Baby food

I am spending a lot of time these days thinking about baby food, or, rather, what to feed a baby. Brigid is not that fond of eating solid food, continuing her protest that this stuff I keep shoveling into her does not properly feel like eating.

Though I usually prefer to make my own baby food, both in Beijing and in the US I have had to look at buying commercially available food. Of course there are differences between the products marketed in China and those in the U.S. I wonder at what these differences mean to how we raise our children. What do the first foods we introduce to a baby signify about our expectations for that baby? Like what we hope to gain from toys, what do we think baby food does for our babies, exactly?

Here are images of a Chinese baby food aisle at a mid-size grocery store (not Wal-Mart). Some food in jars, but many, many, boxes of powdered cereal, rice, and noodles with some flavoring mixed in. This, of course, doesn't include the whole other aisle of powdered milk and formula products.




In the US, the ratio seems reversed. A small selection of boxed cereals and so many choices of food in jars.


Of course, this is only commercially available food. What families prepare on their own wouldn't be included. But it is interesting to me to see these differences in the grocery stores.

Even in the US, we see differing opinions on what baby food is meant to do. Some people believe in an early introduction of cereal to promote longer night-time sleeping for baby and parents. Some believe in postponing all solids until the second half of the baby's first year as the ecological breastfeeding component of NFP. Even the order in which to introduce certain foods is something that we see differing opinions in the West.

I'm interested in learning more about what the current popular theories are in China about what babies eat and when. One of Randy's employees has a baby close to Brigid's age. I ran into on the street one day, around the time both babies were four months old. She was just returning from the store with a box of rice cereal in her hand. She told me it was time that we fed our babies rice cereal and then was surprised that I was still planning to wait a little longer. I didn't see any signs of readiness in Brigid (and, heck, if maybe I still don't). She had mentioned it to Randy, too, and found his response about solid foods and process of introduction odd. Interesting, too, that her baby's primary care-giver, the mother-in-law, was pushing for delaying solid food for the baby.

It seems at times some of our popular theories about child rearing are about fifty years out of sync with one another. In China, formula is popular, as well as rice cereal at an early age. In the U.S. more and more mothers are interested in extended breast-feeding and delaying solid foods. These are attitudes wrapped up in industrialisation, pediatric theory, and economic development, among a host of other cultural factors (you can't ignore the working mother angle, for instance). As long as I am not getting yelled at by random Chinese women about my perceived negligence as a parent, I find these differences endlessly fascinating.