Inventing Baby Food

Guest: Amy Bentley, Ph.D., is the author of Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet. She’s an Associate Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health at New York University.  With help from that famous cherubic face, Gerber has been the leader in baby food for decades. How it got there is the subject of Amy Bentley’s book, Inventing Baby Food: Taste, Health, and the Industrialization of the American Diet. She traces the meteoric rise in popularity of those little bottles of multi-colored goo as an expression of American strength, power, convenience and modernity mid-century.