BABY FOOD. The consumption of food is an extraordinarily social activity laden with complex and shifting layers of meaning. Not only what we eat but how and why we eat tell us much about society, history, cultural change, and humans' views of themselves. What, when, and how we choose to feed infants and toddlers, the notion of "baby food" as opposed to "adult food," and whether or not these foods are nourishing and satisfying reveals how mass production, consumption, and advertising have shaped attitudes about infancy and corresponding parenting philosophies and practices. From the late 1920s to the postwar baby boom of the 1950s, mass-produced solid infant food, especially fruits and vegetables, shifted items of rarity into a rite of passage, a normal, naturalized part of an infant's diet in the United States. In the early twenty-first century commercially produced infant food not only remained a mainstay of an infant's diet in...