Baby food and what is it made of?
The end goal of agriculture is food, most notably for people, although food for animals is also important. It is well known in the agricultural community that ‘people food’ is worth more money than is ‘animal food,’ although in the end we consume the animal along with products from them.
But what stage of people? Most obvious is adults, those who choose what to feed themselves and their families.
The less-mentioned people…are the smallest of us. Babies.
What do babies eat? First came milk, fed from the breast of the birth mother or from a wet nurse. Doctors Ruth Moskop and Melissa Nasea wrote an article for Tar Heel Junior Historian in the spring 2007 edition.
In their article, they state that until about the 1900s, babies depended on human milk for survival. If they were attempted to be fed in other ways, such as with pap or padama, many babies took ill and few survived. Pap and padama are similar in that they are made up of a liquid mixed with bread. Pap appears to be made usually with animal
milk and bread, and padama seemed to include broth and bread. Both were boiled until they took on the consistency of a thick liquid.
Not only were the chosen mixtures not nutritious enough for the baby, but also the method to feed such a concoction were difficult to clean and as such, harbored bacteria.
Either way, we now know that there is nothing better for a baby than human milk. Science argues that breastfed babies are less subject to incidences of diabetes, inflammation, allergies, and even picky eating than babies fed in other ways. If babies were fed any way other than nursing on the breast, they were called ‘hand-fed’ babies.
But we don’t feed babies pap or padama anymore. No, modern hand-fed babies receive the substance that was in such short supply earlier this year: Infant formula.
From a jug-like pap feeder to a baby bottle is a long leap. We began to see a more modern baby bottle around 1800, say Moskp and Nasea, but hand-fed babies still had a very high mortality rate, since the milk could be contaminated at any point after it was removed from the animal, taken to the house, stored, and finally fed to the baby in a container. In the later 1800s, human milk was realized to be different than animal milks in its composition.
A British scientist named George William Wigner gave a lecture called Pure Milk in 1884, and in it discussed the proportions of fat, sugar, ash, and other components in human milk as it compared to cow’s milk. He suggested that adding sugar to cow’s milk would be a good start in creating a more humanlike milk from a cow.
Not too much later, in the early 1900s, drugstores began to sell infant formulas of the sort we would recognize today. While these formulas usually had complicated mixing instructions, they gradually began to take over- and the breast vs bottle debate began.
Due to aggressive marketing campaigns, baby formula started to take on a more rosy shine than breastmilk, hinting that formula is specifically created to optimize baby health.
Humans were created with the ability to produce milk that is nonirritating to a baby’s tiny tummy while at the same time being in the perfect amounts that babies need, so while formula is a good alternative if mother’s milk is impossible, human milk is the best.
But after babies can no longer sustain on only milk, they need to be fed food just like us. The World Health Organization suggests exclusive breastmilk feeding for the first six months of life and then babies can start being introduced to foods other than breastmilk or formula.
First foods for babies in these modern times look like glop. Pureed foods are very popular as first foods, as are rice cereals mixed into the formula or expressed breastmilk.
Are you picturing the iconic glass jars of pureed baby foods? Those didn’t come about until the 1940s, although the Fremont Canning Company (now known as Gerber) was producing metal cans of baby food in the 1930s, according to Amy Bentley, author of Inventing Baby Food.
Before the 1930s, babies just didn’t eat anything, right? They photosynthesized and drank milk until they had all their teeth.
Not exactly.
But instead of massproduced pureed vegetables and fruits, they were fed recipes from a cookbook just like us. An 1852 cookbook written by Sarah Hale specified certain meats (mutton, lamb, poultry, and birds of any kind), vegetables, and fruits and ways to prepare them. The cookbook, titled The Ladies New Book of Cookery: A Practical System for Private Families In Town and Country, preferred stewed and very soft foods for babies.
Baby food has come a long way, but at its core, still resembles what our earlier ancestors fed our babies.
And is there anything cuter than a baby covered in those pureed foods with a big smile on their tiny faces?