Booming baby food: Infant food and feeding in post-World War II America

Michigan Historical Review

Volumn 32, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 63-87

  Bentley, Amy ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 64949143246     PISSN: 03601846     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (78)

1. Jane Nickerson, "News of Food," New York Times, May 5, 1949
2. Millard S. Purdy, "Baby Food Battle: Packers Gird for Fight as Dip in Birth Curve Steps Up Competition," Wall Street Journal, June 23, 1949, 1
3. Carole Sugarman, "Gaga over Baby Food," Washington Post, April 27, 1988
4. Teresa Harris, "6 Creative Ways to Use Baby Food," Baby Talk 69 (August 2004): 71
5. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003), 119
6. For an in-depth look at postwar "package cuisine," see Laura Shapiro, Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America (New York: Viking, 2004)
7. Lewis A. Barness, ed., Pediatric Nutrition Handbook, 3d ed. (Elk Grove Village, Ill.: American Academy of Pediatrics, 1993)
8. See also Michael C. Latham, "Breast Feeding Reduces Morbidity," British Medical Journal, May 15, 1999, 1303-4
9. idem, "Breastfeeding - A Human Rights Issue?" International Journal of Children's Rights 5, no. 4 (1997): 397-417
10. Richard A. Meckel, "Save the Babies": American Public Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant Mortality, 1850-1920 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990)
11. Jacqueline H. Wolf, Don't Kill Your Baby: Public Health and the Decline of Breastfeeding in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001)
12. Penny Van Esterik, Beyond the Breast-Bottle Controversy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989)
13. Valerie A. Fildes, Breasts, Bottles, and Babies: A History of Infant Feeding (Edinburgh, U.K.: Edinburgh University Press, 1986)
14. Janet L. Golden, A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
15. Patricia Stuart-Macadam and Katherine A. Dettwyler, eds., Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1995)
16. Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Breast (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997)
17. Meredith F. Small, Our Babies, Ourselves: How Biology and Culture Shape the Way We Parent (New York: Anchor Books, 1998)
18. and Linda M. Blum, At the Breast: Ideologies of Breastfeeding and Motherhood in the Contemporary United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999)
19. Charles E. Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997)
20. Susan Reverby and David Rosner, eds., Health Care in America: Essays in Social History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979)
21. Apple, Mothers and Medicine, 152
22. See also Yalom, History of the Breast, 123-24
23. Blum, At the Breast, 20-22
24. Wolf, Don't Kill Your Baby, 25
25. Ann Hulbert, Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice about Children (New York: Knopf, 2003), 19-40, 63-93
26. David I. Macleod, The Age of the Child: Children in America, 1890-1920 (New York: Twayne, 1998), 37
27. Rima D. Apple, Vitamania: Vitamins in American Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1996)
28. Harvey A. Levenstein, Revolution at the Table: The Transformation of the American Diet (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 86-97
29. Elizabeth Condit and Jessie A. Long, How to Cook and Why (New York: Harper Brothers, 1914)
30. Carlotta C. Greer, Foods and Home Making (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1928)
31. Nancy Lee Seger, "A Study of Infant Feeding Practices as Used with Cornell's 45 'Practice House' Babies from 1920-1944" (master's thesis, Cornell University, 1945), 115-17
32. Moreover, as David Macleod concludes, educated urban women were more likely to adhere to the child-care manual's advice about infant feeding than to follow its advice on other aspects of child care, such as proscribing "excessive" contact with one's infant. See Macleod, Age of the Child, 54
33. Rachel Sanders Bizel, "A Study of Infant Feeding Practices as Found by a Survey of 702 New York State Babies" (PhD diss., Cornell University, 1933), 137, 160
34. "Food Industries Buy," Business Week, December 15, 1934, 14, 16
35. History of the Fremont Canning Company and Gerber Products Company, 1901-1984 (Fremont, Mich.: Gerber Products Company, 1986). History of the Fremont Canning Company is located in the Gerber archives, which are closed to the public
36. Stephen S. Nisbet, Contribution to Human Nutrition: Gerber Products since 1928 (New York: Newcomen Society, 1954), 15
37. For more on technology in the domestic sphere, see Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon, 1982)
38. Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983)
39. Hulbert, Raising America, 199. Of course, there were always women who were never aware of these recommendations or deliberately rejected them
40. Clara M. Davis, "Self Selection of Diet by Newly Weaned Infants," American Journal of Diseases of Children 36 (October 1928): 651-67
41. Idem, "Self-Selection of Food by Children," American Journal of Nursing 35 (May 1935): 403-10
42. idem, "The Self-Selection of Diet Experiment: Its Significance for Feeding in the Home," Ohio State Medical Journal 34 (August 1938): 862-68
43. idem, "Results of the Self-Selection of Diets by Young Children," Canadian Medical Association Journal 41 (September 1939): 257-61
44. See also idem, "Can Babies Choose their Food?" Parents Magazine 5 (January 1930): 22-23
45. Davis, "Self-Selection of Diet Experiment," 866
46. Lloyd E. Harris and James C. M. Chan, "Infant Feeding Practices," American Journal of Diseases of Children 117 (April 1969): 491
47. Paddleford, "Watch Big Business Cook."
48. Purdy, "Baby Food Battle."
49. "$177,000,000 in Baby Food: Gerber Products Co. Head Sees Amount Spent in Coming Year," New York Times, July 5, 1947
50. J. E. Curtain to Martha M. Elliott, March 26, 1958, file 4-8-1-2-4, Prepared Infants Food, Central Files, 1958-1962, Children's Bureau, RG-102, National Archives, College Park, Md
51. Marian Manners, "Baby Foods Lead Tinned Food Sales," Los Angeles Times, March 6, 1948
52. "Beech-Nut Glassed Foods," Modern Packaging (January 1951), unnamed folder, Beech-Nut archives
53. For example, see a Gerber ad in Baby Talk (January 1955)
54. C. Anderson Aldrich and Mary M. Aldrich, Babies Are Human Beings: An Interpretation of Growth (New York: Macmillan, 1954), 71-72, 75
55. Adelle Davis, Let's Have Healthy Children (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951), 176
56. Simon S. Levin, A Philosophy of Infant Feeding (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas, 1963), 101
57. See also idem, "Solid Food for Babies," South African Medical Journal 33 (February 1959): 149-53
58. idem, "Infant Feeding as a Faith," American Journal of Diseases of Children 102 (September 1961): 380-88
59. idem, "New Infant Feeding Bottles," South African Medical Journal 41 (May 1967): 508-10
60. idem, "A Basis for Infant Feeding," South African Medical Journal 42 (July 1968): 698-702
61. For similar studies and results, see Roselyn Payne Epps and Madeleine P. Jolley, "Unsupervised Early Feeding of Solids to Infants," Medical Annals of the District of Columbia 32 (December 1963): 493-95
62. Virginia A. Beal, "On the Acceptance of Solid Foods, and other Food Patterns, of Infants and Children," Pediatrics 20 (September 1957): 448-56
63. Walter W. Sackett, Jr., Bringing Up Babies: A Family Doctor's Practical Approach to Child Care (New York: Harper & Row, 1962)
64. See also idem, "Results of Three Years' Experience with a New Concept of Baby Feeding," Southern Medical Journal 46 (April 1953): 358-62
65. idem, "Use of Solid Foods in Early Infancy," GP 14 (September 1956): 98-102
66. idem "A New Approach to Infant Feeding: The Use of Solid Foods and Three Meals a Day from Birth," Southern Medical Journal 50 (March 1957): 340-42
67. "Solid Foods Advocated for 9-Week Babies," Los Angeles Times, September 10, 1956, 26
68. Sackett, Bringing Up Babies, 55
69. "There is something different or new about meat, either in texture or taste," Sackett offered, "that sometimes prompts an infant to push meat from his mouth with his tongue. . . . Possibly newer meat preparations, tastier and of a finer consistency, will solve this minor problem for us." Ibid., 60-61
70. Levin, Philosophy of Infant Feeding, 102
71. Peter N. Stearns, Anxious Parents: A History of Modem Childrearing in America (New York: New York University Press, 2003), 103
72. For more on the issue of parental anxieties over child rearing, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988)
73. American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Nutrition, "Report on the Feeding of Solid Foods to Infants," Pediatrics 21 (April 1958): 691-92
74. "Consideration should be given to the possibility that it is the adults responsible for administering the solid food who are emotionally satisfied rather than the baby." Ibid., 691
75. Catherine A. Lutz and Jane Lou Collins, Reading National Geographic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)
76. See also "Milk Consumption Defended by AMA," New York Times, October 31, 1961, 61
77. Lillian Saltzman, "Not by Milk Alone," Registered Nurse 16 (June 1953): 40
78. Baby Talk, July 1950