Most babies could use a dose of vegetables. The only problem is that they hate them—or so parents and baby-food manufacturers seem to assume.
The taste-testing center for the Gerber Products Company is in a town I may not name, in a facility I’ve been forbidden to describe in detail. It’s a kind of baby black-ops site. “Do you know where you’re going?” my driver asked, when he arrived in a Lincoln town car. “I know the address. But do you know what the business is?” Gerber has been conducting taste tests since the nineteen-fifties.
There aren’t many things that babies like better than applesauce. The two samples were subtly different—one was made from a single apple variety, the other from four—but they were equally sweet. And sugar is the great override button of infant taste. A few drops can calm a baby’s heart, release opiates in her brain, and settle her neural activity into a pleasurable pattern. Adults in taste tests reach a bliss point at about five teaspoons of sugar per cup of water.
Judge No. 7 had had enough. She signalled this fact by grabbing the spoon from her mother’s hand, slapping it to her forehead like a salute, and shouting “Baaaaa!” She’d eaten both dishes clean. “They like what they like,” Smith-Simpson said, after the parents had filed out of the room, sated babies back on their hips. We were standing in an observation room next door, looking out at the testing area through a two-way mirror.
Gerber doesn’t add sugar to most of its purées anymore, but it’s there just the same. The vegetables are almost always mixed with fruit—apple-blueberry-spinach, pear-zucchini-mango—or naturally sweet. “Production carrots like these grow bigger and set more sugar than the ones you get in a store,” Chris Falak, one of Gerber’s agricultural-team leaders, told me when we checked on a carrot crop outside Fremont. “They’ll get even sweeter after a week of sunny days and cool nights.
If convenience to a housewife meant not having to cook baby food, convenience to a working parent means not having to serve it. Drivers can’t spoon-feed babies in a car seat, but they can hand them a tube of banana puffs and let them feed themselves. The baby-food industry, having lost some of its youngest customers—the recommended age for starting solid food has crept back up to six months—has expanded its audience on the other end.
“It’s only nutritious if they eat it,” Moody said, echoing the Gerber scientists of the nineteen-sixties. The soldiers in his field tests are a lot like the babies in taste tests. They get tired of eating the same dish. They refuse to eat some things even when hungry. They have limits to what they’ll do for a meal. “We always go to war with the perfect rations for the last war,” Moody said. “We are trying to get ahead of that.
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