It’s hot outside. So hot, these days, you want to curl up next to a fan with a cup full of ice water and allow your brain to regress to an almost womb-like state of slushee-induced, heat-transcending peace. The local papers here in Philly have had nothing very exciting to say about the curent heat wave, but the BBC has an amusing article on the rest of the British media’s penchant for “climate porn” (the BBC, of course, only participates in the phenomenon by discussing how everyone else participates in it). Still, “climate porn”: you might want to rethink how much time you spend at work checking the weather. 
Speaking of returning to the womb, or something close to it, did you hear about the new, designer desi-themed baby food?
HappyBaby, which sells colorful cubes of frozen vegetable and fruit purées through FreshDirect and Gourmet Garage, flavors puréed peas with fresh mint, and potatoes and red lentils with coriander and cinnamon in their savory dahl, an Indian staple.
“This is how my parents fed me,” said Shazi Visram, co-founder of HappyBaby, which began on Mother’s Day and is expanding its line this month. “Why shouldn’t babies, of all people, get to eat delicious things?”(link)
No more vanilla, canned Gerber for today’s stylish babies. At HappyBabyFood, you get organic Baby Dhal. It comes in frozen, baby-sized cubes, and is sold at health food places in the New York City area. (Because it’s frozen, they can avoid having to put in preservatives.)
Not everyone is thrilled with the masalafication trend:
But some parents remain skeptical. “Moms ask me, ‘Can babies really have that?’ ” said Anni Daulter, co-founder of Bohemian Baby, which delivers meals like Vegetable Korma, made with coconut milk, for 12-month-olds, and purées of fruits like pomegranates and figs for infants. “And I say, of course! What do you think they feed babies in India?” (link)
Wait, you mean they feed babies in India something other than American baby food?
For more frozen organic baby food porn, click on this image, from New York Magazine. And a bit more on HappyBaby Food co-founder Shazi Visram, who has an MBA from Columbia and has worked in real estate in Brooklyn, can be found here.
Ah! I’m so glad someone posted on this. I was fascinated by this article.
Does anyone know anything about babies’ taste sensations when they’re that young? I assume they can differentiate between tastes, and therefore some babies like peas and beets and some don’t. But does something change as we get older? Does giving your kid coriander and cinnamon when she’s 5 months old ensure anything about her tastes as a 15 year old?
It seems like once children start to eat solids there might be some correlation, but does it really start this early? Any pediatricians in the house?
Tamasha, I’m no pediatrician, but the Times article did mention something about this:
So they’re saying 2-3 years is the taste/preference threshold. (The study they reference is here; I haven’t been able to get the full article.)
Incidentally, there’s an article in Time that also cites the Tennessee study.
The key is to force your baby to eat as diverse a set of flavors and textures that you can stuff into them before they become old and too picky. Now I’m not doctor and I’m no parent, but this sounds like a very reasonable plan. Non-picky eaters are the life of the party. All the other babies will want to be seen with them because they will never make a scene at a restaurant when they are older. 🙂
Thanks for the info Amardeep.
On a side note: when my mom was pregnant with me she craved coconut 24/7, which she took to mean I wanted it, so my parents fed it to me when I was a kid. It seems to have had the opposite effect: I think coconut anything, fake, real, raw, milk, even smothered in chocolate, is disGUSting. Even just thinking about it makes me cringe.
Surely you jest? Have you ever tried a chocolate covered macaroon? Mmmmmm.
Oh wait, I missed the part about smothered in chocolate. Nevermind.
read closer angel-boy!
There was a lot of discussion about this among the moms at work a few days ago and I usually tune out when it comes to baby talk but I heard about the desi baby food and thought cool. Interestingly my Indian girlfriends didn’t care much for it. Their take was that feed their babies whatever they eat just milder and softer. As a child myself growing up in India I was fed everything that was eaten in the house in rice or roti balls 🙂 so I get the logic. However my white friends loved it cause they said it helped them introduce their children to different kinds of foods and not just peas and carrots.
Personally I’m shocked when people allow very small children to turn into picky eaters. What’s up with that? That was a luxury never welcome in my house. Don’t get me wrong it’s not like my mother was forcing me to eat Karela if I disliked it (which I don’t) but we ate everything in our house. One of my friends has a picky husband and 2 picky kids and between the three of them they don’t eat peas and tomatoes and cauliflower and a bunch of other things. That’s spoilt.
Not going to their house for dinner!
