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"Amy Bentley's engaging, brilliantly researched book is a revelation. Who knew that all those little baby food jars could tell us so much about the commercial, cultural, and personal history of food in America. Inventing Baby Food is an instant food studies classic." --Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics
"Food scholars who think infant feeding means burping babies on their mothers' shoulders should think again. Bentley shows how the corporate approach to babies' appetites rested on a shallow conception of babyhood and human taste. She also devotes attention to the changes in the past few decades, as longer breastfeeding and home-prepared foods have gained modest purchase. Her book leaves us better informed, perhaps even a little more optimistc." --Sidney Mintz, William L. Straus Jr. Professor Emeritus, Anthropology, Johns Hopkins
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1. Industrial Food, Industrial Baby Food: The 1890s to the 1930s
2. Shifting Child-Rearing Philosophies and Early Solids: The Golden Age of Baby Food at Midcentury
3. Industrialization, Taste, and Their Discontents: The 1960s to the 1970s
4. Natural Food, Natural Motherhood, and the Turn toward Homemade: The 1970s to the 1990s
5. Reinventing Baby Food in the Twenty-First Century
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
About the author
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.
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. This book explores how the invention of commercial baby food shaped American notions of infancy and influenced the evolution of parental and pediatric care.
Additional text
"An exciting contribution to food studies and cultural studies."
