Baby Food Made Out of … Babies?

This just in from an alert PETA member: Gerber is selling baby food made out of veal. For some reason, this struck us at the PETA Files as especially spit-up-inducing. Feeding babies to babies just seems sort of … I don’t know, cannibalistic? Want some puréed fava beans with that, Junior?

Would you feed me to your baby?

But then we started thinking: Veal is one of those foods that even many carnivores shy away from because of the horrors that are now widely known to be involved in its production—horrors such as tearing babies away from their mothers and locking them in up boxes for a few months before prodding them on wobbly, atrophied legs to slaughter. But the truth is that most animals who are killed for food are still babies when they are strung up on the slaughter line.

Because of “modern” innovations such as feeding animals growth-promoting drugs and selectively breeding them so that they’ll grow fatter faster, pigs and turkeys are on average just 6 months old when they are killed, and chickens are just 7 weeks old. By comparison, steers who are raised for beef are old-timers when they are killed at between 1 and 2 years of age.

It’s enough to make strained carrots sound downright … grown-up.

There’s been some online chatter that the Veal and Veal Gravy baby food has been discontinued, but it’s still listed on Gerber’s website. Have you seen this “baby cruelty in a jar” at your local market?

Written by Alisa Mullins