JOAT is right, baby/child food is not seen as a separate group in desiland, just milder, and if you ask me, it’s very sensible, otherwise you have to have separate kinds of food for kids till they are well into their teens, which is a nuisance and not good for their health. Very young children (pre solids) tend to be fed mashed up bananas and yogurt and boiled vegetables, in my experience, though that may just be a westernized conceit.
I still can’t get used to American parents letting their kids throw tantrums about food and giving them hot dogs and mac and cheese every day rather than trying to expand their tastes. The idea of “kid-friendly” food and “kids don’t like anything that isn’t bland” doesn’t make much sense to me. If kids are naturally drawn only to peanut butter and hot dogs and cheese, why do desi kids happily (OK, in my case, tolerantly) lap up their dal-sabzi?
I’ll buy the bit about tastes being formed in utero – I love everything that my mom craved when she was pregnant with me.
kudos to that..that is definitely a true statement…
JOAT,
Personally I think that anyone who actually enjoys eating karela is some kind of foodie pervert 😉
Such individuals should be slapped for their depravity.
I remember reading a while back that children’s sense of taste is something like 10 times stronger than adults’. Confirmation/debunking by any medics on SM would be appreciated.
I’m sorry, but this is absurd. I’m sure someone here is well meaning, but the fact that an entire industrial operation exists to get frozen organic desi baby food to New Yorkers is scary.
Saurav, it’s the logical extension of the yuppie-organic culture in which people don’t cook at home but buy organic marinated meats and frozen Thai meals and prepared salads at Whole Foods or Trader Joe’s. Entire industrial operations exist to get food to all sorts of American households (delivery, prepared foods, what have you) so why should it be a surprise when they want the same for their babies. And there’s extra guilt about feeding your kid prepared foods, and extra pressure to do everything right for the kid in upper middle class households. Where there is Baby Mozart, can organic food delivery be far behind? 🙂
Ooooo I love that stuff. Including brussle sprouts and all kinds of gourds and any strange vegetable. If it’s a vegetable I’ll eat it. The Maharashtrian karela is soaked in salt for a while (to lessen the bitterness) than stuffed with masala and panfried and it really is yummy.
I ate nothing but Poppu Sadam at home from the time I could eat solid foods until I was about 15. I still eat it predominantly whenever I go home. So yes, I believe that taste can be shaped at a young age. But I did start to like spicier foods eventually. Even in India, I noticed that my nieces and nephews tended to all like the same dishes, much like the kids here in the U.S. love hot dogs and Mac & Cheese. Plus they are both delicious, let’s be serious.
kitchadi and idli… daal. Certainly not freakin designer Korma or Lamb Rogan Josh.
JOAT,
Good God, is there no end to your debauchery ? Brussel sprouts too ?!
I bet there are illegal websites, banned across 49 states, dedicated to lascivious pictures and video files of underground cookery clubs doing strange, unmentionable things with saucepans, frying pans, and the offensive vegetables concerned. Along with late-night, scrambled cable channels showing degenerate-looking outlaws feverishly eating karelas and (it gets even worse) bindi/okra.
Those vegetables should only be sold in anonymous brown bags and kept on the top-shelf of supermarkets/groceries, out of view of young impressionable folk who would be corrupted by a brief glimpse of such a disgustingly twisted food item.
I cannot believe that SM has become so decadent these days that the Mutineers actually allow commenters to admit such fetishes in public. Abhi is probably playing his fiddle as we speak.
Do they make Navratan Kurma/Korma?
🙂
I am really bored so I’m posting on threads like this I normally wouldn’t; but this thread has me reminiscing…anyone remember how hard it was to finish a can of soda as a little kid? It seemed so enormous and never ending. Even a burger at McDonald’s I remember seemed like a huge meal and took me like half an hour to finish (I’m talking about age 4-5 or so).
Oh, I’m not surprised. I’m just kind of creeped out. You know how sometimes it takes something a little bit over the line to make you realize the insanity of it all? 🙂
had i known, 30-some odd years later i’d be waiting in line behind “Estelle” for my share of two plain slices on PIZZA FRIDAYS here at the office, perhaps I would not have taken for granted my mother’s freshly made rotis, soaked in a rich layer of ghee and topped with shakkar or bura… or the countless times she’d make daal bati churma on my return from school…and then there was her delectable missi roti with pyaaz ki chutney and a tall glass of chaach on the side to cure us from the ills of summertime heat…
ahh, oh well.