Measles, Mumps, Chicken Pops, And The Anti-Vaccination Crowd

For anyone growing up in the Fifties, there were no vaccinations against childhood diseases, so everyone just got them.  Better to have them as a child than to suffer the horrible consequences of getting them in adulthood – like going blind or getting swollen testicles.

Every year an epidemic of childhood diseases swept the community.  Measles were the worst because you had to stay in a room with the shades down.  Of all the diseases you could get, it was definitely the worst. You could die from it.  As a result there were a lot of old wives’ tales around.  A favorite was this one: Take a cutting of hair from the sick child, put it between two pieces of buttered bread and feed the sandwich to the dog who would assume the disease, thus curing the patient.  Needless to say it never worked, but the old Italians on Franklin Square knew differently.  If their child still had the measles after the sandwich and the dog, it could only have been the wrong kind of dog, not the treatment itself.

The Swedes believed that a tea made from the bark taken from the north side of a cherry tree would cure measles, and every year the trees in Rogers Orchards were scarred and bleeding.  Bill Rogers knew exactly who was responsible, and confronted the Bergstroms – first politely and then more threateningly – every Spring before measles season.  Knut Bergstrom and his wife knew no English and didn’t need any because working at North & Judd required nothing more than showing up and keeping your fingers out of the hydraulic press.



So when Bill Rogers showed the Bergstroms pieces of bark from his cherry trees, they had no idea what he was talking about, but assumed that he was warning them of a particularly virulent measles season to come.  Rogers was almost as phlegmatic as the Bergstroms, so flying off the handle like this could only mean trouble.

The mumps were weird because your face swelled up and even a drop of lemon juice was misery.  Bobby Blantyre’s mother knew that he had the mumps when he jumped out of his chair at the first sip of the fresh lemonade she had made for him early one summer.

Chicken pox – or ‘pops’ as most kids called it – was the most fun, because it felt so good to scratch the itchy sores that appeared all over your body. You had to be careful to scratch around each pox and not tear off the scab (“You will be scarred for life”, my mother hollered when she saw me in an ecstasy of scratching and getting perilously close to the crusted whorl), but it was worth the risk.

Some kids had it worse than others.  Lila Steinberg had pops in her throat, and her sister told us she had them ‘down there’.  At six or seven we couldn’t even imagine what ‘down there’ looked like, let alone with chicken pox, and it might be disgusting; but we all asked her if we could have a look anyway.

Whooping cough was fun too.  The cough was as deep as a coal miner’s and after a few days you sounded like a bloodhound.  Billy Babbitt bayed at us from his bedroom window as we walked home from school.  We all barked back and riled up all the dogs on the block.



Polio was a different story.  The idea of spending your whole life in an iron lung was creepy.

Swimming pools and movie theaters were off-limits in the summer when polio seemed to strike the hardest; but it was always too nice out to see the double-features at the Palace, and everyone had grown out of the Saturday morning cowboy and Three Stooges matinees.  The pool at Stanley Quarter Park was always crowded with kids from the public schools who lived in four-story walk-ups near the factories, and most of us went away for the summer anyway, on family vacations to Maine or the Bay Islands; so pool time was not an issue.

All of which leads to the conspiratorial hype circulating about vaccinations.  There are now immunizations against all childhood illnesses and yet parents are refusing them on the grounds that they cause all kinds of worse problems like autism, brain cancer, and worse.  A favorite is this one:

With respect to the tracking issue, the government places minuscule tracking devices in these vaccinations. These tracking devices act as beacons for various satellites. In this way, similar to the technology found in controlling airplane traffic, the government knows where we are at all times. Indeed, it is unclear how much information is provided in these beacon devices. These beacons may, for example, provide rudimentary data, such as age, heart rate, blood pressure, or speed. They may also provide more detailed information, such as what we are saying at any given time.

This is not surprising because an online journalist from Tupelo, Mississippi had just written a series of articles on fluoridation and said that he wanted to warn people because more and more jurisdictions were adding the chemical to drinking water.  However he was not so much worried about the usual issues – cancer, mental retardation, early Alzheimer’s autism, and monkey tics – but about an even more pernicious effect. 

The Soviets had learned from captured Nazi scientists that fluoridation had unique properties of mind control – it made people more compliant and particularly responsive to political persuasion.  The Nazis had successfully fluoridated German water and that was why so many millions of otherwise normal people had become such rabid Nazis.  The Soviets wanted to accomplish the same thing, except this time to promote Communism; and had surreptitiously fluoridated water systems in the United States.



