In the 1980 When Did Thy Give Baby Jar Food

The invention of baby food

Baby food as it is traditionally known—jars of sweet potatoes and cans of rice cereal—didn't really be until the 1920s.

According to Amy Bentley, author of Inventing Infant Food, the get-go solid infant food to appear on the market was invented by a man named Harold Clapp. The story is that when his wife fell ill and couldn't care for their baby, Clapp developed a soup made from beef broth, vegetables, and cereal. ¹ When Clapp saw how well his baby did on the soup, he began making large batches and somewhen started selling information technology to other parents via local drugstores. ²

The ascension of industrial baby food

A few years after Clapp's baby food went on sale in New York pharmacies, Frank and Dan Gerber (father and son) began experimenting with strained babe food at their cannery, the Fremont Canning Visitor. ^three Past 1933, Fremont produced more than 2 million cans of infant nutrient, which included a variety of strained fruits and vegetables, as well every bit a beef vegetable soup. ⁴ Recognizing the tremendous opportunity, companies such as Heinz and Beech-Nut quickly followed suit. The Gerber'south line of canned baby nutrient became so popular, in fact, that Fremont Canning eventually abandoned all of its other lines of canned nutrient and changed its proper noun to Gerber's Babe Foods.

Campaign to persuade moms and doctors

While the concept of store-bought nutrient specifically fabricated for babies picked up some serious speed in the 1930s, many Americans were still suspicious of canned food, having lived through the days of spoiled and contaminated canned food. ⁵ To overcome this, Gerber undertook an ambitious advertising entrada to convince moms, dieticians, and pediatricians that their processed baby food was not only nutritionally superior to homemade baby food, merely safer. ^six The advertizing campaign included enquiry—funded past Gerber—that praised the benefits of canned food by and large.

Meanwhile, American mothers began to rely more and more on the communication of doctors and pediatricians for feeding their children. Recognizing this shift, Gerber stepped up its advertising efforts to the medical customs, offering their canned baby food costless of charge to doctors who requested it. ^seven

Future Gerber advertizement campaigns would include messaging to convince moms that homemade infant food was not as safe as commercially-made baby food and that toiling away in the kitchen was not good for mothers…or their babies.

Importantly, many baby food advertisements (Gerber's and others) also encouraged feeding solids at 3 months old, sometimes explicitly in the text, simply besides visually by the babies depicted in the ads themselves. Of grade, the most memorable representation of this was the original Gerber babe sketch, which featured Ann Turner Cook at four months old.

Non surprisingly, past the 1950s, babies were existence fed commercial solid food by just six weeks of age. ⁸

From beef soup to caramel pudding

The beginning commercial baby food to hitting the market was a vegetable soup with a beef goop base. Other common baby foods in the 1940s included liver, veal, and strained single-ingredient vegetables and fruits. By the 1950s, however, baby food companies increased their focus on sense of taste, calculation sugar and artificial flavors, equally well as food that was a more than consistent, polish purée. ^nine Whereas American babies fed in the 1940s were probable to go significant amounts of iron and protein—as well every bit some different textures—from commercial baby food, babies in the 1960s and beyond were more likely to experience a sweet, smooth purée. While there is no publicly bachelor information for why baby food companies stopped producing foods like liver and veal, information technology's non hard to imagine the increased render on investment of sweet purées. Not just were apples, bananas, and sweetness potatoes cheaper than meat, they played to a baby'due south preference for sweetness foods.

Baby food: a cultural boomerang

In 1880, babies were not unremarkably fed solid nutrient until they were 11 months former, and by 1950, that historic period plummeted to only 6 weeks old. ¹⁰ It wasn't until the 1970s that the medical customs began to realize that the early introduction of solid food was contributing to a deportation of breast milk and formula, which doctors were starting to recognize as more than nutritious. ¹¹

Equally of today, the American University of Pediatrics, U.Southward. National Institutes for Wellness, and World Wellness Organisation all recommend waiting until a baby is at least vi months old to introduce solids.

