50 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019
“My computer ads don’t know me at all.”• •
Moody’s team has managed to reduce
their weight and volume by an addi-
tional thirty per cent, while improving
their flavor.
The logical end to all this is person-
alized nutrition: to each according to his
body chemistry. Field rations vary from
thirty-six hundred calories for ordinary
soldiers to six thousand for Army rang-
ers or Arctic ski patrols. “You wouldn’t
want to put the same thing in a fighter
jet that you put in a tank,” Moody said.
The next step is to tailor the rations with
nutrients for specific tasks: tyrosine for
improved cognition, anthocyanins to re-
pair muscles, calcium to thicken bones.
(Millennial recruits are prone to stress
fractures, Moody said, their frames hav-
ing gone soft from too much screen
time.) One day soon, soldiers will come
back from a patrol, download data from
their smartwatches, and 3-D-print pills
of the nutrients they’ve lost. The baby
version won’t be far behind.
The two fields come closest to con-
verging in the cockpits of spy planes.
U-2 pilots need to keep a pressurized
helmet on at all times, so they can’t use
a spoon or a fork. To keep them nour-
ished for flights of up to twelve hours,
the Combat Feeding Directorate has
designed what look like oversized tubes
of toothpaste. Stick the nozzle in a
socket on the dashboard and it heats
up like a cigarette lighter; stick it in
your helmet and you can squeeze the
hot food into your mouth. “When we
first developed them, we did a lot of
surveys,” Jill Bates, the directorate’s sen-
sory coördinator, told me. She squeezed
two lines of food onto a plate, one beige
and the other cream-colored. “And we
realized that the pilots wanted more
texture and mouthfeel in there. The
idea that they were having a meal—not
just grown men eating puréed meat.”
The lines did look lumpier than ex-
pected, but I wasn’t prepared for the
taste. I’d been imagining something
like Plumpy’Nut, the nutritional paste
given to starving children. Yet if I closed
my eyes and forgot about the tube, my
first taste was of apple pie—or a rea-
sonable simulacrum, with bits of crust
and real fruit. The second line tasted
like a luxurious mac and cheese. It was
made with real Gouda and truffle oil,
Bates explained, and tiny beads of past-
ina pasta: “That’s the only kind that
can squeeze through.” Like the other
tube foods they’d developed—tortilla
soup, Key-lime pie, polenta with cheese
and bacon—these were dishes meant
to do more than nourish. They were
designed to trigger sense memories: to
call to mind a kitchen in Iowa, as a
pilot circled the Syrian desert at sev-
enty thousand feet.It’s a lesson Americans learn early
and never seem to forget—that even a
replica of a replica of a thing can soothe
the heart. That a rough facsimile is often
enough. It’s why we have Velveeta and
margarine and orange juice from con-
centrate, protein shakes and Soylent
drinks and superfood smoothies, made
for runners and hikers or just people in
a hurry. We’re all eating baby food now.M
y children have long since grown
up and can feed themselves. The
strange things I forced on them as kids—
goat kefir gets mentioned more often
than I’d like—seem not to have stunted
them too badly, or twisted their palates
into unseemly shapes. Two of them even
like beets. Still, after a few months in
the crosscurrents of baby-food research,
I couldn’t help having second thoughts.
Did I feed them right? Are their di-
etary foibles my fault? Would some
magic combination of Swiss chard and
tempeh, grass-fed beef and organic
dragon fruit have made them stronger?
Food should be a comfort to us, but
it’s just as often a torture. And so, one
morning this fall, hoping to clear my
head of theories and counter-theories
and get a hint of how other babies eat,
I went to an African farm stand in
Maine. Portland has been a haven for
immigrants for more than forty years,
beginning with Vietnamese and Cam-
bodians in the nineteen-seventies. In
the past ten years, a stream of refugees
have arrived from Sudan, Somalia, and
the Democratic Republic of the Congo,
among other countries, and a scatter-
ing of African markets have popped
up to serve them. This stand was the
brainchild of a group called Cultivat-
ing Community, which trained immi-
grant farmers to grow African produce
in Maine. The Somali Bantu man who
supplied the vegetables had leased an
acre southeast of Lewiston, where he
grew the crops these mothers missed
most: amaranth greens, African corn,
bitter eggplant.
By the time I arrived, a line of women
had formed, most of them with babies
in slings or strollers. Mariam, the good-
natured Djiboutian who ran the stand,
had told some of the mothers that I was
coming, so a group of them stood to one
side, eying me curiously, their hands on
their hips or holding bags of greens. Four