A01=Amy Bentley
alternative food movements
american diet
american food
Author_Amy Bentley
babies
baby food
breast milk
california studies in food and culture series
Category=JBCC4
Category=MBNH3
commercial baby food
commercial foods
domestic space
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
family
food
food consumption
formula
gastronomy
health
highly processed foods
history
industrial food products
industrialized diet
infancy
mothering
nutrition and health
parental care
parenthood
parenting trends
pediatric care
postwar america
social activity
social norms
solid foods
united states of america
Product details
- ISBN 9780520277373
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 19 Sep 2014
- Publisher: University of California Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 all 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 now contend with health and nutrition problems 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.
Amy Bentley is Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University. She is the author of Eating for Victory: Food Rationing and the Politics of Domesticity and the editor of A Cultural History of Food in the Modern Era.