The touch on of commercial baby nutrient on American food culture has been enormous. Not only were babies fed solids earlier and earlier—displacing chest milk as the master source of diet—they were exposed to textureless purées with refined sugar, salt, MSG, and other artificial flavors more ever earlier, potentially impacting their season preferences for life. ¹²

Perhaps nigh poignant in the cultural shift of feeding babies, however, is the boomerang upshot the manufacture has had on moms in the terminal 100 years. The very products designed to make feeding babies easier for moms laid the foundation for a cultural expectation that moms should brand organic, unprocessed infant nutrient at domicile. Not surprisingly, the industry has responded with lines of pricey organic pouches, featuring everything from organic beets with super foods like chia seeds to wild-caught salmon purées. A shut inspection of these modern products, however, show that about still contain the traditional sweeteners of sweet potatoes, carrots, apples, and pears.

Rise of picky eating

Prior to the invention of perfectly smooth baby nutrient, babies were exposed to a wider variety of textures. Further, because straining baby food was and then labor intensive, it's non hard to imagine that babies may take eaten finger foods earlier in their solid food journey than babies did in the 1950s every bit well.

In 2019, Solid Starts conducted an analysis of Northward American Google searches related to baby food. Interestingly, the results demonstrated that searches related to picky eating were among the about popular queries. While picky eating is nothing new, research shows that it has been on the ascent for quite some time. ¹³

Cultural shifts in eating are rarely linear. No unmarried baby food visitor can be responsible for the sheer affect that commercial baby nutrient has had. One has to gene in the rise of advertising, the increase of marketing to kids, the boom of snack foods, equally well every bit the extended menstruum of time in which babies were spoon-fed purées. Merely once y'all put all those things together, it's easy to see how picky eating has become the number 1 problem in feeding footling ones.

The hereafter of feeding babies

Numerous studies have shown that the more variety of tastes, textures, colors, and mouth feels a infant is exposed to, the more likely those children are to accept new foods afterwards on. ¹⁴ Further, inquiry studies have shown that babies fed diets of bland, textureless foods are more likely to prefer these foods subsequently. ¹⁵

Equally the bear witness builds for the benefits of introducing a variety of wholesome, real food to babies, feeding philosophies are shifting. Methods such every bit baby-led weaning (where purées and spoon-feeding are skipped in favor of finger foods) are rapidly growing in popularity. For a detailed review of baby-led weaning, and why y'all might want to attempt it, hop over to our side by side section: What is Baby-Led Weaning?

1. A. Bentley, Inventing Baby Food, Academy of California Press, 2014, p. 30
2. A. Bentley, Inventing Baby Food, Academy of California Press, 2014, p. xxx.
3. A. Bentley, Inventing Baby Food, University of California Printing, 2014, p. 32.
4. A. Bentley, Inventing Babe Food, University of California Press, 2014, p. 30, 32.
5. A. Bentley, Inventing Baby Nutrient, University of California Press, 2014, p. 33.
6. A. Bentley, Inventing Baby Nutrient, Academy of California Press, 2014, p. 33.
7. A. Bentley, Inventing Baby Food, University of California Printing, 2014, p. 35.
8. A. Bentley, Inventing Infant Food, Academy of California Press, 2014, p. 59.
9. A. Bentley, Inventing Baby Food, University of California Press, 2014, p. 80.
10. A. Bentley, Inventing Babe Nutrient, Academy of California Press, 2014, p. fourscore.
11. A. Bentley, Inventing Babe Food, Academy of California Press, 2014, p. 125.
12. 50. Birch and J. Fisher, Development of Eating Behaviors Among Children and Adolescents, Semantic Scholar [website]https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c324/d4bf4fcebfff9fc80e11c233dfc497242dcf.pdf (retrieved Nov 5, 2019).
13. J. Traig. The Making of a Picky Eater, The Wall Street Journal, Jan 11, 2019.
14. L. Birch and J. Fisher, Development of Eating Behaviors Among Children and Adolescents, Semantic Scholar [website]https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c324/d4bf4fcebfff9fc80e11c233dfc497242dcf.pdf (retrieved November 5, 2019).
15. A. Bentley, Inventing Baby Nutrient, Academy of California Press, 2014, p. 158

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