You should have seen the things they were giving babies instead of milk. I remember seeing them put salt-pork gravy in milk bottles and putting a nipple on, and the baby sucking this salt-pork gravy. A real blue baby, dying of starvation. In house after house, I saw that sort of thing.

I don't think it would have been possible ... You always have choices, yes, but I don't think there was any way of stuffing the genie back into the bottle.

No other formula gives your baby a better start in life except that stuff that comes out of you for free.

I let the baby drink the butter.

you can't just move backward. You can't push the chicken back into the egg, wine back into the grape, the boy back into the womb. If you want the baby to let go of your watch, you don't just try to explain that he ought to do it — you offer him something he would rather have.

Lucky Charms are like the vampires of breakfast cereal. They're magical, they're delicious, they're a little bit dangerous and bad for you. They initially make you feel great, but then over time you realize that maybe your relationship with Lucky Charms is just a little bit unhealthy and you start to think, 'Maybe I don't want to be in a long-term relationship with a breakfast cereal that tastes delicious but damages my health.' But then the Lucky Charms gets all stalker on you and for some reason you kind of like that. It makes you feel special. So yeah, you spend your life with Lucky Charms. That's awesome. That's a great way to... get diabetes.

No, well, first of all let me tell you that it is carefully, because you never know when the little elf of the bottle is going to get out of it and will hit you with it and will let you watching little stars.

you can’t just move backward. You can’t push the chicken back into the egg, wine back into the grape, the boy back into the womb. If you want the baby to let go of your watch, you don’t just try to explain that he ought to do it — you offer him something he would rather have.

Oh, Garrett, who do you think it was that brought the bottle to her?

I thought about how mothers feed their babies with tiny little spoons and forks so I wondered, what do Chinese mothers use? Toothpicks?

Right, I breast feed baby camels in my backyard just for the freaking fun of it. Just tell me where you live, Pinocchio, and save the baloney for lunch.

For many practicing pediatricians, the imperative keeps coming back to the exam room. Recently, in the pediatric outpatient clinic at Bellevue Hospital, which has served the poor of New York City since 1736, I saw a toddler who was seriously overweight, and I tried to talk with his mother about ending the practice of nighttime milk bottles. The mother became very distressed when I broached the subject of the child’s weight, and the risk of severe dental caries. She knew it all — she had already been through dental procedures for her son, she was worried about the family history of diabetes and the risks associated with obesity. But if she didn’t give her son a milk bottle, he would cry — loudly and at length — and his crying at night disturbed the other people sharing the apartment, who all had to get up early for work or school. She was clearly worried that following my advice might mean losing her living situation, which was already tenuous. The toddler in my exam room was already suffering from some of the chronic diseases — obesity, dental caries — that are part of the medical risk of poverty.

You cannot place a mother breastfeeding her baby on an equal footing with men. You cannot make women work in the same jobs as men do, as in communist regimes. You cannot give them a shovel and tell them to do their work. This is against their delicate nature.

Give that child to me. I want it. I will care for it. I am willing to accept any child who would be aborted and to give that child to a married couple who will love the child and be loved by the child.