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A couple of years ago, nursery manager Melanie Smith, who runs Portland Kindergarten in Lincoln, noticed that many children were eating in a new way. Or rather, they were not eating in a new way. A significant percentage of the toddlers in her care were now refusing to try any element of the nursery’s small morning meal (which always includes fresh fruit) or their lunch, which might be something like spaghetti bolognese, fishcakes with vegetables, or mild chillies and curries. This new generation of infants “just don’t seem to like texture”, comments Smith, who has been involved with the nursery for 35 years (before she took over, her mother ran it for 25 years). In the most extreme cases, Smith and her staff found themselves feeding three-year-olds who vomited at the very sight of a cooked lunch.
During the 10 years that Smith has been in charge at Portland, there have always been a fair number of picky eaters. A degree of “fussiness” about food is nothing new for this age group – it can be an entirely natural developmental stage. It’s called neophobia: fear of the new. Smith says it was a normal part of nursery life to have children who struggled with certain vegetables or ones who “liked dry food but not wet food”. The difference now, Smith says, is that the nursery is seeing a lot of three-year-olds for whom follow-on milk plus commercial baby food and other packaged snacks form “100% of their diet”. At the same time, Smith says there has been a “massive increase” in toddlers with tooth decay, as well as a rise in the number of children reaching the age of three who are more or less nonverbal. She attributes this speech delay to the fact that the skills and muscles needed for chewing are related to those needed for speech.
Has this generation of children – who were born from 2020 onwards – become scared of real food? As with anything to do with post-pandemic life, the answers are not simple. Eating is a deeply social activity and we will never fully get to the bottom of the ways in which children born during or after Covid were affected by dozens of forms of social dislocation, including the closure of baby groups and play areas, the masking of faces, the rising use of screens and the isolation of their parents from friends and family. Smith says when it comes to child-rearing, “people have lost their village”.
When offering your child his or her first taste of food, you can endlessly doubt yourself. I definitely did when feeding my three children, even though I was lucky enough to have cooking skills and a fully equipped kitchen. What if my baby hated my cooking? What if I gave him the “wrong” thing by mistake? Back in 1999 I fed my oldest son sloppy baby rice from a packet, followed by homemade purees frozen in ice cube trays, plus the odd jar. Given the chance to do it again, I would forget the purees and try baby-led weaning – the approach pioneered by former health visitor Gill Rapley, in which babies are simply offered pieces of real, whole food from six months onwards and encouraged to explore it themselves. Then again, it’s easy to be wise about what to feed babies when you are not in the middle of doing it.
For many families now, these are exceptionally difficult times. New parents of all social classes are feeling time-poor and uncertain, and one of the great beneficiaries of this collective state of parental anxiety has been the commercial baby food industry. Manufacturers have done a spectacular job of convincing many parents that feeding a baby with highly processed pouches, powders and crisp-like snacks is not just the convenient option but the healthier and better one. Does your baby refuse greens? A pouch will provide all the veg they require. Worried about your child choking? Give them a “melty” snack.
The damage done to child health by commercial baby food in the UK – and the failure of government to do anything to protect families from the marketing of it – is one of the great untold food scandals of our time. If anyone should be protected from the ultra-processed world we are now living in, you might think it would be babies. As the World Health Organization states, good infant nutrition in the first three years of life is critical to how a child will grow and develop. Babies need food that is pure, varied, minimally seasoned and nutrient-dense. Apart from meeting a child’s needs in the short term, the food they eat during their first few years of life is also equipping them with preferences for the future. Yet by the age of two to five, the average UK toddler is getting 61% of their energy from ultra-processed foods, according to a 2022 study – a significantly higher percentage than UK adults, and higher even than for children in the US (where it is 58%), let alone countries that still have a relatively strong cooking culture, such as Argentina (where it is 27%) or Colombia (18%).
Have you been in the baby food aisle of a big supermarket lately? For me, it had been a while (my youngest child just turned 16). I had vague memories of lumpy purees and porridge in jars, plus crispy things in dreary packets, such as rusks and plain rice cakes. When I returned, I found that the aisle had morphed into a brightly coloured snacktopia, colonised by a series of brilliantly marketed and fancifully shaped baby fast foods. There were puffs and straws; sticks and stars; biscotti and “smoothie melts”; sweetcorn rings and fish-shaped raspberry “tiddlers”. The jars of mush I remembered were still there but were now vastly outnumbered by row upon row of colourful pouches with bright and appealing graphics on the front.
