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Things the blogosphere taught me this week

In an effort to avoid all the things that I “should” be doing today, I’ve been taking a little tour around the blogosphere. It’s amazing what you can learn. Here’s few items off my list:

Infant formula companies are not supposed to advertise their products in Canada

From PhD in Parenting, I learned that Canada is a signatory to the WHO International Code of Marketing of Breast-Milk Substitutes and that in 2007 the Canadian Food Inspection Agency issued a letter to the infant formula industry that specifically advises the industry on how to comply with the WHO Code.

In the CFIA letter, it outlined, among other things, that infant formula should not be promoted in advertising, should not compare its product to breast milk and should not even have a picture of an infant on its product label.  

Huh. Did you know that infant formula companies were not supposed to use print or online advertising? This is news to me. In fact, I have several Canadian parenting magazines in front of me right now that very clearly advertise an infant formula, compare the formula to breast milk and show images of infants.

I understood that regulations did exist to protect mothers and babies in developing nations. I assumed that in developed countries, where clean water and literacy levels are higher, that these regulations did not apply.  But they’re applicable in the Canadian market as well. I sure didn’t know that. Did you?

I have not been recycling my plastics properly

From Turtlehead, I learned that my family has been putting a whole bunch of non-recyclables into our blue bin. Did you know that the only plastic that should be in the blue bin is as follows:

  • pop bottles;
  • shampoo bottles, vinegar jugs and the like that are labelled with a 1 or 2 on the bottom (no caps!); and
  • wide-mouthed margarine or yogurt tubs and their lids IF marked with a 5 on the bottom.

Oh, boy, oh boy … I fear that Lynn would REALLY lose it if she walked by my blue bin instead of her neighbours with the take-out containers. Yikes. I’ll do better, Lynn. Thanks for your post on this.

There are some really freaky nutbars out there

And last but not least, I learned that XUP has met more freaky nutbars in her lifetime than any other person I know. I’m still reeling from the Aurora character.

Comments

  1. It turns out we haven’t been recycling properly either. I blame the city who clawed back on recycling a few years back. (They used to take everything except “7”.)

    Only in Ottawa would they scale back recycling.

  2. In retrospect I kind of feel like I freaked out about the whole thing. I hope I didn’t come across as some sort of barefoot-hippie foot-stomping dominatrix.

    Oooh, there’s my Halloween costume for next year :).

  3. Aurora reminds me of a woman I met while I was in a support group for mentally ill people. A man in the group explained that he was a paranoid schizophrenic who believed that voices in his head told him to kill his wife (and unborn child). So he did. The lesson I took away from that was that there are a lot of people running around who hear voices in their heads, and those voices tell them to do not-nice things like kill people. Just my perspective, of course.

  4. Ya, I haven’t even gotten to the people I met while working in a parole office. I can second what CM said about the sort of scary people walking among us every day — we have no idea.

  5. And one other point: Who knows how many people out there hear voices? Nobody’s willing to admit that. I know I wasn’t.

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