How We Learn To Eat
advertisement from Life Magazine, December 12, 1949 In the mid-1920s, Dr. Clara Davis assembled a group of fifteen infants — most of them orphans, many of them undernourished, all under a year old — isolating them from all social contact in an experimental nursery. For months, the babies were given free rein to assemble their own meals from a limited selection of 34 foods. These included fruits and vegetables (bananas, peas, turnips), grains (oatmeal, Ry-Krisp), and meats (chicken, liver, bone marrow), each mushed or minced in a bowl. A nurse was instructed to sit stonily by, spoon-feeding a child only when he or she had shown definite interest in the contents of one of the bowls. The results were remarkable. In months, haggard, hollow-eyed babies grew cheeky and plump; rickety infants cured themselves through diet alone. Rather than shying from...