When Hong Kong-based nutritionist Georgine Leung had her first daughter in the UK 11 years ago, she mostly fed her on a homemade diet, simply mashing whatever she and her husband were eating (having been careful not to add any salt). As a baby in Hong Kong, Leung had been fed by her own mother on congee rice porridge, watery to start with, then thicker over time, supplemented with other foods such as steamed hairy gourd and little pieces of meat and tofu. When she became a mother, Leung remembers finding the illustrations on the Ella’s Kitchen pouches very “attractive”. In her National Childbirth Trust group, these pouches were ubiquitous, and British parents generally felt they represented goodness and health. “There’s a huge moral angle to feeding,” Leung comments. “People feel judged.”
On the subject of feeling judged for how you feed your child, one of the cleverest marketing inventions of modern times is surely the baby snack. These nibbles sell parents the idea that they are helping their child’s physical and social development – when what they are really buying is a tiny and very expensive packet of crisps or biscuits. One of the first of these snacks to be sold in the UK, back in 2006, was Organix Melty Carrot Puffs – a kind of all-natural Wotsits – with their “no junk promise”. Carrot puffs have since been joined by a host of other “melty” snacks, all claiming to be perfect finger food for a developing child. “Delight little learners with our Melty Veggie Sticks, a scrum-veggily-umptious finger food to grab, hold and happily munch!” says the packet of Organix Veggie Sticks. The promise of meltiness preys on parents’ understandable terror of a baby choking. But these snacks – organic or not – are also one of the reasons that many infants have not learned to chew properly, because they are quite unlike the crunchy textures of real food: the crispness of toast, the chewy juiciness of roasted carrots or the crunch of an apple.
Baby snacks are huge business. Over the past decade, they have risen from 10% of the total UK baby food market to 21%. Pushing snacks on babies and their parents has been one of the ways the food industry has continued to make a tidy profit out of babies despite declining birthrates. These finger food snacks are easily the most lucrative form of baby food for manufacturers, and half of them are ultra-processed (whether organic or not). I recently tried my first packet of Veggie Straws, by the Kiddylicious brand, marketed as “fun and colourful for little fingers”. Veggie Straws are hollow, low on veg (tiny quantities of beetroot, kale and other vegare used more for colour than for flavour) and high on potato starch and refined rapeseed oil. I can’t say the taste thrilled me because I could hardly detect one – a slick of oil on my tongue was the main impression given by these pallid sticks, whose colours were much less vibrant than the packet art. Yet when I got to the end of the miniature 12g packet, I found myself scrabbling in the bag for more, like I did when I was a compulsive eater bingeing crisps as a teenager.
Someone who has been trying to get the government to take the problem seriously is Dr Vicky Sibson, director of First Steps Nutrition Trust, a charity that provides resources and reports on children’s food. Sibson tells me Smith’s experiences in Lincoln are far from unique. Two years ago, she co-authored a report for First Steps on ultra-processed food in the diets of infants and young children in the UK. She found that between the ages of four and six months – when the official health advice is for babies not to have even started solid food yet – 34% of all babies in the UK are fed some form of industrially produced baby snacks.
Even when commercial British baby foods are not technically ultra-processed (which, according to the Brazilian nutritionists who identified the concept, means foods that are made using additives and processes that would never be found in a home kitchen), they are often quite unsuitable for babies. A case in point are the “first baby food” pouches of fruit and vegetable purees that are routinely marketed for babies of four months, in contradiction of NHS weaning guidance, which advises exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months (or using formula milk for those who are bottle feeding). Some baby pouches contain more sugars per 100ml than Coca-Cola, yet they are sold with labels that reassure parents that they are entirely “organic” with “nothing artificial” added.
How is this legal? As Sibson told me, most parents imagine foods in the baby aisle are heavily regulated. Speaking on behalf of the baby food industry, Declan O’Brien of the British Specialist Nutrition Association told me that “baby foods are strictly regulated to ensure their quality and nutritional composition”. Yet there are – I was staggered to learn – no specific legal limits on sugar thresholds in any UK baby foods. The English regulations on baby food – which were set in 2003 when the market was very different – state that the amount of “sucrose, fructose, glucose, glucose syrups or honey” added to baby food shouldn’t exceed 7.5g per 100g. This is odd in itself, given that honey shouldn’t be given to babies under the age of one, due to a very unlikely risk of botulism. But the regulations say nothing about other added sugars such as fruit juice concentrate. There are also no regulations on the sugars contained in fruit purees themselves. The total carbohydrates in a baby puree would have to hit 20g per 100g to fall foul of the law. This would be very, very sweet – about the same amount of sugar per 100g as a supermarket mini sugared doughnut.
