‘Eat food, mostly what your parents eat, not too salty’.
This, for those of you who were fortunate enough to escape noxious aughties food culture, is a riff on a famous Michael Pollen quote. ‘Eat food, mostly plants, not too much’ the journalist and food activist wrote in his 2008 book The Omnivores Dilemma. My friend Sarah offered the above edits as we lamented the increasingly convoluted advice parents are offered for introducing solid foods to babies. Not that she is a Michael Pollen stan, you understand. Just that we were both scunnert of the weaning-industrial-complex commodifying something humans have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years and making people anxious about it. And ok fine. I’ll admit it. I find it obnoxious when people make weaning their entire personality. I once saw a woman on a packed train from Euston to Liverpool Lime street set out what appeared to be a 3-course meal for an 8-month-old complete with bamboo plates and cutlery. The train was rammed; standing space only. The buggy was wedged next to the disabled toilet. The baby was wrapped in a crinkly plastic full body apron before access to food was granted. To this day I still think about what she did with those dirty baby plates. And I wonder, who was that performance for?
My own child was profoundly unbothered by food. Was a big boob guy until at least 18 months. Still thinks he can slide his hands down my top to warm his hands; consent is hard when you’re not quite 5. Still fairly unbothered by food and would prefer to stick to the main food groups: pasta (plain); strawberries; white rice with soy sauce, cucumber maki (variation on a theme), Jammy Dodgers, banana-oat pancakes, broccoli, and Lotus biscoff spooned straight from the jar. Some would say he’s fussy; I'd say he’s particular and knows what he likes.
When it came to offering Avery solids, I kept it fairly low-key; stripped him down to a nappy, shoved him in an Ikea high chair, did what Sarah said, and cleaned up the mess at the end. Insofar as I can follow rules – my natural proclivity is towards nonconformity, but if you’ve been here a while you already know that – I did the ‘right’ things at the ‘right’ time. I advanced textures, let him play with his food, let him self-feed, never tried to override his cues, prepared the food safely, and knew the difference between choking and gagging. Even this low-key approach is still a considerable amount of labour; foodwork. And there was a peripheral sense that I should be doing more: tracking the number and type of foods offered; aiming for at least 100 different foods in the first year; following protocols of green vegetables; paying attention to the salt content of cheeses; appraising the merits of ‘baby-led’ vs. ‘spoon-fed’; worrying about the ‘correct’ way to offer foods at each stage; offering mango pits and sourdough crusts for chewing practice.
And then of course there are the online courses, apps, weaning influencers and books – which can be better understood as instruction manuals – that dictate the correct ways of doing things. Failure to do so will likely result in a child who is reliant on an NG tube for the rest of their lives, or so the panicked inflection would have you believe. We are told to select high chairs dutifully so as to maintain a 90/90/90 posture. Sippy cups are prohibited. You should start offering an open cup from 6 months and if you absolutely have to have something spill-proof then it must have a weighted straw. Pouches should be a last resort; kept at the bottom of the changing bag for absolute emergencies such as running out of Annabel Karmel spinach and salmon fritters.
My husband – despite our broadly egalitarian approach to child rearing – figured I’d be able to handle the weaning thing myself. But in a social media landscape dominated by what sociologist Sharon Hays called ‘intensive mothering’ culture, introducing solid foods to babies has become a decisive, high stakes event, marked by conspicuous consumption, busywork, and an invisible mental and emotional load. Raising a baby is work, no matter what the cultural expectations of what that work should look like are. But in the context of intensive mothering culture, the work of weaning has taken on a valence that I have come to understand as part of a larger project to re-domesticate women.
Do you know how we weaned babies before the advent of spoons and bibs and social media? I’ll tell you how. Adults would chew up food in their own mouths and regurgitate premasticated food into an infant’s mouth like tiny baby birds. Importantly, this was not specifically the mother’s job; it was a communal event where other relatives and carers would help feed the baby. I hesitate to write this for fear it will give The Trad Wives ideas, but scientists believe that this way of feeding conferred immunological benefits to little ones.
