The New Yorker - USA (2019-11-25)

THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019 47

babies were fed solid food dropped from
seven or eight months to less than two.
Formula and “patent foods” were bet-
ter than breast milk, pediatricians and
advertisers claimed. Formula never ran
out, and baby food could be enriched
to suit an infant’s needs. “For Baby’s
Sake, Stay Out of the Kitchen!” a Ger-
ber ad insisted in 1933. Science could
provide what mothers could not.
They weren’t wrong. Babies of that
era were often anemic, so they needed
food fortified with iron. But that was
because physicians insisted on clamp-
ing their umbilical cords immediately
after birth. This kept blood from flow-
ing from the placenta, depriving the
baby of up to a third of its blood sup-
ply. Instead of nursing at their moth-
er’s breast, babies were carted off and
given formula, which kept the mother’s
milk from coming in. It was a self-per-
petuating cycle, and it kept spinning
long after children grew up. Just as eat-
ing broccoli as a baby can teach you to
love it as an adult, eating foods full of
sugar, salt, starches, and preservatives
can give you a taste for those things
later on. It’s palate training on an in-
dustrial scale.
Babies can get fat when fed solid
food too soon. Before the age of five
months, they’re often too weak to re-
fuse a meal, and adults, in their way, fol-

low suit. “Industrializing the food sup-

ply was a win for most people,” Bentley

told me. “It created safe, affordable,

shelf-stable food that only rich people

used to be able to eat. The problem is

that, when so much food is available,

the rules around it disintegrate. We can

afford to eat like cavemen now or to be

gluten-free. We can eat anything, any-

where, anytime, and the really delicious

stuff is not that great for you. So now

we aren’t dying of disease or hunger.

We’re dying from consuming too much.”

The beaming faces on baby-food jars

can hide quantities of unhealthy addi-

tives and worse, Ralph Nader told Con-

gress in 1969. Seven years earlier, Ra-

chel Carson had found that chemical

fertilizers could work their way into the

fruits and vegetables in baby food. A

year after that, a study found that rats

fed a baby-food diet developed hyper-

tension. A series of contamination scan-

dals followed: rodent excrement in dry

baby food, cockroach fragments in

Beech-Nut jars, chips of enamel paint

and high levels of lead in many others.

“One of the enduring characteristics of

the food industry is its penchant to sell

now and have someone else test later,”

Nader said. Even dog food was more

clearly labelled.

The backlash was furious but brief.

If the scientific mothers of the nine-

teen-thirties wanted baby food un-

touched by human hands, the natural

mothers of the seventies wanted only

handmade food. After a half century of

being pushed around by doctors and

industry, they were ready to “take moth-

ering back,” Bentley writes. Pressing a

button on a blender was easier than

forcing squash through a sieve, and a

spate of new cookbooks offered advice

for the trickier parts. “Peel the banana,”

a recipe for “Banana” in “Making Your

Own Baby Food” explained, “and mash

it in a dish with a fork.”

A third of all baby food is now home-

made, yet the baby-food industry is big-

ger than ever. Its new products have

more vegetables and fewer additives.

They are better labelled and more cleanly

processed (though a recent study found

trace quantities of heavy metals in nearly

all the baby foods it tested, probably

from pesticides and airborne pollutants).

Gerber even has certified dietitians, lac-

tation experts, and sleep coaches on call

for free. But the true attraction is still

convenience. Grinding your own carrots

is a drag, even with a Baby Bullet blender,

and your child may like the stuff in jars

better anyway. “We are concerned with

the technical task of mass feeding,” Ger-

ber’s director of research, Robert A. Stew-

art, concluded in 1968, after dismissing

the notion that the company’s use of

sugar, salt, modified starch, and MSG

was bad for babies. “The quickest way

to fail in such mass feeding is to prepare

a nutritional product in a form that the

consumer will not eat.”

T

he taste-testing center for the Ger-

ber Products Company is in a town

I may not name, in a facility I’ve been

forbidden to describe in detail. It’s a

kind of baby black-ops site. “Do you

know where you’re going?” my driver

asked, when he arrived in a Lincoln

town car. “I know the address. But do

you know what the business is?” Ger-

ber has been conducting taste tests since

the nineteen-fifties. At first, the sam-

ples were sent to panelists by mail; then

the tests were moved to a hotel in Fre-

mont, Michigan, where the Gerber fac-

tory is situated. But the company wor-

ried that the results were skewed: many

of the panelists owed their jobs to Ger-

ber. So the tests were moved to this

town which I shall not name, in a state

For the sea bass to give up its spine without resistance.

For your aunt to serve you nameless meats you love.

For your grandfather to assign everyone a favorite dish, incorrectly.

For the shrimp to have expressionless eyes.

For your grandmother to murmur “thank you” as everyone serves her.

For the owner to insist on calling your father “professor.”

For the ice water you requested but forgot to drink.

For the film of oil on your last grains of rice.

For the gift of red-bean soup with the oranges.

For the numbers on the check, in Chinese penmanship.

For the leftovers in their cartons, in tied plastic bags.

For the Chinese-newspaper rack in the vestibule.

For night to have fallen while you were eating.

For ginger and scallions to infiltrate the dreams

from which you will wake in the only home you know.

—Adrienne Su