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Infant Feeding

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Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics

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Food safety; Industrially manufactured foods; Natural food

Introduction

Food studies generally ignore infant and young child feeding practices in favor of adult eating. Human infants are totally dependent on others for their food, and they survive primarily on one food – milk; however, the bioethical issues concerning infant and young child feeding are seldom explored. Food activists usually focus on adult foods, not baby foods; policy makers concerned with food security ignore breastfeeding because breast milk is neither produced agriculturally nor industrially. Because human milk is produced in the bodies of individual women, it is a greater challenge to relate it to global food issues. Infant and young child feeding is also different from adult eating because the person being fed, the baby, is not making the decisions about what, how, and when to feed. The decision on what to feed an infant is not a lifestyle choice dependent on trends and fashions, but one with vital...

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Correspondence to Penny Van Esterik .

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© 2019 Springer Nature B.V.

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Van Esterik, P., Linnecar, A. (2019). Infant Feeding. In: Kaplan, D.M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1179-9_492

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