When you eat a whole piece of fruit, the sugar in it is intrinsic, meaning it is part of the fruit’s natural cell structure. Thanks to the fibre it contains, it is digested more slowly. By contrast, the sugars in a processed fruit puree are free sugars because the cells of the fruit have broken down. A report by First Steps Nutrition Trust in 2018 found that the average free sugars content of a fruit-only pouch marketed as suitable for a four-month-old baby was 11.7g per 100g. Many pouches contain even more sugar than this. Ella’s Kitchen Bananas + Coconuts for four months plus contains nearly 15g of sugar per 100g: about four level teaspoons of sugar a pack. Savoury flavours are often little better: First Steps found that the majority of pouches containing vegetables as well as fruits consisted mainly of apples or pears, though most did not mention these as the main ingredient. For example, Little Freddie pouches with Spinach, Peas and Apples (since discontinued) were 82% apple and just 12% spinach and 6% peas. A study in 2020 found that the UK was unusual in adding sweet fruit to savoury baby food. Researchers found that savoury meal-type purees for babies did not contain added sugars in any of the European countries studied, except for the UK and Malta.
Something you never saw 20 years ago that has become entirely normal is the sight of a young child in a pushchair slurping his or her lunch from the nozzle of a pouch. One of the purposes of weaning a baby on to solid food at six months is to expose them to a range of flavours and textures so they can gradually learn to enjoy the varied diet their bodies need. By contrast, these pouches reinforce a preference for sweetness and smoothness. The era of pouch feeding started in 2006 with Ella’s Kitchen, now the UK’s largest baby food firm. The company was the brainchild of entrepreneur Paul Lindley, who quit his job at the children’s TV channel Nickelodeon and launched the company with his life savings, naming it after his daughter. Ella’s Kitchen “changed the whole landscape of baby food”, Leung says. For an occasional quick snack on the move, a pouch is undeniably handy. But for many families around the world, they have become a way of life that continues long after babyhood. An article in the Los Angeles Times last year featured a mother from Pittsburgh whose seven-year-old was still eating two or three pouches every day. Some of the brands explicitly push the idea of them as something for all ages of children. On one pouch of Ella’s Kitchen puree for four-month-olds, I noticed the label said: “I am also great for older little ones who will love my tastes for years to come.”
According to First Steps Nutrition Trust, parents should be actively discouraged from buying these baby pouches. The NHS guidance on weaning makes no mention of them anywhere; pouch feeding goes against NHS advice that infants be discouraged from sucking from spouts and teats after the age of six months. In 2022, the British Dental Association attacked pouches for putting baby teeth at risk of “erosion and decay” just as “they are erupting”. Most of the pouches have small print on the back advising that the contents should be squeezed into a bowl or on to a spoon before being offered to babies. However, the fact that Lindley – who sold the company in 2013 for £66m – posed for publicity photos sucking straight from the nozzle of an Ella’s Kitchen pouch suggests he was aware that this was how they are usually consumed. A spokesperson for the company told me that Lindley has not worked for Ella’s Kitchen since 2018, and that “none of our promotional materials will ever show a little one feeding directly from the pouch”. They added that the company has “never marketed our weaning range as a substitute for whole or textured foods”. A baby who sucks from a pouch can neither smell nor see what they are eating, so it does not teach them to recognise or enjoy real whole fruits and vegetables. Sucking smooth, sweet puree direct from a pouch is also a recipe for tooth decay.
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It’s often said processed foods are a cheap way to eat, but in the baby food aisle they are eye-wateringly expensive. Four tiny packets of Organix Cheese & Herbs Puffs are £2.38 at Asda. The high price, perversely, seems to be part of the reason why these products are so popular among all classes in the UK – it wrongly reassures parents they are feeding their child something good. In 2020, a team of researchers interviewed 62 parents and carers with babies aged four to six months, following up with them twice more at six-month intervals. The parents were split between those on low, middle and high incomes.
One mother on a low income said she used the puree to “get the nutrients in” and the packaged finger foods “just to play with and explore the textures”. One of the wealthier mothers said she liked Ella’s Kitchen pouches because they had “lovely ingredients in them” so she didn’t have to worry that there was “too much sugar … or anything like that”. Although the pouches are costly, some of the mothers on lower incomes liked them because at least they knew the contents wouldn’t be “wasted to the bin” as one parent put it. Buying a whole bag of sweet potatoes or broccoli felt like a financial risk. A kilo bag of sweet potatoes, enough to make 10 baby portions, costs £1.19 in Aldi – about the same price as a single pouch of Ella’s Kitchen puree, or two pouches of the Aldi equivalent.
