November 25, 2019 Issue

I can’t believe I’ve just read an entire article about baby food. Well, actually I can believe it, because the article is by Burkhard Bilger, one of my favorite writers. But when I saw that his subject was baby food, I inwardly groaned. Baby food? Come on! Then I read the first sentence – “In a laboratory in Denver, on a decommissioned U.S. Army base, a baby sits in a high chair with two electrodes attached to his chest” – and then the next one, and the next one, and just kept going right to the end. I was hooked. The piece, called “Open Wide,” begins at that Denver lab (“Building 500, as this facility was formerly known, has the looming hulk of an Egyptian temple: it was once the largest man-made structure in Colorado”) and ends, surprisingly, delightfully, in an apartment of a Congolese woman in Portland, Maine. In between, it takes us to: a suburban kitchen in Scarsdale, New York; the taste-testing center for the Gerber Products Company; the laboratories of the U.S. Army’s Combat Feeding Directorate in Natick, Massachusetts; and an African farm stand in Maine. 

The piece is like a themed wunderkammern, stuffed with all kinds of interesting sentences: 

Beets are kale’s dark twin in the baby-food family. Something about their loamy sweetness, the taste of iron and manganese that seeps through them like runoff from a rusty pipe, turns children off.

Babies are creatures of fashion. They may not know what fashion is, but they’re under our control, so we dress them as we like and feed them what we want. Their diets distill our anxieties.

If you want to see the future of baby food, look in a foxhole. 

Like the other tube foods they’d developed—tortilla soup, Key-lime pie, polenta with cheese and bacon—these were dishes meant to do more than nourish. They were designed to trigger sense memories: to call to mind a kitchen in Iowa, as a pilot circled the Syrian desert at seventy thousand feet.

Rachel’s lenga-lenga was like no baby food I’d ever seen. It was full of onions and garlic and bitter green pepper. It had mashed eggplant and leeks that could give a baby gas. It was salty from the bouillon—the rest of the family would be eating it, too—and far from sweet. By the time it was done cooking, it was a thick green porridge, pungent with smoked fish and sulfurous plants. It made kale look like Christmas candy. And yet, when Rachel brought a bowl of it over to Soraya on the couch, she bounced up and down and clapped her hands.

And of course, Bilger being Bilger, there’s a catfish (“She watched as her mother threw a head of garlic and some yellow onions into her cart, then picked out an especially fearsome-looking dried catfish, black from smoke”). 

“Open Wide” brilliantly explores the “crosscurrents of baby-food research.” I enjoyed it immensely.

Another superb piece in this week’s issue is Alexandra Schwartz’s “Bounty Hunters,” an account of her experience working at the Park Slope Food Co-op in Brooklyn. It begins wonderfully:

The sidewalks of north Park Slope must be among the narrowest and most uneven in Brooklyn. They crash against the stoops of landmarked brownstones and split over the roots of oak and sycamore trees, menacing the ankles of pedestrians. Baby strollers compete for space with dogs of all sizes, shoals of high-school students, and shopping carts from the Park Slope Food Co-op. Here comes one now, rattling catastrophically, like Max Roach whaling on the high hat.

I read that and just kept going. Inspired passages sprang to my eyes:

I have the P.L.U. codes for bananas, avocados, and lemons in my fingertips. I know how to tell mustard greens from dandelion, quinces from Asian pears. Sometimes, cruising through a shopper’s load in a blissful state of flow, I fantasize about racing other checkout workers for the title of Fastest Register, though this would surely be deemed “uncoöperative,” the worst of all Co-op sins.

You learn something about people, working Co-op checkout. You see how they handle their kids, their parents, and their partners. You see friends greeting one another and exes steering clear. You ask about beautifully named foods that you have never engaged with before—ugli fruit, Buddha’s hand, fiddlehead ferns—and then you chat with the people buying them about how they plan to prepare them. It is fascinating to observe what people eat, and almost prurient to be allowed to handle their future food, to hold their long green-meat radishes and cradle their velvety heirloom tomatoes, as fat and blackly purple as a calf’s heart.

September is a cornucopian time, when late-summer and early-fall harvests mingle, the first butternut squash next to the last Sugar Baby watermelons. Chayote from Costa Rica is on the shelves at ninety-one cents a pound. There are Pennsylvania pawpaws (“ripe when fragrant and soft to the touch,” a sign advises), burgundy beans, cactus pears, ground cherries, Key limes. Apples are in: Crispin; Jazz; Zestar!; Ginger Gold; Cox’s Orange Pippin; Hidden Rose, with its modest mottled skin and startled, blushing flesh.

“Bounty Hunters” is one of this year’s best reporting pieces. It might be the best!