At the same time spies and Soviet propagandists spread information about Communism.  The result was a whole decade of pro-Soviet American Communism. 

‘Tracking’, therefore, is not that weird.

Parents in many states are organizing chicken pox parties where children use the blankets, clothes, dishes, and stuffed animals of infected friends.  The idea is to get the disease early and avoid the painful complications of adulthood; and to avoid having to get vaccinations.

The idea of deliberately exposing your child to a potentially dangerous disease when a safe, sure, and proven vaccination is available seems illogical to say the least.   This is a list of complications provided by the Centers for Disease Control:

Serious complications from chickenpox include

• dehydration
• pneumonia
• bleeding problems
• infection or inflammation of the brain (encephalitis, cerebellar ataxia)
• bacterial infections of the skin and soft tissues in children including Group A streptococcal infections
• blood stream infections (sepsis)
• toxic shock syndrome
• bone infections
• joint infections

Some people with serious complications from chickenpox can become so sick that they need to be hospitalized. Chickenpox can also cause death.

Chicken pox is the least dangerous of all the childhood illnesses; so if infection parties were restricted only to this disease and to the remote outer islands of Puget Sound, no one would take much notice.  But the strong, unified, and insistent anti-vaccination movement in the United States which threatens the lives of millions – not just those children whose parents prefer a home-remedy DIY alternative.  Herd immunity is threatened when enough children are not vaccinated, and childhood diseases can come back with a vengeance.  Not vaccinating is not just a personal preference or individual statement.  It is an immoral act.

The stance of anti-vaxxer true believers is a stand for individual liberty, religious rights; and a line in the stand against an intrusive, malevolent, untrustworthy government out to dominate, intimidate, and neuter its citizens.  They hate the government so much that they are willing to risk their children for their principles.



Over forty percent of Americans do not believe in Evolution; and more that 60 percent consider themselves Christian fundamentalists for whom the Bible is the ultimate authority on everything.  Seen within that context, the stridency and goal line stand mentality of the anti-vaccination minority is understandable. Political observers have noted that America is a divided country – rich-poor; urban-rural; black-white; gay-straight, etc. – but the biggest division is between those who use reason to make decisions and those who do not.  The twain will never meet.

Stress, Avoiding It, and The Girl From Ipanema

In her new book, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, Brigid Schulte writes about how Americans – particularly women – are feeling stressed and increasingly unable to cope with the many competing demands on them.  Being a wife, mother, and successful lawyer or corporate executive exact a big-time toll; and if that isn’t enough, women stress about being stressed. They are ‘overwhelmed’.

Very understandable, and it is no surprise that women in the middle of their restless nights may think back to a simpler era when they were homemakers, housewives, and keepers of the flame in the family hearth.  “Maybe it would be better for everyone if I gave up my job”, they feverishly consider, “and returned to caring for my family as women once did”. After all, they reason, caring and nurturing have been women’s anointed roles since time immemorial. 

Then the reality of never-ending routine of peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches, play groups, dirty diapers, and the crushingly boring outings to the park hits home.  What self-respecting woman with a degree from Harvard could possibly agree to a life of pushing a playground swing and sharing mother stories.  “Well, my two-year-old…”goes the operatic overture; but alas, no Ivy League education can make Acts I-IV any more than first steps, pre-school admissions, and unprocessed baby food.  The libretto is very weak indeed.

But oh, the angst, the visceral, perhaps even XX chromosome, gene-driven angst about motherhood and responsibility!  Only women can have babies, these restless, sleepless overwhelmed women think in the middle of the night.  Doesn’t that tell us something? Can we – or better should we – ignore our biological imperative?

If all this weren’t bad enough, women have to spread their legs for a husband who is frustrated at his work and wants at least some satisfaction at the end of a hard day.  Is it any surprise that half-drunken marital sex is a fumbling, inept affair?  And how trite is his  “What was wrong? You didn’t seem to enjoy it”.

So, modern women really do have a hard time, and men don’t fully realize it.  They pitch in far more than ever before, but still pull way less than half the load of diapers, dinners, and folding the laundry. However, society’s demands for gender equality is taking its toll on them as well.

But it doesn’t stop there. I (Brigid Schulte) soon discovered that men are beginning to feel as much or more overwhelm than women, now that so many no longer just want to be the distant provider father, or just the fun Dad or helper parent, but truly involved at home. They’re doing now what women did 30 years ago—giving up time for sleep and personal care and spending almost all their “leisure” time with their kids (In an article by Rebecca J. Rosen, The Atlantic, 3.25.14).

