My impression is baby food sold in Canada and the US is designed to be bland, perhaps designed to appeal to basic preferences for salt and sweet at most. My questions are
I don’t know if that’s necessarily the case. Baby food fills a very specific and short period in a baby’s life when they aren’t quite ready for regular food because they have no teeth yet, but are too old for strictly milk or formula.
And in general, it’s VERY simple stuff- like pureed carrots, and nothing else. Or pureed apples. Or pureed whatever. They don’t even add salt in a lot of cases. I remember trying to feed some sort of meat baby food to one of my sons, and him refusing it. So being inquisitive, I tried it. Turned out it was utterly unsalted. So I got a bit of salt, stirred it in and retried it. Not bad outside of the texture. Son gobbled it up at that point.
I don’t think it’s necessarily intended to be bland, but rather be simple- single ingredient, or a blend of 2-3. Nobody’s making Mole Poblano baby food; it’s more like Squash, Beans and Carrots together, with all the intense flavors present there.
Interesting!
I know many parents that want simple food with no preservatives or additives. A baby food jar that just says “pureed carrots” meets the bill. One with “pureed carrots, salt,” invites the question - is that too much salt? Babies have immature kidneys and (I am told) can’t process excess salt as easily as adults. A baby food jar that said, “pureed carrots, natural flavors, salt,” would get put right back down.
Some kids have digestive issues, and one thought is always, “it could be an allergy.” If so, the advice is to introduce kids to only one new ingredient at a time and see how they react. So, once again, “strained peas,” good; “strained peas, pureed carrots, paprika, onion powder,” worthless.
There are also some baby guides that say don’t introduce kids to overly spicy foods too early because then they won’t like bland foods when they grow up. I wonder why liking spicy foods is a problem (it doesn’t seem to be a problem for roughly a billion Indians) but harried parents not giving too much thought to this are just likely to go with that advice. Bland food it is.
Do other societies introduce spicier food early on?
Out of curiosity, I googled for Indian baby food recipes, on the theory that if any people are going to have non-bland baby food, it’s going to be Indians (and other South Asians). So about what you’d expect; recipes for dals, khichri, sambars and other soft traditional foods, made with a very few spices.
Yes. When my daughter was little I knew quite a few people from various parts of the world. Baby food was always bland. They made it the same way I did - make regular food and either set some aside for the baby, and serve to them as is, or sometimes blend it.
Also the Indian/Bangladeshi parents I knew tended to not give onion-heavy dishes to babies same as most English people I know didn’t, from handed-down experience that it can lead to poocopalypse, and nobody wants a poocopalypse.
mrAru babysat for his new baby brother when he was IIRC 12 or 13, and didn’t know what to feed him, so gave him some of the chili he was having for lunch.
He said he never knew a baby could poop uphill … apparently the poopcopalypse ended up going up the back out the back of the diaper, and spreading all over poor Patrick’s head …
One of my godsprogs ended up with a pooppcopalyps from some bug her elder sister brought home from school, charming little disease vector she was. I made life easier by setting the temp on the kitchen sink to mildly babywarm, and hosed the little poopfest down the drain, there was no way in hell I was going to go through that many baby wipes, nor deal with washing several washcloths. Got finished, and used comet to deal with sterilizing the area. I look upon it the same as me usisng a 1 gallon stainless steel stock pot as an emesis basin when sick - the damned thing is stainless steel, it can be sterilized a hell of a lot easier than dealing with a potential trail of yack between bed/sofa/chair and toilet.
I was under the impression that babies didn’t actually like salt as much as adults. Or, to put it another way, a little would go a long way. Is there any info on that?
As an odd aside, you want to see a poopfest? I had an ostomy bag failure in hospital right after my proctocolectomy, the seam on the bag failed. I was on hard core antibiotics and day after surgery and just starting to eat again so I had about 10-12 oz of very liquid poop in my bag when it [literally] shit the bed. Poor overnight nurse and maintenance person were absolute angels for helping clean me up, the bed up, change all the bedding, change the bag, change the foley bag, change the 3 drains still in me. I was the geyser of poo =(
I should do an AMA about the surgery and introduce people to P’tit Joey, my stoma.
