Inventing baby food : taste, health, and the industrialization of the American diet / Amy Bentley.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bentley, Amy, 1962- author.

Series:

California studies in food and culture ; 51.

California studies in food and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Infants--Nutrition--United States--History.

Infants.

Infants--Nutrition.

History.

United States.

Genre:

History.

Physical Description:

ix, 236 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2014]

Summary:

Food consumption is a significant and complex social activity-and what a society chooses to feed its children reveals much about its tastes and ideas regarding health. In this groundbreaking historical work. Amy Bentley explores how the invention of commercial baby food shaped American notions of infancy and influenced the evolution of parental and pediatric care. Until the late nineteenth century, infants were almost exclusively fed breast milk. But over the course of a few short decades, Americans began feeding their babies formula and solid foods, frequently as early as a few weeks after birth. By the 1950s, commercial baby food had become emblematic of alt things modern in postwar America. Little jars of baby food were thought to resolve a multitude of problems in the domestic sphere: they reduced parental anxieties about nutrition and health; they made caretakers feel empowered; and they offered women entering the workforce an irresistible convenience. But these baby food products laden with sugar, salt, and starch also became a gateway to the industrialized diet that blossomed during this period. Today, baby food continues to be shaped by medical, commercial, and parenting trends. Baby food producers must now address health and nutrition concerns as well as the rise of alternative food movements. All of this matters because, as the author suggests, it's during infancy that American palates become acclimated to tastes and textures, including those of highly processed, minimally nutritious, and calorie-dense industrial food products. Book jacket.

Contents:

1890s to 1930s: industrial food, industrial baby food

Shifting child-rearing philosophies and early solids: the golden age of baby food at mid-century

1960s to1970s: industrialization, taste, and its discontents

1970s to1990s: natural food, natural motherhood, and the turn toward homemade

Reinventing food for babies in the twenty-first century.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780520277373

0520277376

9780520283459

0520283457

OCLC:

874835387