The whole problem is following:
Lets say we have Items, Items can have Bids, Items can have Questions and Question can have Answer.
When an Item is displayed
To get dobeerman's example (the accepted answer) to work in d7, add 'language' => LANGUAGE_NONE and cast the $node array into an object. i.e.:
$node = (object)array( 'uid' => $user->uid, 'name' => (isset($user->name) ? $user->name : ''), 'type' => $node_type, 'language' => LANGUAGE_NONE );