Bentley: Really in the s. He had a sick child and made a vegetable soup, and his child got better and people asked for his recipe. Gerber is getting going also in the s. They are a fruit- and vegetable-canning facility in Michigan. These canners who were already canning fruits and vegetables switched to producing pureed fruits and vegetables and then marketed it specifically as baby food.
Beck: The typical age at which people introduced babies to solid food dropped considerably between the midth and midth centuries. What were the reasons behind that? Advertisers are presenting images of babies who look very young, and talking about tiny babies enjoying their peas or their mashed bananas.
Those studies come later. Advertisers and manufacturers, of course, are eager to have mothers introduce foods at younger ages. The women themselves are interested in doing it. Solid food seems modern, it seems civilized, as opposed to liquid formula and breastfeeding which is characterized as primitive and uncivilized in the midth century.
Canned baby foods at mid-century are prepared the same way that all canned foods are prepared, with salt, with sugar, sometimes nitrites, MSG, preservatives, and thickener. This is how canned food is made. Likewise with sugar. About 90 percent of American infants are fed baby food. And by contrast, breastfeeding rates have been going down. They drop to incredibly low levels by the 60s and 70s.
As of today, the American Academy of Pediatrics, U. National Institutes for Health, and World Health Organization all recommend waiting until a baby is at least 6 months old to introduce solids.
The impact of commercial baby food on American food culture has been enormous. Perhaps most poignant in the cultural shift of feeding babies, however, is the boomerang effect the industry has had on moms in the last years. The very products designed to make feeding babies easier for moms laid the foundation for a cultural expectation that moms should make organic, unprocessed baby food at home. A close inspection of these modern products, however, show that most still contain the traditional sweeteners of sweet potatoes, carrots, apples, and pears.
Prior to the invention of perfectly smooth baby food, babies were exposed to a wider variety of textures. Interestingly, the results demonstrated that searches related to picky eating were among the most popular queries. Solid foods were just not considered necessary, and the standard advice and practices were to introduce meat as a first food and fruit and vegetables were not presented until around the age of two.
Once we hit the midth century, the standards changed and moms were encouraged to begin weaning at an earlier age and to use plenty of cereals, fruits, and vegetables. By the s and '60s, it was recommended that you introduce solids to your baby at four to six weeks of age, with some doctors promoting the introduction of solids a mere 24 hours after birth. This was a time when if something was promoted by science and doctors, then it must be right.
Moving them on to commercial baby cereals was a natural next step. As you can see from the ingredients above, salt, sugar, and other unnecessary ingredients were used as a matter of routine. At this stage, there were no regulations about what went into the baby foods or any rules to say what you could or could not put on the label. At the time, the more something was processed, the more science had been thrown at it, and therefore the better it was. One of the things you will notice about the label on this jar is that there is no age limit or recommendation.
The side of the label you cannot see tells you that the jar is packed with carrots, water, and an array of salts, sugars, and other additives because this was still a period where artificial equaled better. The manufacturing processes used to produce commercial baby foods lent themselves more towards the pureeing of fruits. As they were already high in water content, you could add plenty of water to bulk them out, easily mash them up and pour them into a jar. This led to a shift away from meat as a first food and opened up the world of baby food to carrots, peaches, pears and other easily squashed foods.
This, in turn, led to increasing levels of sugars in a babies diet from an early age, encouraging a sweet tooth and all of the dental and health problems that come with it. Strangely enough, it is not so much the liver element, but the fact it has been made into soup and then canned that puts me off.
The back of the Bib orange juice says everything you need to know about how baby food, the mothers who were buying it, and child care, in general, were perceived. It went on to say:.
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