THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019 45
“I can see no farther than the final episode of the first season.”
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but it’s really the opposite: a celebration
of what people will eat. Some Chinese
love earthworm broth, and Zanzibaris
feast on white-ant pie; the French have
been known to eat eels with sea-urchin-
gonad sauce, and some Hawaiians have
a taste for broiled puppy. Human be-
ings will eat damn near anything, it
seems. You just have to start them young.
L
ate one afternoon in August, in a
suburban kitchen in Scarsdale, New
York, I watched a woman named Saskia
Sorrosa roast beets for a baby-food rec-
ipe. Beets are kale’s dark twin in the
baby-food family. Something about their
loamy sweetness, the taste of iron and
manganese that seeps through them like
runoff from a rusty pipe, turns children
off. “I used to use a little magical think-
ing,” Sorrosa said. “When my girls were
little, I’d tell them that if they eat beets
they’ll make rainbow poop.” Slender and
tan, in a denim shirt and black jeans,
Sorrosa moved about the kitchen with
an easy efficiency. She peeled and chopped
the roots, spread them on a cookie sheet
with some fresh fennel, and drizzled them
with olive oil. She did the same with a
tray of asparagus and leeks, then put the
trays in the oven. “But they also learned
pretty quickly that there was only one
meal. That was that. If they didn’t eat it,
there was no dinner.”
Sorrosa is the founder and C.E.O.
of Fresh Bellies, a line of organic baby
meals that Walmart and Kroger began
carrying this summer. Seven years ago,
when she made her first baby food, she
was thirty-three years old and a vice-
president of marketing for the National
Basketball Association. She had a six-
month-old girl and could find nothing
in stores to feed her that wasn’t insipid
or sweet. “So I’d come home from work
and make the menu for the week,” she
said. “Two or three flavors, purée and
freeze, then the same thing again two
days later. I wasn’t just making peaches.
I was making peaches with lavender,
figuring out which vegetables to cook
with onions and which ones with gar-
lic. It was like having a second full-
time job.”
Born and raised in Ecuador, Sorrosa
speaks with her hands and in a rapid,
ebullient English with no trace of an
accent. Her father was a general man-
ager for Del Monte in Guayaquil, then
a banana farmer and exporter. He could
afford to send his three daughters to an
international school. Sorrosa came to
the United States at seventeen to study
communications at George Washing-
ton University, found work in Miami
and New York, and eventually married
a childhood friend. “My friends said it
was like dating your brother,” she said.
After their second daughter was born,
two years after the first, Sorrosa quit
her job and launched her business. She
rented a professional kitchen, hired a
chef who’d worked for Mario Batali,
and began selling her baby food at farm-
ers’ markets up and down the Hudson.
Within three months, she was making
as many as two thousand jars a week.
This year, Fresh Bellies will produce
half a million. Next year, the company
should quadruple that number.
Baby food is in the midst of a golden
age. With the rise of two-income fam-
ilies, home delivery, and ever pickier
eaters, the global market has grown to
nine billion dollars a year, sixteen per
cent of it in the United States. Nine out
of ten Americans have eaten commer-
cial baby food for some period of time.
Happy Baby, Tiny Organics, Once Upon
a Farm, and dozens of other brands have
joined in a scrum for the boutique mar-
ket, over the bodies of fallen competi-
tors like Bohemian Baby. One baby-food
delivery service, called Yumi, promises
to introduce babies to “over 80+ ingre-
dients” in “the most nutrient-dense pu-
rees available.” Its lineup includes Kiwi
Chia Pudding and Baby Borscht: “Su-
perfoods for Superbabies.”
Sorrosa has a simpler goal. She wants
her children to eat the way she ate as
a child. “In Ecuador, we had whatever
the adults were having—it was just
puréed and given to babies,” she said.
“I learned to eat spicy young.” On week-
ends, friends and neighbors would de-
scend on her parents’ farm for buffets
of ceviche and sancocho soup (a beef
broth with mashed plantains and lime
juice), braised goat stew and shrimp in
peanut sauce. All of which found its
way into Sorrosa’s mouth as she hung
from her mother’s hip.
“Palate training” is the buzz phrase
for this, though it makes babies sound
a bit like interns at a wine bar. We learn
to eat what we’re given to eat, and that
education begins before we’re born.
When a pregnant woman eats a green