They love it. It can kill them. Babies have tiny organs that can’t handle salt as well as adults can.
Pretty much the same as cats - I can let my cat lick a little margarine off some dropped bread, and the lactose isn’t an issue, but the salt could be. But man, she’s at that toast like a goat on a hydrodam.
(Though that is a really weird article - I remember reading it at the time and being really annoyed. Baby rice isn’t just a “thickener,” three months was not “way too early” at the time - in 1999, when that article was published, four months was the norm, and three months was fairly common and even advised for “hungry babies,” and the whole thing is thicker with class superiority than the things those poor parents were feeding their baby, that were literally advertised as things babies eat. The salt content was too high but it really shouldn’t have been).
With homecooking it’s fine as long as you add the salt after separating the baby’s food out.
As a first generation Indian immigrant, I can confirm that Indian baby food recipes don’t contain spices - but the food itself varies from place to place in India.
For example, a baby from Bengal will have a ceremony called the “first solid foods or first grains”. It is traditional for the baby to be given a symbolic amount of fish (seafood) during this initiation. Here is such a menu - https://www.favcounter.com/bengali-annaprashan-menu-list/
East and South India have rice as the staple, while the north and west have wheat (bread) as the staple. So solid foods initiation is different in different parts of India.
This raises thread shitting to a whole new level.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’d appreciate a Not Safe For Eating icon here.
I think a big part of it is lack of salt. You have to be really careful about salt intake for infants, because (as I understand it, not being a doctor but having had babies) their kidneys cannot handle very much sodium at all, so it doesn’t take much to put them in kidney failure.
Babies get enough salt (and sugar, for that matter) from breast milk or commercial baby formula. I’ve heard that the reason baby foods were once flavored with salt or sugar is because the PARENTS complained about the taste.
I keep a couple jars of meat baby food on hand in case my cat doesn’t want to eat her crunchies, or has hairball issues (I mix a fish oil capsule in it and give her a spoonful at a time). It definitely smells a lot better than it looks.
As a personal anecdote, when my wife was pregnant with our firstborn son, she ate a lot of spicy Thai food. So when he was old enough to be eating solid food, she’d try giving him a single grain of rice that had been in the spicy curry (not saturated, just on the border zone where the sauce met the white rice, choosing a grain that was half curried), on the theory that maybe he got used to spicy food getting it secondhand in the womb. Yeah, I doubt it works that way, but he would happily eat the spicy grain of rice.
Any inborn predilection toward spicy food he may have had eventually wore off though, and he was as picky a toddler as any ever was. But he does like spicy food now that he’s 18.
I don’t know why it took so long for someone to say this.
I don’t know enough about nutrition to know the effect of salt/sugar/spices on a baby’s body. But it is just common sense that if you feed too much of that stuff to them when they’re young, they’ll come to expect it, and without the additives, they’ll complain that the food is (dare I say it?) BLAND.
Instead, leave that stuff out, so they can learn what a carrot actually tastes like. Salty/sweet/spicy is wonderful for an ocassional treat, but too many of us (I’m talking to ME here) are addicted to it.
When my wife and I were just starting out we were barely making enough to put food on the table and WIC was a massive help. Among other things we ended up with way too much baby oatmeal and I’d eat it once in a while.
Different texture but not bad at all. It’s oatmeal.
Much the same with pet food. Changes are made to make it more attractive to the owners (the buyers), though the pets have minimal reaction.
For example, dry cat food often consists of little bits of different colors and vaguely shaped like animals: reddish fish shapes, yellowish chicken shapes, brown beef, etc. The different shapes are just formed when manufactured, and the different colors are mostly food dye – often the actual ingredients are the same. And all taste the same to the animal.
After all, if it was the cat the makers would tout ‘mouse-flavored’ cat food – but that’s not appetizing to the cat owner, who is the buyer.
I have a 2.5 year old, so I’ve been through all the baby training recently, and they didn’t tell us anything about salt. No honey, do give them peanuts (in the form of a smooth peanut butter) early, always put them down on their back to sleep, etc, etc. But nothing about salt. And there’s a lot of community expectation here that the baby’s going to be eating what you eat whenever they’re ready to come off their pure milk/formula diet.