THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER25, 2019 51
were from the Congo, one from Angola,
and one from Somalia; all were dressed
for going out, in elaborately plaited wigs
and weaves and carefully applied makeup.
We talked for a while about what they
feed their babies, and how it differs from
what their older children ate in Africa—
they’d all immigrated in the past two
years. Then I made plans to watch three
of them cook for their children. “But
only if you buy the ingredients!” a feisty
Congolese woman named Rachel, with
long copper braids, told me. “This takes
time, you know!”
Rachel was twenty-nine and had
studied mathematics in Kinshasa. When
she fled the Congo, two years ago, after
a government crackdown on dissidents
and student protesters, she had an eight-
year-old boy and a five-year-old girl,
and she was pregnant. The only visas
that she and her husband could get
were for Ecuador, so they flew to Quito
with their children, and made their way
north, country by country, on foot and
by bus, until they reached Laredo, Texas,
and were granted temporary asylum.
Now here they were in Maine, on an
alien continent. The climate was so
cold that it seemed frankly hostile, and
the government was less and less in-
clined to let them stay. The least she
could do was feed her children some
food from home.
The next day, I picked Rachel up at
her apartment, in north Portland, and
we went shopping at a Sudanese mar-
ket in the East End. While I wandered
among sacks of fufu flour and canary
beans, bottles of palm oil and sorrel
syrup, Rachel hitched her daughter
Soraya onto her back with a blanket.
Soraya was a year old now, with bright
eyes and a look of plump, irrepressible
health. She watched as her mother threw
a head of garlic and some yellow on-
ions into her cart, then picked out an
especially fearsome-looking dried
catfish, black from smoke. Together with
the amaranth leaves and eggplant she’d
bought at the farm stand, they were the
key ingredients in one of her favorite
Congolese dishes, lenga-lenga.
“Even just this, with some fish and
tomatoes, c’est formidable,” Rachel told
me, back at her apartment. She was slic-
ing a green pepper into a pan of onions
and whole garlic cloves that were sau-
téing on the stove. She added peeled and
cubed eggplant and some sliced leeks,
then checked on the amaranth leaves
boiling beside them, soft as lamb’s-
quarters. Across the room, Soraya was
slumped on the couch. She was watch-
ing a cartoon of a mother cradling her
child, singing, “Hush, little baby, don’t
say a word.” Rachel glanced over at her,
then mashed the softened eggplant
against the side of the pot with a wooden
spoon. She poured the sautéed vegeta-
bles into the boiling greens, dropped in
two bouillon cubes and the smoked
catfish, boned but not skinned, and cut
in two whole tomatoes. Then she cov-
ered the pot and set it to simmer.F
eeding children isn’t molecular bi-
ology; it just feels like it sometimes.
The perfect diet is a target that’s both
moving and receding, its bull’s-eye
shrinking in the distance. The Recom-
mended Dietary Allowances for calo-
ries and nutrients, first issued by the
National Research Council in 1941, were
deemed too permissive in 1994. The lat-
est versions, called Dietary Reference
Intakes, also include adequate, average,
and tolerable nutrient levels—three
more numbers for parents to keep in
mind. And every year seems to bring
more supplements to obsess over: pro-
biotics, phytonutrients, antioxidants,
adaptogens. “We’ve got solids down to
a science,” the Yumi baby-food Web
site promises. If only.
No doubt there’s always something
better for babies to eat. But they’re re-
silient creatures, for all their flab. Any
good, varied diet will get them through,
and the components aren’t hard to figure
out: a dark-green vegetable, an orange
vegetable, a carbohydrate, and a protein
for iron and B vitamins. A single egg
or half a cup of milk, two or three times
a week, can be the difference between
a healthy child and a malnourished one,
Mutinta Hambayi, a senior nutrition-
ist with the World Food Program, in
Rome, told me. “One mother said to
me, ‘When you have a mouse hole and
there are seven babies in there, I can
feed one to my child every day!’ They
are called hunger foods, but they are
not. They are foods that countries have
adapted to eating.” In Zambia, where
Hambayi grew up, people eat caterpil-
lars; in Kenya, termites; in Uganda, flying
ants; in Cambodia, spiders. “People findit disgusting, but I’m from a landlocked
country,” Hambayi said. “I had the same
reaction when I saw prawns.”
Babies do have some sense of what’s
good for them, it turns out. “Self-
weaned” infants, who dispense with
purées and just gnaw on their parents’
food, tend to be slimmer and healthier
than those raised on baby food. But
only if their parents eat healthy meals
themselves. And there’s the catch. The
average American’s diet is so abysmal,
Amy Bentley told me, that most babies
are better off eating commercial baby
food: “They’ll get more and a greater
variety of fruits and vegetables than
those fed the family meal.” To learn to
feed our children, we need to learn to
feed ourselves.
Rachel’s lenga-lenga was like no baby
food I’d ever seen. It was full of onions
and garlic and bitter green pepper. It
had mashed eggplant and leeks that
could give a baby gas. It was salty from
the bouillon—the rest of the family
would be eating it, too—and far from
sweet. By the time it was done cook-
ing, it was a thick green porridge, pun-
gent with smoked fish and sulfurous
plants. It made kale look like Christ-
mas candy. And yet, when Rachel
brought a bowl of it over to Soraya on
the couch, she bounced up and down
and clapped her hands.
“With really young babies, it’s not
about liking or not liking,” Susan John-
son had told me. “If they want to eat,
they’ll eat.” That’s the most striking
finding of the Good Tastes Study. In
video after video, the babies grimace or
purse their lips after the first taste of
kale. But when offered a second spoon-
ful, they eat it anyway. “It’s amazing that
they do, but they do,” Johnson said.
“There seems to be this window of op-
portunity between six and nine months—
maybe even twelve months—where
they’re just interested in food. And that
predisposes them to healthy eating.
They’re like baby birds. It doesn’t even
matter if they like it. They just try it.”
Soraya coughed a little and glanced
at the TV. She shook her head and
clutched at an empty Cheetos bag on
the couch. The spoon was floating to-
ward her now, filled with that smelly,
familiar stuff from the bowl. She looked
up at her mother with wide, inscruta-
ble eyes, and slowly opened her mouth.