Pablum

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1935 can of Pablum (center left) exhibited at the Indiana State Museum, 2011

Pablum is a processed

Mead Johnson & Company in 1931. The product was developed at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto to combat infant malnutrition
.

Developers of Pablum included Canadian

pediatricians Frederick Tisdall, Theodore Drake, Pearl Summerfeldt, Alan Brown,[1] laboratory technician Ruth Herbert (all of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto), and Mead Johnson chemist Harry H. Engel.[2]

Name

The trademarked name is a contracted form of the Latin word pabulum, which means "foodstuff". The word "pablum" had long been used in botany and medicine to refer to nutrition or substances of which the nutritive elements are passively absorbed. In a broader sense, "pablum" can refer to something that is simplistic, bland, mushy, unappetizing, or infantile.

Description

Pablum Mixed Cereal was made from a mixture of ground and precooked

chicken eggs, lactose or nuts
of any kind, while it does contain wheat and corn, which can be allergenic for some.

History

Pablum was developed in 1930 by Canadian

pediatricians Frederick Tisdall, Theodore Drake, and Alan Brown,[1] in collaboration with nutrition laboratory technician Ruth Herbert (all of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto), along with Mead Johnson chemist Harry H. Engel.[2] At the time, breast-feeding had declined in the middle and upper classes, with the effect that the diets of babies were often deficient in essential elements. The cereal marked a breakthrough in nutritional science: it helped prevent rickets, a crippling childhood disease, by ensuring that children had sufficient vitamin D in their diet. From the bone meal, it had about 12 ppm fluorine,[4]
which works out to about what pediatricians were prescribing about four decades later.

Although neither Pablum nor its biscuit predecessor[5] was the first food designed and sold specifically for babies, it was the first baby food to come precooked and thoroughly dried. The ease of preparation made Pablum successful in an era when infant malnutrition was still a major problem in industrialized countries.[6]

For a period of 25 years[

H. J. Heinz Company.[citation needed
]

See also

References

  1. ^
    Canadian Studies at Mount Allison University. 2001. Archived from the original
    on September 1, 2009. Retrieved January 12, 2010.
  2. ^ a b "Harry H. Engel". The New York Times. Associated Press. April 2, 1984. Retrieved July 7, 2021.
  3. PMID 13367900
    .
  4. PMID 13184358
    .
  5. PMID 20317679
    .
  6. ^ "History of Pablum". Canadiana Connection. March 12, 2012. Retrieved June 17, 2020.

External links

  • The dictionary definition of pablum at Wiktionary
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