention. All else, like mother who mind their own business and the health and wellbeing of the children whose stomachs they’d like to fill, are totally secondary and inferior to that. And so the public is bombarded with marketing, sly information via HCP’s (who should really know better if they their own business minded to better) and indoctrination through all available media. The bombarding sometimes may resemble real bombing in the outcomes with casualties in the sense of injuries and even, in some cases, death. In formula and packaged baby and toddler foods often ‘’product-strange objects’’ (VWA, 2009) can be found (animal-originated yucky stuff, metal or plastic particles, glass splinters, wood, …). The safe chice for mothers thus is to rely on home-made to feed their children starting with breastfeeding an up to cooked from scratch meals. Pure, food, good food: that’s a lot of own business to mind for a mom.
Some examples of infant and toddler food recalls:
Similac Banana meal with glass (2011)
Similac formula with bugs (2010)
Presidents Choice Organics Pear Juice with arsenic (2008)
Similac Advance with pieces of black plastic (2005)
Melamine in Chinese formula (2008)
Olvarit baby food jars with glass (2002)
Voedsel en Warenautoriteit: Productvreemde delen in voedsel. Kennisbank Voedselveiligheid VWA, 2009.
Arden MA: Conflicting influences on UK mothers' decisions to introduce solid foods to their infants. Maternal & Child Nutrition, 2010, 6(2):159-173.