Editor, Gazette-Journal:

“Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.” —D.H. Lawrence

Pioneer American women lived and crossed the continent in Conestoga wagons for up to a year with their families. Today, 102 years after their daughters go the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, a crisis has hit modern American women, bringing them to their collective knees. WWII American women won the war working in factories at home, and nursed and cared for their families while their men served in Europe and the Pacific. Fifty years since Miss America’s 1968 bra-burning declarations of feminism and even less than six years since the women’s marches of 2016, our current mothers are devastated by “The Great Baby Formula Shortage of 2022!”

Today, fewer than 25 percent of American women nurse their babies. Thus the shortage of 2022 is a major American dilemma. Mothers watch helplessly as their babies go hungry. Postpartum American women, who frequently replace milk-soiled breast pads, are now desperately driving safari-like miles seeking manmade, powdered breast milk.

Leading pediatricians warn mothers not to take things in their own hands. They should avoid the dangerous, close-to-home substitutes right under their noses, they say.

As for the idea of women making their own “formula?” Home recipes of pioneer women have survived till now, passed down from one generation to the next based on cow’s milk mixtures that are easily found and substituted.

But! One expert warns it’s critical to get the right “calorie density.” You must be careful that your baby is getting the right “micro-nutrients,” he warns, and that any water used is only from a safe water source. Remember, if it is not manufactured by us, it’s not to be trusted!

Meanwhile, President Biden—happy to have a “real” problem to attack—considers invoking the Defense Production Act to sweep aside safety regulations governing the manufacture of “formula.” He meets leading CEOs of Walmart, Target, Abbott and Gerber to save the nation’s babies from infant starvation in a dearth of breast milk, “formula,”—even as his government has adequate supplies to dispense to our newest citizens from the south!

My grandmother’s early 20th century formula, ignorant of “calorie density” and “micro-nutrients” was simple, healthy, and cheap for my dad, me and my brother.

I’m 82; hmmm, how bad could it be?
Bill Husztek

Gloucester, Va.