The New Yorker:

In the past two decades, American parents have started to ditch the purées and give babies more choice—and more power—at mealtime.

By Alexandra Schwartz

When I was pregnant with my son, I took slow, blood-circulating walks around Prospect Park and thought about feeding him lemons. Not just lemons, of course. Also roast chicken and broccoli florets, their edges nicely charred from the oven; sweet, juicy peaches and tart Cortland apples; curried egg salad and garlicky Greek yogurt whipped with olive oil; fat, unctuous sardines and crispy schnitzel served with silky mashed potatoes, peppery arugula, and August tomatoes. These were foods that I loved, and I wanted him to love them, too. There were other parts of the human experience that I hoped he might grow, in time, to enjoy: reading a novel in a shaded hammock on a hot summer’s day; riding a bicycle (wearing a helmet, please, God) through the streets of a new city; dancing with abandon when his song comes on. But those pleasures were not available to a baby. Food would come first.

Until quite recently, this would have been an unusual, if not frankly heretical, way for an American parent to think about feeding her progeny. In 1894, the pediatrician Luther Emmett Holt published “The Care and Feeding of Children: A Catechism for the Use of Mothers and Children’s Nurses,” an enormously influential guide that ushered babies into an age of abstemious blandness. A child’s first non-milk food should be gruel, Holt instructed in one edition. Beef juice could be offered at five or six months if the infant was sickly and anemic, at ten or eleven months if she was hardy and robust. Next might come coddled egg whites and a few sips of orange juice. At eighteen months, some prune pulp or baked apple could be allowed, along with stale bread; at two years, baked potato. If flavor was bad for babies, Holt believed texture to be even worse. “No child can be trusted to chew meat properly,” he warned. “All omelets are objectionable.” As for green vegetables, they must “be cooked until very soft, and mashed, or preferably put through a sieve.”

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