48 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
that will likewise go unspecified. “They
rented out a church basement for a
while,” Sarah Smith-Simpson, a chip-
per, speed-talking principal scientist
with Gerber’s Consumer Sensory In-
sight division, told me. “But they kept
getting bumped out by funeral lunches.”
We were waiting for the babies to
show up. Gerber runs about a hundred
and fifty taste tests a year—since this
facility opened, in 1996, ba-
bies have tried more than a
hundred and fifty thousand
individual servings. As we
watched, nine mothers and
one father filed in with ba-
bies on their hips. They took
their places in cubicles fur-
nished with high chairs and
desktop computers. Then a
cart full of white ramekins
was wheeled in. Half the
ramekins were filled with a pale-yellow
purée; the other half had a purée that
was closer to beige. Across from me, a
moonfaced girl in a white stegosaurus
jumper, identified only as Judge No. 7,
grunted and kicked her legs. She turned
and gave me a long, level stare, then
blew a raspberry in my direction.
For the next fifteen minutes, she and
the other babies would taste the two
samples and their parents would rate
their reactions on the computer. It was
the Good Tastes Study without elec-
trodes. Only instead of kale the babies
were eating applesauce.
There aren’t many things that babies
like better than applesauce. The two
samples were subtly different—one was
made from a single apple variety, the
other from four—but they were equally
sweet. And sugar is the great override
button of infant taste. A few drops can
calm a baby’s heart, release opiates in
her brain, and settle her neural activity
into a pleasurable pattern. Adults in
taste tests reach a bliss point at about
five teaspoons of sugar per cup of water.
Babies prefer twice that amount. This
test, in other words, was a no-brainer.
It was like asking third graders if they
want to go to Disneyland. Really? How
about Harry Potter world? Judge No. 7
was already pounding her tray for more.
Gerber would have it no other way.
The company has dominated the baby-
food industry almost from the day, in
1927, when Dorothy Gerber, tired of
mashing peas in her kitchen, asked her
husband if he couldn’t do a better job
of it at his canning factory. Between
1936 and 1946 alone, Gerber’s business
grew by three thousand per cent. The
company now claims roughly two-thirds
of the baby-food market, and has the
highest consumer loyalty of any brand
in America. Fremont is nestled among
apple orchards and vegetable fields near
Lake Michigan, where the
winds off the water cool the
ripening fruit and help it
“set sugar” in the summer.
There is a baby-food festi-
val every July, with crawl-
ing competitions and baby-
food-eating contests, and a
harvest festival in Septem-
ber. From the sky-blue water
tower at the center of town
to the image of the iconic
Gerber baby in the lobby (clearly too
young to be eating solid food), every-
thing seems to belong to the same happy
kingdom. When I visited, this fall, the
Gerber employees I interviewed seemed
incapable of a negative thought. They’d
all fed Gerber products to their chil-
dren or grandchildren, apparently, and
always with impeccable results: every
child healthy, every mealtime harmo-
nious, every dinner sweet.
That is not most parents’ experience.
In 2002, Gerber commissioned a sur-
vey of children’s eating habits in more
than three thousand American house-
holds. The rate of childhood obesity
had tripled in thirty years, and the sur-
vey confirmed the reasons in sobering
detail. American babies were drinking
soda as early as seven months. They ate
a third too many calories, often from
chips and fries. One in five ate no green
vegetables daily, and one in three no
fruit. The picture has improved a bit
since then—babies now breast-feed a
little longer—but the over-all pattern
holds. American toddlers are more likely
to eat dessert than plants.J
udge No. 7 had had enough. She sig-
nalled this fact by grabbing the spoon
from her mother’s hand, slapping it to
her forehead like a salute, and shouting
“Baaaaa!” She’d eaten both dishes clean.
“They like what they like,” Smith-Simp-
son said, after the parents had filed out
of the room, sated babies back on theirhips. We were standing in an observa-
tion room next door, looking out at the
testing area through a two-way mirror.
On Gerber’s old nine-point tasting scale
(it has since switched to seven points),
an eight or above was a home run—
cause for a joyous announcement in
Fremont. Vegetables averaged six and a
half. “I don’t know that anyone likes
Brussels sprouts or kale the first time,”
Smith-Simpson said.
We know how to solve this problem.
To learn to like a vegetable, children
have to try it again and again, the psy-
chologist Leann Birch found more than
forty years ago. Sometimes it takes ten
tries or more. But who wants to take
that advice? Who wants to watch a baby
toss a turnip across a room five times,
much less ten? “Most of our research
shows that parents will buy one con-
tainer and give it three or four times,
but they won’t buy it again,” Smith-Simp-
son told me. Good eating habits are the
one skill that parents don’t mind their
children giving up on, Saskia Sorrosa
told me: “When they’re learning to ride
a bike, they fall down a hundred times.
Learning to read takes years. But when
they’re learning to eat it’s ‘Oh, well, you
didn’t like it the first time. Don’t bother.’”
Taste tests like Gerber’s miss the
point, Sorrosa believes. Babies have no
idea what’s good for them. If we want
them to eat like adults, their food should
taste good to adults. Yet Sorrosa can’t
escape the logic of the market, either.
The beet-fennel purée that she made
for me was delicious, but she couldn’t
risk it on a supermarket shelf. Beets are
polarizing enough on their own, she said.
“Add fennel and you have two things
that people either love or hate.” It’s the
basic conundrum of baby food: If it sells,
it’s probably not best for babies. If it’s
best for babies, it probably won’t sell.
Gerber doesn’t add sugar to most of
its purées anymore, but it’s there just
the same. The vegetables are almost al-
ways mixed with fruit—apple-blueberry-
spinach, pear-zucchini-mango—or nat-
urally sweet. “Production carrots like
these grow bigger and set more sugar
than the ones you get in a store,” Chris
Falak, one of Gerber’s agricultural-team
leaders, told me when we checked on a
carrot crop outside Fremont. “They’ll
get even sweeter after a week of sunny
days and cool nights.” Of the more than