My annual Passover rant

Last Sunday I went grocery shopping and picked up a brief guide to Passover products in the supermarket. I quickly leafed through it when one section caught my eye: baby food. This year, to my great disappointment, the only certified kosher for Passover baby food is some foreign made fruit mush with added sugar. This is the first time I have seen refined sugar added to baby food. So naturally I wanted to see what the guide would say about baby food, which was not certified and whether some of it would be acceptable to use during Passover.

It might have been the fumes from Windex during Passover cleaning or exhaustion or my natural working mother defensiveness, but one sentence, actually one word in that section, ticked me off real bad. I quote,

"Ideally, it is best to (gasp!) prepare baby food at home using a blender or food processor."

Guess which word (gasp!) @#$%ed me off?!

Gasp? Gasp?!!! Excuse me? I was not reading an article or a blog entry or an essay on the topic. For goodness sake, I was consulting some very simple product guide. How dare they gasp at me and all the other mothers who are looking to buy baby food? What the hell? I understand and respect their recommendation, but what's up with the attitude? I was looking for mashed bananas and butternut squash, not crack cocaine!

Here's the newsflash for those MEN who have compiled the guide: I am reading your guide to (gasp!) only find out which products I can and cannot use during Passover, not to subject myself to the your judgment of my mothering/cooking skills and definitely not to the pitiful attempts at sarcasm from individuals who not only (gasp!) never made baby food themselves, but probably wouldn't even know how to plug in a food processor let alone use one, (but whose mothers - no doubt - busy as they were with Passover preparations still found time to make their own baby food, so why can't the modern women?) Gasp...

Here's another newsflash: if I (and all other women you are gasping at) made my own baby food - as I often do - all the time, as well as other products that I am perfectly capable of making myself instead of buying ready made, your kashrut certification revenue would greatly suffer. So would your employment and ability to come out with sarcasm- laden guides.

So here's a suggestion: when you prepare next year's guide, you will think about the last time YOU (not your wives) made baby food, how much you contribute to Passover preparations (vs your mothers and wives), how much you need your organization to generate revenue and raise contributions, and then make your buying recommendations for kosher consumers respectfully and (gasp!) keep your gasps to yourself? And if your compulsion to gasp overtakes you and becomes unbearable, you will express it in the blog post or - even better - in a private journal, away from exhausted female eyes?

Just a suggestion.

Then again, Windex fumes are thinning out, so I might look at this very differently a week from now...