Nowhere is a parent’s trust in baby food more misplaced than when it comes to “growing up milk”. These are powdered formula milks specifically marketed at infants aged 12 months and over, and they should not exist at all. When it comes to ultra-processed foods, formula milk for babies under the age of one is in a category of its own, because for babies who are not breastfed it is essential, as well as being a safe and well-regulated product in the UK. Many mothers cannot breastfeed for as long as they would like to, or at all.
But if formula milk is a vital substance for some babies in the first year of life, it loses its purpose after the age of one. All the health advice says that formula milks “are not required by children aged one to five”. A one-year-old is ready to drink whole cow’s milk (or the plant-based equivalent), or to continue with breast milk if they are breastfed. Yet formula milk continues to be drunk by more than a third of children aged 12 to 18 months.
“Growing up” and “toddler” milks are great for business, forming 48% of sales of the commercial formula market worldwide. But they are not so great for children. What most parents don’t realise is that, in contrast to formulas sold for babies from birth, the composition of which is tightly regulated and which are not allowed to be advertised (because to do so would undermine breastfeeding), growing up milks have no restrictions on marketing or ingredients in the UK. As a result, they tend to be alarmingly high in sugar, often in the form of maltodextrin, a sweetener that is made from processed starch, often corn. Maltodextrin has a higher glycaemic index than table sugar and it is known to impact tooth enamel, yet in the UK it is not labelled as added sugar. As well as these sugars, toddler milks are mainly made up of powdered milk and vegetable oil. A 350ml portion of Alpro Soya Growing Up Milk, for instance, would give a toddler 15.5% of their daily energy from free sugar: three times the recommended amount. These milks have a cloying taste, unlike the flavour of regular cow’s milk, which reinforces a child’s preference for sweet foods.
How bad do things have to get in the baby food aisle before the government finally decides to protect infants – and parents – from this flood of oversweetened and highly processed food and drinks? In November, I went to Portcullis House in Westminster for the launch of a report from the House of Lords’ Food, Diet and Obesity Committee, whose remit was to consider the role of ultra-processed food in diets in Britain. The committee’s chair, Joan Walmsley, had commented in a podcast a few months earlier that the food industry had been “getting away with murder”, especially when it came to foods aimed at babies and children. One of her committee’s strongest recommendations was that the government must “act immediately to strengthen regulation on the composition and marketing” of follow-on, toddler and growing up milks, banning their promotion altogether. The committee also called for stronger standards for “commercial infant food” in general.
The government’s reaction to the committee’s recommendations has been half-hearted, to say the least. In a response issued on 30 January, the Department of Health acknowledged the “concern” about growing up milks, but announced no new regulations beyond continuing to “review the evidence”. As for baby food in general, the government responded that we already “have comprehensive regulations in place”. The health secretary, Wes Streeting, has said it is Labour’s ambition to make “our country’s children the healthiest generation that has ever lived”. But apparently this doesn’t extend to helping them to eat healthier food during their very earliest months.
In the absence of better regulation of baby food, perhaps the most remarkable thing is that there are still many children in the UK who have a varied and healthy diet. All the experts I spoke to agreed that there were huge variations in how children ate and that this cut across income groups. Smith told me that there were many children at Portland who did enjoy their nursery lunches. One child, from a low income household, brought in his own lunch from home each day, consisting of dishes such as rice and chicken and plantain, beautifully cooked. His food, she said, was so “amazing” that the staff often wished they could be eating it.
Dr Bimpe Oki, director of public health at the London borough of Lambeth, told me that what their community dietitians see is the difference it makes for a child to be living in a household with strong cooking habits. But to feed a child on something other than pouches and powders is also a “battle against a whole range of things” including low literacy, cramped housing and inadequate kitchen equipment. “Even using a blender can seem daunting,” Oki says.
When it comes to steering someone away from ultra-processed products, the key is to start early. “We don’t wait until six months,” Oki says. She is well aware that it isn’t always easy to get parents to see the benefits of homemade baby food when there are such cleverly marketed alternatives in every supermarket. Oki herself “never thought of giving my own children anything but what I cooked for them”. But the day of our conversation, she decided to check out the baby food in a local shop and found herself strangely attracted to a pack of Heinz biscotti with Peppa Pig on the label, aimed at babies aged seven months and up. “It just drew my attention.”
