Swift's Meats for Babies Grow Chart

Swift Canadian Co. - 1958

This chart is part of a Swift Canadian campaign, beginning in the late 1940s, that encouraged “Meats for Babies.” Although Swift’s Canadian headquarters were in Ontario, this pre-cooked and strained food, sold in small cans, might have been produced at the Edmonton packing plant. Advertisements emphasized the food’s complete protein content and high nutritive value, including vitamin B, minerals, and iron, and indicated that it might be given to babies as young as three weeks (Swift Canadian Co., “Mothers!” and Swift, “Protein for Baby”). The practice of adding pureed meats to infant formula speaks to breastfeeding’s decline in this period, as mothers were taught to defer to the scientific authority of physicians and manufacturers (see Nathoo and Ostrey). Amy Bentley’s “Feeding Baby, Teaching Mother” explores this shift in infant feeding in the United States between the 1930s and the 1950s, observing how mass-marketed baby foods changed the prevailing wisdom about infant nutrition and encouraged the ever-earlier inclusion of manufactured solid food products. This growth chart was apparently used for a little over two years.