The children of these manic couples turn out manic as well.  Of all the supposed factors contributing to ADHD, parental mania is perhaps the most important but the least discussed.  If you were a kid with a helicopter mom and a Type A father who absolutely, positively had to play horseshoes, darts, soccer with you, and take you bowling, you too would be jumpy, irritable, and restless by the time Monday rolled around.

Something’s got to give.  One option is for women to forego their careers and rejoin the female stream that began in the Paleolithic.

Can mergers and acquisitions really compare with childbirth? Can torts and contracts possibly compete with raising a child to be a moral, ethical, and responsible adult who thanks to mothers will never see the inside of a courtroom?

Another fevered reverie in the tortured Hours of the Wolf.  Theoretical, academic nonsense.  We live in an age of outsourcing – transferring contractual responsibilities to those who are better placed to perform the repetitive, often menial, but critical tasks of the economy.  So why not outsource parenting? Even thirty years ago parents in Northwest Washington fought like rabid hyenas to get their children into St. Margaret’s, the premier pre-school in the city.  Not only would the caring teachers of St. Margaret’s provide full-time intelligent attention to their children; they would take them off their hands for six hours.

If women farm their kids out to accredited schools, make partner, and manage to maintain at least a civil relationship with their husbands, the battle is only half won. What about aging Mom and Dad in Burlington?  Or sister Mae who went off the straight-and-narrow when she was fourteen?

Last but not least is a social life. Many stressed-out, lean-in, be-all-you-can-be women are getting drunk once a month with the girls at Happy Hour on K Street, and how unsatisfying is that?

I feel a lot of sympathy for young women who are stressed out by the incredible demands placed on them; but except for those relatively few men who have bought into the sharing partnership routine and given up male independence for feminist ideals, most have figured out a way to ease the pain. First, they have not given up their millennia-old right of sexual conquest.  They have figured out a way to have mistresses, girlfriends, and slight Folies Bergère paramours just like the French.  The cinq-a-sept liaison is no longer a thing of the Paris upper classes.  It is alive and well in America. Men may pay lip-service to modern fatherhood, but they are as serially unfaithful as men of 1000 years ago.

I have a friend who used to take his kids with him for his after-work tryst with his lover.  He made love to her while little Laura and Lars played Barbies and He-Man figures in the playroom.  Sometimes he did double-duty on the playground swings, adding duty hours to compensate for his drunk Sundays rolling around the mousy rug of his girlfriend’s Adams Morgan walk-up.

Another friend calls his wife every evening from his beachfront hotel in Ipanema before having dinner with his café-au-lait Brazilian beauty.  He chose his profession – International Development Consultant – as much for the sexual opportunity as for the professional challenge. His wife suspected his dalliances, but was none the wiser despite her suspicions.  When he returned home, he was really home.  He dug into childcare and housework like a trooper, working off whatever residual guilt remained as a result of his indiscretions and infidelity, but was actually only building up good karma with his wife for his next sexual escapades. 

As far as I could tell, he never had a stressed day in his life.  He figured out early on how he wanted to lead his life and managed his choice of wife and profession accordingly. Of course there were down times.  He spent more tedious vacations where she wanted to go and agreed only to build up marital equity. As he got older the allure of sexual adventure and risk lost some of their allure.  Life became more predictable, routine, and ordinary; but there was no doubt that most of his long life was spent happily and most importantly without tension, stress, and unnecessary conflict.

Women complain about their lot in life. They are either sexual objects; called whiny and bossy; or become conflicted moms,saints, whores, and trailer-bound housewives.  I have a great deal of sympathy for these modern women because they really do have a more difficult row to hoe than men.  They, like racial and ethnic minorities, are always bumping up against some stereotype or artificial glass ceiling. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t; while men go about their business as they have for millennia.

Women’s problem is that they have too many balls in the air and too many spinning hoops to jump through.   They can’t triage and focus, do a Nietzschean will-and-power thing like Goneril and Regan, Volumnia, Tamora and scores of other determined Shakespearean women.  They are not Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Laura, or Rebekka West who understand that the complete, uninhibited expression of will is the only validation of individual humanity. They could be, but they are not.

Men still can.  For us, life is simple – sex, power, and dominance as it always has been.  Women call us simplistic or puerile for this seemingly unsophisticated worldview.  Testosterone, they say disparagingly, but secretly envy men’s uncomplicated ignorance and willful acceptance of their biology.

In any case, stress can be avoided; and I have little sympathy for women who say they are conflicted and tense; and no patience with men who unsuccessfully fight their maleness.  Have fun, I say.  You can do it!