You see, current trends for baby-led weaning have evolved as a backlash to the baby food industry that sprouted in the 1920s, prior to which commercial ‘baby foods’ were not a thing. By the 1950s baby food was seen as more ‘scientific’. It also often contained sugar and salt that meant that babies really liked it, but it wasn’t all that great for them. Babies were also being weaned onto commercial purées earlier - as young as 4-6 weeks old – and in the process displacing nutritionally complete human or formula milk. The baby food industry had successfully convinced parents that that baby food was a ‘healthier’ option than baby milk. It wasn’t until the 70s that the medical establishment figured out that this wasn’t the case and had to unwind half a century of baby food marketing.
This, understandably, has contributed to distrust of the baby food industry. And I don’t disagree that a hefty dose of skepticism is required in the matter. But it’s also too convenient to say that there’s a corrupt shadow-y cabal running the show and they’re out to make our children sick with their melty puffs and soft oaty bars. But this was the thesis of food writer Bee Wilson’s latest piece in The Guardian: Ultra-processed babies: are toddler snacks one of the great food scandals of our time?. ‘The damage done to child health by commercial baby food in the UK – and the failure of government to do anything to protect families from the marketing of it – is one of the great untold food scandals of our time’.
Except Bee, it is not an untold story is it? Cultural historian Amy Bentley told that story two decades ago (and then again in her 2014 book). I should know, it was required reading for my graduate sociology of food and nutrition class; my PhD supervisor was an Amy Bentley stan. But this is not about journalists putting a fresh, sanitised spin on old news. It’s not even about whether or not Wilson’s claims about skyrocketing levels of food refusal are empirically verifiable. This is about the sweet potato as an ideological tool.
‘Something you never saw 20 years ago that has become entirely normal is the sight of a young child in a pushchair slurping his or her lunch from the nozzle of a pouch’ writes Wilson, disapprovingly. Baby food pouches – which are often sweet tasting and much smoother than homemade purées or mashes – are, in Wilson’s view, limiting children from developing a refined palette. She believes parents across all social classes have been hoodwinked into thinking they’re more convenient and better value for money. Wilson goes on to advocate for stronger regulation of the ingredients and marketing of products aimed at babies and toddlers; a point I don’t necessarily disagree with, but which seems myopic nonetheless. Wilson then goes on to make the point that baby pouches such as Little Freddie’s, Ellas’s Kitchen, or even supermarket own brands are really expensive, actually. ‘A kilo bag of sweet potatoes, enough to make 10 baby portions, costs £1.19 in Aldi – about the same price as a single pouch of Ella’s Kitchen puree, or two pouches of the Aldi equivalent’.
I couldn’t get past the kilo bag of sweet potatoes; a tiny detail that reveals so much about the values and ideologies underpinning discourses around both child feeding and ultra-processed foods. So, let's say the quiet part out loud.
‘Family foodwork - or the household practices that support eating, such as meal planning, shopping, preparing, cooking, and cleaning up—is a multifaceted and demanding form of domestic labor’ write sociologists Priya Fielding Singh and Merin Oleschuk, my Amy Bentleys. ‘Foodwork involves researching and purchasing foods, deciding where to procure food (including going to restaurants or ordering take-out), preparing appealing meals, negotiating preferences, accommodating allergies, and managing different family members' complex feelings around these activities’ they explain in their 2023 paper Unequal Foodwork: Situating the Sociology of Feeding Within Nutrition Disparities, which I will use as a lens for the rest of this essay.
Fielding-Singh and Oleschuk (and the broader sociological literature that they draw from) recognise the important role that foodwork has to play in shaping nutrition and health outcomes. In other words, they see the value in preparing sweet potato purées or mash from scratch. But critically, and unlike Wilson, they recognise that foodwork itself is a product of complex intersecting structural and social inequalities.
Both in historical and modern contexts, foodwork and indeed domestic work writ large (what Marxist-Feminists may call reproductive labour) is the engine that propels capitalist accumulation. It is contingent on the gendered exploitation of unpaid and undervalued care work. In this light, producing purees from a bag of sweet potatoes is only cheaper than a pouch because we have erased the labour that goes into producing it. (Of course the true cost of a pouch is also hidden, albeit in a different way).
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