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In Praise of Dawn Schafer, “The Baby-Sitters Club” Vegetarian
In the early ’90s, the BSC was already teaching kids like me about the dangers of pollution and importance of sustainability. Thanks, Dawn!
Georgia O’Keeffe. I Love Lucy. The definition of stoic, trepidation, and pariah. Mononucleosis. Insulin. And…Tofu. All things I learned about for the first time from The Baby-Sitters Club. For a time, this long-running series of books absolutely dominated my life — I would fill notebooks with drawings of the characters; I wrote screeds of what I would later come to learn was fan fiction; trips to the library were anticipated like Christmas Day; and I would speed-read new editions in the local book shop in lieu of being able to afford them.
In hindsight, the Baby-Sitters Club could be read as children trapped, via Simpsons-like arrested development, in a cycle of monopolistic corporate capitalism and happiness derived through labor and compliance, which in turn cunningly locked millions of young readers into a long-term purchasing cycle. “The best friends you’ll ever have!” tagline could be a threat or a promise in equal measure. But in the early 90s, seven distinct friends who supported each other through fluctuating family units, social hierarchy, bicoastalism, and degrees of sophistication, with comparable autonomy and financial independence — to me, that was a fantasy world that I longed to be a part of.
Dawn Schafer, one such baby-sitter, debuted four books into the series in 1987, when Whole Foods was only seven years old and terms like wellness, plant-based, and sustainability were decades away from infiltrating our vernacular. Dawn was a child of California and divorce, not to mention the tail end of the hippie movement of the seventies (at least for the first few times the sitters went through eighth grade.) She shook up her new burger-loving East Coast friends because she was a proud vegetarian for whom carrot sticks were a sublime treat. Now, chaos and mundanity are evenly weighted in the Baby-Sitters Club books. The outfit your narrator chose to wear that day is described with the same loving detail afforded to the time the babysitters got shipwrecked on a deserted island. And with every single new book in the series, the narrator…