The Paleolithic Diet–Rugged, Natural, And Pointless

The Paleolithic diet is a modern nutritional plan based on the presumed diet of Paleolithic humans. It is based on the premise that human genetics have scarcely changed since the dawn of agriculture, which marked the end of the Paleolithic era, around 15,000 years ago, and that modern humans are adapted to the diet of the Paleolithic period.

The Paleolithic diet consists mainly of fish, grass-fed pasture raised meats, eggs, vegetables, fruit, fungi, roots, and nuts, and excludes grains, legumes, dairy products, potatoes, refined salt, refined sugar, and processed oils. What was good for the caveman is still good for us.  Here is a romanticized picture of Late Paleolithic Man who lived only 10,000 years ago.  He indeed looks a lot like us – trimmed beard, attractively long but not shaggy hair, well-muscled and not overly hairy, strong nose, and intelligent, purposeful gaze.

Early Paleolithic Man who lived 1,000,000 years ago was a bit different, and his diet was not chopped, pounded, cooked, and spiced like his descendants. He had massive jaws to rip and chew raw meat, roots, wild prairie stalks, and beehives.  He was truly close to the land and should be the real poster boy for the modern Paleolithic diet.

One of the hottest restaurants today is NOMA in Copenhagen.  The master chef is Rene Redzepi who forages for the ingredients that go into his five-star dishes. He gathers wild grasses, seaweed, leaves, periwinkles, nuts, and berries.  Although he does not bill his fare as Paleolithic for obvious reasons, he is a chef in that tradition.  He cooks his food, which is a big improvement on early the caveman, but he still has a profound belief that whatever grows can be eaten.

                                                            Rene Redzepi foraging for dinner

As far as I an tell, the Chinese are as Paleolithic as they come.  A Chinese exchange student lived with us for a year while my children were in high school.  I would often walk with him on the C&O Canal, a narrow strip of National Park along the Potomac River and home to a surprising variety of wildlife for parkland so close to Washington.  Every day he would notice some animal – a snake, chipmunk, beaver, shrike, or caterpillar – and comment, “That good to eat”.  After a month or more of this I said that it seemed that Chinese people ate everything.  “If you can catch it in China, you can eat it”, he replied.

My son spent many year in China and agreed.  Although the food was often greasy, it was certainly eclectic and very tasty.

The old Italians were pretty Paleolithic in their tastes as well.  My grandmother always picked dandelions from our front lawn in the Spring and fixed them in salads and in soups. I don’t know how she did it because they are the nastiest, most bitter, plants around.  Italians like bitter vegetables, and although Americans have come to like broccoli rabe and endive, the light bitterness took some getting used to. 

My dinners growing up were as far from Paleolithic as possible if you discount my grandmother’s occasional dandelions. We ate Swanson’s chicken pot pies and TV dinners, frozen French Fries, peas, carrots, and lima beans; and Sara Lee cakes.  My mother was actually a good cook, but soon got sick of Paleolithic chopping, pounding, and cooking and happily filled her shopping car with all the processed food that the Fifties could churn out.  Unfortunately for my sister and me, we had gotten used to her spaghetti with anchovies, all-day tomato sauce with veal, pork, and braciole; stuffed artichokes with parmesan cheese and garlic; and pasta al brodo.  

“What is this disgusting stuff?”, my sister shouted when my mother served us our first TV dinner. Tasteless turkey slices, gluey dressing, fake, cardboard-tasting mashed potatoes, and marbly peas.  “You’ll eat it and like it”, my mother said.  “We’re going out”, and left with my father in a wash of perfume and cigarette smoke.

I first had my taste of ‘natural’ food in Quito in the 70s.  A husband-and-wife team from Vermont opened Hojas de Hierba and made whole-grain food – carrot cakes, muffins, and bread. They were impossibly rugged, inedible, and tasteless; but Alma and Lars were way ahead of the curve, and little did they know that the organic, whole foods, natural, locavore movement would be all the rage today.  Fortunately both local and commercial food producers learned quickly how to turn their stone age, rock-hard products into something delectable.  There is nothing like today’s organic bran muffin, hot out of the oven – fragrant, moist, sweet but not cloyingly so, and marvelously textured. 

Two Yale professors recently conducted a review of what are considered the healthiest diets available, assembled in this table by James Hamblin in The Atlantic (3.25.14).

The researchers were not able to conclude from the evidence which was best, but since they are all based on the same scientifically accepted principle – non-processed foods are best for health – one could freely pick and choose.

