Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American DietFood consumption is a significant and complex social activity—and what a society chooses to feed its children reveals much about its tastes and ideas regarding health. In this groundbreaking historical work, Amy Bentley explores how the invention of commercial baby food shaped American notions of infancy and influenced the evolution of parental and pediatric care. Until the late nineteenth century, infants were almost exclusively fed breast milk. But over the course of a few short decades, Americans began feeding their babies formula and solid foods, frequently as early as a few weeks after birth. By the 1950s, commercial baby food had become emblematic of all things modern in postwar America. Little jars of baby food were thought to resolve a multitude of problems in the domestic sphere: they reduced parental anxieties about nutrition and health; they made caretakers feel empowered; and they offered women entering the workforce an irresistible convenience. But these baby food products laden with sugar, salt, and starch also became a gateway to the industrialized diet that blossomed during this period. Today, baby food continues to be shaped by medical, commercial, and parenting trends. Baby food producers now contend with health and nutrition problems as well as the rise of alternative food movements. All of this matters because, as the author suggests, it’s during infancy that American palates become acclimated to tastes and textures, including those of highly processed, minimally nutritious, and calorie-dense industrial food products. |
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Contents
Introduction | 1 |
Commonly accepted age of introducing solid foods | 10 |
Trade card for Nestlés Milk Food circa 1880s | 24 |
Hurry Motherits Libby time December 1938 ad in the Ladies | 37 |
The Golden Age of Baby Food at Midcentury | 43 |
the baby food | 57 |
The midtwentiethcentury motherconsumer | 68 |
The 1960s to the 1970s | 71 |
Baby food labels and ingredients circa 1960s | 81 |
9 | 101 |
Natural Food Natural Motherhood and the Turn | 104 |
Baby food and consumer activism | 124 |
Reinventing Baby Food in the TwentyFirst Century | 133 |
Baby Food 2 0 A FreshDirect delivery truck with baby food | 151 |
Acknowledgments | 165 |
Other editions - View all
Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the ... Amy Bentley Limited preview - 2014 |
Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the ... Amy Bentley Limited preview - 2014 |
Common terms and phrases
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Bibliographic information
| Title | Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet Book collections on Project MUSE Volume 51 of California Studies in Food and Culture |
| Author | Amy Bentley |
| Edition | illustrated |
| Publisher | Univ of California Press, 2014 |
| ISBN | 0520283457, 9780520283459 |
| Length | 236 pages |
| Subjects | › › Cooking / History FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Life Stages / Infants & Toddlers History / United States / General Medical / Pediatrics |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |