46 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
AN HOURLATER,YOU’RE HUNGRYAGAIN
For the table to be round.
For the teapot to be bottomless.
For your elders to compose the menu.For the waiter to recite the order back.
For the fish-maw soup to be ladled at the table.
For red vinegar to bloom in it, a submerged flower.For the bright lights and immaculate tablecloth.
For the extra order of Singapore noodles.
For the white blossoms on Chinese broccoli.For your mother to warn you which sauces are hot.
For your brother to turn the lazy Susan just when you need it.
For the cloth napkin to slide to the floor.For rice in a hexagonal lacquered box.
For the hill of bones on your tiny plate.
For the Wash ’n Dri packet after the lobster.bean, its flavor winds its way into the
amniotic fluid around her fetus, and
later into her breast milk. “Carrots, va-
nilla, alcohol, nicotine, mint—I’ve never
found a flavor that didn’t get through,”
Julie Mennella told me. Those tastes,
and the colors and textures of things
that contain them, come to signify food
in babies’ minds. Children whose moth-
ers ate potatoes with garlic while preg-
nant, a study in Ireland found, are more
likely to enjoy potatoes with garlic ten
years later.
By now, Sorrosa’s kitchen was filled
with the smell of roasting vegetables,
earthy and sweet. She took the trays
from the oven and let them cool, then
puréed the beets and fennel with an herb
stock made with oregano from her gar-
den. She was doing the same with the
asparagus and the leeks when her daugh-
ters came tumbling in, wearing summer
dresses and pink headbands. Sorrosa
handed them bags of beet chips and
freeze-dried red peppers to eat. When
I asked what their favorite foods were,
Alexa, the five-year-old, tilted her head
and scrunched her eyes. “Chicken nug-
gets? Hamburgers?” Her mother laughed
and waved her off. “We never eat chicken
nuggets,” she said. Then she took a plate
and spooned the two purées on it, bright
green and red like traffic lights, and
handed it to me.
This was cheating, of course. No
commercial baby food could be so fresh.
To keep for weeks on a shelf, food has
to be pressure-cooked at two hundred
and fifty degrees, or simmered at lower
temperatures and spiked with an acid
to help fend off bacteria. Fresh Bellies
takes the second approach. Its We Got
the Beet flavor is tart with lemon juice
and much rougher on the tongue than
the suave purées she’d given me. It’s also
three times as expensive as most baby
food and has to be kept refrigerated.
Still, it’s recognizable as food in a way
that the gray sludge in jars often isn’t.
And it has no added sugar or fruit. “You
could mix it with chickpeas to make a
really delicious hummus,” Sorrosa said,
and she was right. This was baby food
for grownups.
Sorrosa wasn’t teaching her girls to
eat as she did in Ecuador. She was teach-
ing them to eat as she does now, in Scars-
dale, with cookbooks by Ottolenghi and
the Barefoot Contessa on the counter.
Her girls were contented omnivores, as
she intended. But what part of their
training was essential to their good
health, and what part was just teaching
them to be foodies like their mother?
“I like Chop’t salad!” Isa, the seven-year-
old, told me, trying to cover for her sis-
ter’s chicken-nugget comment. “And
chicken-noodle ramen!” Sorrosa gave
her the side-eye. “Ramen?” Then her
face brightened. “Oh, you mean at Mo-
mofuku! You do love that.”B
abies are creatures of fashion. They
may not know what fashion is, but
they’re under our control, so we dress
them as we like and feed them what we
want. Their diets distill our anxieties.
In the nineteenth century, this meant
breast milk for a year or until the first
molars appeared. In the nineteen-thir-
ties, with the rise of “scientific mother-
hood,” it meant formula at first, then
cereal at seven or eight months. It meant
jars of overcooked carrots in the nine-
teen-fifties, in the heyday of industrial
food, and homemade purées in the nine-
teen-seventies. Babies have been early
adopters of organic, low-carb, gluten-
free, vegan, and hypoallergenic diets.
But if the latest trend is to feed them
what they’ll eat as adults we may be
betting on the wrong horse. Our own
diets seem to change every five years.Who’s to say what their diet will be?
Fruits and vegetables are the best
proof of that fickleness. Until the early
twentieth century, they were a suspect
food, the cultural historian Amy Bent-
ley writes in “Inventing Baby Food.”
Raw fruit was thought to cause fever,
based on medical theories that dated
back to the second-century Greek phy-
sician Galen of Pergamum. Vegetables
were seen as sources of dysentery and
diarrhea. (The real problem was the pol-
luted water used to wash them.) When
canned fruits and vegetables were sold,
it was mostly in apothecaries, as laxa-
tives. Only the discovery of “vitamines,”
so named by the Polish biochemist Ca-
simir Funk, in 1912, restored their rep-
utation. “Nowadays it has become a race
between physicians and nutritionists to
see who dares to feed vegetables and
solid food the earliest,” a pediatrician
at the Mayo Clinic wrote in 1954. “Veg-
etables have already been fed in the first
month. We can now relax and see what
it is all about.”
What it was about was business, abet-
ted by bad medicine. Between 1921, when
a restaurant manager named Harold
Clapp made the first commercial baby
food, in Rochester, New York, and 1960,
the baby-food industry swelled into a
quarter-billion-dollar business. In that
same period, the average age at which