five hundred baby foods with vegeta-
bles that Susan Johnson’s graduate stu-
dents surveyed for the Good Tastes
Study, nearly forty per cent listed fruit
as a first ingredient; another quarter
listed red and orange vegetables first.
Only one per cent were mostly dark-
green vegetables.
The American diet is like a broken
bridge, Johnson says. It’s missing a span
of simple, savory baby foods that can
lead to healthy eating habits. “There’s
nothing wrong with fruit. But fruit in
my dark-green vegetables? Who thought
that was a good idea?” Getting children
across the bridge has never been easy,
but in a culture that always plays to their
weaknesses it can seem impossible. Amer-
ican toddlers now eat an average of seven
teaspoons of sugar a day, according to
the Centers for Disease Control—more
than the recommended allowance for
adults. Even baby food made with a sin-
gle, unsweetened ingredient may taste
nothing like the real thing. Babies raised
on the pressure-cooked bananas in jars,
one study found, were no more likely
than others to enjoy the fresh fruit.
The observation room had a second
one-way mirror, which looked into a
small working kitchen. “We wanted to
figure out what parents do at home—
how they store the product, feed it, and
prepare it,” Smith-Simpson said. Then
she pushed a button and the room began
to revolve like the grand-prize booth
on a game show. A minivan was now
parked where the kitchen used to be.
“The car is the second most used envi-
ronment,” she said.
If convenience to a housewife meant
not having to cook baby food, conve-
nience to a working parent means not
having to serve it. Drivers can’t spoon-
feed babies in a car seat, but they can
hand them a tube of banana puffs and
let them feed themselves. The baby-food
industry, having lost some of its young-
est customers—the recommended age
for starting solid food has crept back up
to six months—has expanded its audi-
ence on the other end. That has led to
a proliferation of new “delivery systems,”
including squirt bottles and squeeze
tubes and bags of dehydrated veggie
chips. Babies once weaned from jars at
twelve months now sip from pouches
well into their toddler years. Half of
American children under three use them.
The idea, as usual, came from the
military. The baby foods of the nine-
teen-fifties and sixties were often based
on foods developed for American sol-
diers in the Second World War. Their
powdered, concentrated, and prepack-
aged ingredients were easy to serve and
close to imperishable. What could be
better for baby? And today’s pouches
are direct descendants of the Army’s
foil-packed field rations. If you want
to see the future of baby food, look in
a foxhole.“
W
ar fighters are a weapons sys-
tem. We fuel them with food,”
Stephen Moody, the director of the U.S.
Army’s Combat Feeding Directorate,
told me, when I visited his labs in Na-
tick, Massachusetts. Square-built and
direct of speech, with ears like minia-
ture satellite dishes, Moody runs a team
of eighty-seven chemists, biologists,
food scientists, and support staff, devel-
oping field rations for all five branches
of the military. “We are building the
fuel for that war fire,” he said. This
seemed a world away from babies eat-
ing applesauce. But Moody’s goals were
a lot like Gerber’s: mobility, nutrition,
taste. The tinned beef and soy biscuits
of the Second World War have given
way to a food court’s worth of flavors:
buffalo chicken with brown rice, beef
goulash with smoked paprika, man-
go-chipotle salmon. Toss a foil packinto a plastic sack with some salt water,
add a tea bag of iron and magnesium
powder, and the resulting chemical re-
action will heat the meal to a hundred
degrees in ten minutes. The pack can
survive for three years at eighty degrees
and withstand a thousand-foot drop
from a C-17 cargo plane. Yet the chick-
en-burrito bowl I tasted was better than
most fast food. Even the rice had kept
its shape and bite, thanks to a special
variety that had taken months to source.
“It’s only nutritious if they eat it,”
Moody said, echoing the Gerber sci-
entists of the nineteen-sixties. The sol-
diers in his field tests are a lot like the
babies in taste tests. They get tired of
eating the same dish. They refuse to
eat some things even when hungry.
They have limits to what they’ll do for
a meal. “We always go to war with the
perfect rations for the last war,” Moody
said. “We are trying to get ahead of
that.” Today’s military is focussed on
counter-insurgency and mobile expe-
ditionary squads—the equivalent of
families in minivans, and similar con-
cerns apply. How heavy is my back-
pack? What’s the most nutritious snack
bar? What’s the simplest self-serve
container? Three meals’ worth of stan-
dard field rations weigh just under five
pounds. “First strike” rations for expedi-
tionary forces weigh about three pounds.
By microwaving foods in a vacuum or
bombarding them with sound waves,