I am an eclectic cook and have prepared dishes from all the categories on the chart above – foods that are low in carbohydrates, low fat, and even Paleolithic, although because of my background, travel, and family tradition – not dietary principle - most of my dishes are Mediterranean.  I still don’t get the Paleolithic as a steady diet, however.

Good friends of ours live on a ranch in Montana and are committed to organic farming, local produce, and free-range meat.  They are not Paleoliths because they eat farm-grown grains and their own home-grown vegetables, but do insist on eating only wild animals.  They prefer not to do the hunting, but buy deer, elk, moose, and antelope shot by local ranchers in the foothills of the Crazies.  I am used to urban meat – thick, marbled, dry-aged prime ribeye; a thinly-sliced veal scaloppini; tartar-grade ground beef, or the tastiest of all, slow roasted lamb shanks with whole garlic and rosemary.

Elena roasted the elk, carved and served it at the table.  It was stringy, rangy, and five-minute-a chew tough. It was a principled meal, very Paleolithic, organic, and so free-range that hunters were up in the mountains for three days in the higher elevations before they brought the animal down.  Because the elk had run in a herd, traversing the mountains and back and forth across the length of Paradise Valley, it was lean and well-muscled.  It was a mature adult so any baby fat that it might have carried had been burned off long ago. The meat was tasteless and inedible.

Other friends of ours live in the Dordogne region of France, and both Marcel and Evelyn forage for wild mushrooms and truffles in the hills above their small chateau.  The problem, however, is that both are Parisians and moved to the ancestral home of Marcel’s family only after his mother had died.  They both took to country living, fit easily into the mold of country squires, and lived a life of sophisticated rusticity.  Neither one, however, learned how to forage correctly, and only thanks to a stray dog who begged for food, are they alive today. “I’m not so sure about that one”, said Evelyn to Marcel as he was about to cook some suspicious-looking mushrooms. “Why don’t you wrap it in fat and feed it to the dog to see”. 

It is easy to see how Marcel had mistaken the deadly Amanita ‘death cap’, the most deadly mushroom on earth with the clitocybe nuda, a very tasty edible variety of mushroom; but still, he was very  fortunate not to eat it.

He fed it to the hungry dog who gulped it in one go, lapped some water from the cistern in the courtyard, and keeled over dead.

The moral of the story is to eat what you like, particularly if you are of a certain age.  By the time you are of retirement age, whatever damage a childhood of Chef Boyardee, Swanson’s chicken pot pies, TV dinners, and Oreo cookies has done, it is too late to do anything about it. No amount of marbled fat, Perdue chickens, or Monsanto GMO-laced peas is going to make any difference whatsoever.

I am lucky to have been conditioned into liking a Mediterranean diet, so I prefer pasta marinara with a squid-based tomato sauce garnished with basil-steamed monk fish over a slab of meat.  When I do get the hungries for a bloody something, however, I go to the adult section of the store, and buy a thick 16 oz. NY Strip.  I never trim the succulent fatty bits from the center-cut, bone-in pork chops, but nibble them as entremets between each juicy mouthful of meat and the cheesy, Normandy-style potatoes au gratin with fines herbes I learned how to make in France.

I first had this potato dish in Brittany at the country home of a Parisian friend.  She picked the fresh herbs from the garden, bought the cheese from the local fromagerie , and helped slice the potatoes.  When the dish came out of the old, heavy, iron stove, it was bubbling with cheese and rich cream.  Every bite was succulent, full of flavor, and completely satisfying.

I could use half-and-half, semi-skim Jarlsberg, and regular butter; but I never cut back.  I use whole cream, unpasteurized, high-fat Gruyere and Emmental, and European-style creamery butter.  It is fabulous and always unforgettable.

I once was invited to a dinner party where the hostess wanted to show off her ‘nouvelle cuisine’ and made the same potato dish with all the ‘right’ but tasteless ingredients – skim milk, margarine, and low-fat cheese. The trick was to slow-bake it, she said, thus preventing curdling and allowing the potatoes to absorb all the liquids.  The result was a pasty mess. The cheese curdled into hard lumps, the potatoes disintegrated, and the liquids evaporated to leave a mess of oregano-flecked, half-mashed potatoes.

I am sure that there are some really remarkable creations chez Rene Redzepi; but I suspect diners eat an NOMA for the exotic allure of foraged ingredients, for the chef’s artistic presentation, and his renowned food architecture.  I still am not convinced that wild alfalfa and oak fungus will taste all that good.