Housekeeping among Malay Peasants by Rosemary Firth

Author:Rosemary Firth [Firth, Rosemary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845200152
Google: 428LAAAAIAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 14453622
Publisher: Athlone Press
Published: 1943-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHILDREN’S FOOD

In common with many other native peoples, the Malay does not regard the mother’s milk as sufficient food for the infant, and supplements this with other sources of nourishment as soon as the child is born. It is realised that ordinary rice is too coarse a food for the new-born baby, and, surprisingly, Brown and Poison’s patent cornflour or mashed banana are regarded as the ideal foods. Ioh said to me that, unless food other than the breast milk is given to a child, it is hungry and cries and cannot sleep. “Therefore we give it bananas mashed, or cornflour, and so on, and then the breast for a little while, and then it sleeps.” Cornflour is widely sold in Malaya in tins at 70 cents a tin, and the chief market appears to be for baby food. I was told by many women that only expense prevented them from getting this for their infants, and one of the most prized of my presents to a woman whose baby’s birth I had witnessed was such a tin. It is made into a smooth paste with water, and fed to the child in the first few days of life. One man said that his adopted child had been fed on three tins of this with tinned milk and sugar mixed. Not unnaturally, the infant does not take to this with much ease, but it is persuaded to swallow it, being fed by hand. Suckling goes on at the same time, and is continued, as with many native peoples, until the child is over a year old. If cornflour is not available mashed and cooked bananas are considered good. Otherwise, rice is ground down into a paste, and cooked into a sort of blanc mange for the child. Most of the locally made snacks or sweetmeats referred to above are considered good for small children, as they are of a smooth consistency, usually made of rice flour, coconut cream and palm sugar. How soon the mother will start to give the child ordinary rice will probably depend on how long she can afford to buy the ready-made snacks, which is a more expensive way of feeding the infant than home-cooked food, and how much she can be bothered to continue grinding the rice into flour herself. But bananas should always be given for the first 20 days, I was told, and only after that, rice in any form.

I did not witness the suckling of children of three or more, as is common, I believe, in parts of Africa, but Ioh’s child, who was about a year old at the beginning of our survey, was being weaned after we had been there some nine months. Some time in the second year of life is probably the most common period. At one year, Ioh’s child was having a most varied diet of all kinds of snacks and sweetmeats, and European biscuits, which he loved. My first contacts with his mother arose through my

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