Infant Formula
50 Things That Made the Modern Economy
English - June 10, 2017 03:00 - 9 minutes - 4.19 MB - ★★★★★ - 1.4K ratingsBusiness Homepage Download Apple Podcasts Google Podcasts Overcast Castro Pocket Casts RSS feed
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Not every baby has a mother who can breastfeed. Indeed, not every baby has a mother. In the early 1800s, only two in three babies who weren’t breastfed lived to see their first birthday. Many were given “pap”, a bread-and-water mush, from hard-to-clean receptacles that teemed with bacteria. But in 1865 Justus von Liebig invented Soluble Food for Babies – a powder comprising cow’s milk, wheat flour, malt flour and potassium bicarbonate. It was the first commercial substitute for breastmilk and, as Tim Harford explains, it has helped shape the modern workplace.
Editors: Richard Knight and Richard Vadon
Producer: Ben Crighton
(Image: Baby lying down drinking from bottle, Credit: Lopolo/Shutterstock)