Download Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet AudioBook Free
Food utilization is a substantial and complex cultural activity - and just what a society chooses to supply its children shows much about its preferences and ideas regarding health. With this groundbreaking historical work, Amy Bentley explores how the technology of commercial baby food designed American notions of infancy and inspired the evolution of parental and pediatric care and attention. Until the late 19th century, newborns were almost entirely fed breast milk. But over the course of a few short decades, Americans began feeding their newborns formula and food, frequently as early as a few weeks after birth. By the 1950s, commercial baby food got become emblematic of all things modern in postwar America. Little jars of baby food were thought to resolve a multitude of problems in the local sphere: They reduced parental anxieties about nourishment and health; they made caretakers feel empowered; plus they offered women going into the labor force an amazing convenience. But these baby foods laden with sweets, salt, and starch also became a gateway to the industrialized diet that blossomed during this time period. Today, baby food continues to be designed by medical, commercial, and parenting movements. Baby food makers now contend with health and nourishment problems as well as the rise of substitute food movements. All of this matters because, as the author implies, it's during infancy that American palates become acclimated to preferences and textures, including those of highly processed, minimally nutritious, and calorie-dense commercial food products.
