I have decided that I need to find a new Free Baby Health Nurse. This is going to be problematic, as the two closest shopping-centres to me both have the same nurse, the one I am trying to avoid. Now, C. seems perfectly competent, and I imagine she is reasonably good at what she does, it's just that she and I do not see eye to eye on one quite important thing.

C. advocates solidly and *very* insistantly for a white-bread-standard Western diet for Baby K.

I am a child of organic-meat-and-chickpea-favouring ex-hippies. I adore Japanese food and believe that having rice at all three meals of a given day is just dandy. I also believe that cold leftover potato is nature's perfect breakfast food. (Cold chips/french fries, baked potato, mashed potato, it's all good!)

Baby K is *not* eating a white-bread-standard Western diet. In fact, up until this week, she'd never encountered bread at all. It's not a big part of my diet, therefore it isn't a big part of hers. And I am *judged* because of this, despite the fact that C. acknowledges that Baby K is a rampantly healthy, alert, active little girl who gains weight with clockwork regularity. But she is not having fruit and cereal for breakfast and sandwiches for lunch, so clearly I'm doing something wrong, wrong, wrong.

I, personally, am a strong advocate for protein as well as carbohydrates for breakfast - and more than just what you'd find in a glass of milk, if we even drank milk, which we do not as we are lactose intolerant. It's much more conducive to stable blood-sugar and reliable energy throughout the morning than just sugar and carbohydrates, whether the sugar is fruit or Froot. Since hypoglycaemia runs in my family and diabetes in my husband's, frankly, I feel that Baby K's blood-sugar warrants a bit of care and attention in her formative years.

Wrong, wrong, wrong, apparently.

So is not eating wheat (gluten intolerance is so common in my family that the pediatrician strongly urged me to keep Baby K away from gluten in any form until she is one or two, no testing required) , only eating red meat once or twice a week (look, if it's good enough for the Heart Health people it's good enough for me) tofu as a breakfast food (it is delicious!) and using coconut cream in the baby's food. Polite horror was definitely C.'s reaction to that last suggestion, and she clearly didn't believe me when I explained that coconut is a staple food in many cultures and perfectly safe for babies!

Ethnocentrism always startles me, but never more than when it comes to food. I have talked to the offspring of quite a few former hippies over the years, and there are a few things that we all almost invariably agree on.

1) That health-food shop peanut butter, that stuff that's just mushed up peanuts, is *evil* and possibly an act of child abuse.

2) Sugar is awesome.

3) A Standard White-Bread Western Diet is intriguing when you're a kid and can't have it, but invariably turns out to be the most boring thing in the whole world after hommus.

4) Hommus tastes like bum.

I would never subject my child to mushed peanuts, no matter what people say about the salt and sugar in peanut butter. I am planning to keep her in the dark about sugar as long as possible, but will be open-handed with the honey and dried fruit to make up with it. Hommus... well, I'll let her try it sometime, but it's not compulsory.

And while I do make roast lamb and chicken soup upon occasion, I'm also planning to send her off to school with tamagoyaki and octopus dogs in her lunchbox, not Vegemite sandwiches. After all, all the magazines say you should feed your child what everyone else in the family eats.

As for C., I'll show her. I've just found a lovely recipe for fried eggplant. Looks like just the thing for finger-food.