Baby Products

Brief History of Baby Feeding

In a little over 100 years, infant feeding has transformed from a practice that was primarily dependent on an infant's mother's ability to successfully breast-feed her child to a powerful industry that brings in $3 billion annually and that makes feeding an infant possible without the presence of a mother. Archaeological and historical documentation make it clear that feeding infants, especially those who do not have access to a lactating individual, has long been a concern of human civilization. Up until the early 1900s, a woman's inability to breast-feed her child during the first months of an infant's life usually determined the fate of her infant. The infant was thus entirely reliant upon her lactating mother, or other lactating women, for nourishment and survival.

That did not stop mothers and their families from trying to come up with other viable methods of nourishing their babies. Ancient attempts at artificial feeding (such as horns and ceramic vessels) have been found in Africa dating to the Neolithic period and from Bronze Age Europe. Wet nursing (the act of having a child nurse from a woman who is not its mother) or having an infant suckle an animal's teats were two alternatives for mothers who either chose not to or could not breast-feed their infants. Wet nursing is ancient in practice and is discussed in Egyptian hieroglyphs, medical texts written in India between 400 B.C.E. and the 7th century C.E., texts found in ancient Greece, and in the Old Testament. When a mother either could not breast-feed or secure a wet nurse, pap and panada were used as breast milk substitutes, which involved cooking flour, bread, or cereal in water, butter, or milk.

Condensed milk became available on the market in 1853, finally offering a reliable—though not fail-safe—option for mothers who could not [Page 62]nurse or afford a wet nurse. Gail Borden patented his milk evaporation technique in 1853 and then subsequently marketed Eagle Brand Condensed Milk starting in 1856. Because his formula contained sugar, pediatricians tended to shy away from recommending it to their patients. Unsweetened evaporated milk was introduced on the market in the late 1880s and 1890s by companies such as the Helvetia Milk Condensing Company (also known as the Pet Milk Company), Liebig, and the Pacific Condensed Milk Company (later known as the Carnation Company). With a safer condensed milk becoming available on a mass scale and advocated by pediatricians, the vehicle through which artificial milk could be fed to an infant also become available en masse. Still, pediatricians were hesitant to recommend formula over breast-feeding, as the medical benefits of the latter practice greatly outweighed the former.

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