Weaning and baby formula

[Scythe13]

If you had a baby in a SHTF situation and needed to feed it, but it wasn't breastfeeding, what would you do? Or, if you found a baby, or a male relative came over with a baby, and thus breastfeeding was not an option, what would you do?

[MaryN]

Well, Scythe, theoretically, babies can eat just "adult" food, so long as it is prepared properly - i.e. scraped or pureed to a mush, and in the absence of any milk that would probably be the only option. To be really horrible, you could say that a small baby with no suitable food available would be a bit of a liability anyway......

[Sunna]

chew it into a mush and bobs ya uncle .

[BeardyMan]

(24 July 2015, 23:10)Sunna Wrote: chew it into a mush and bobs ya uncle .

You can't eat babies. Legally anyway.

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I've got number 3 on the way in October. The milk lasts for a while, so powered or pre-prepared, you can stockpile it. Everything runs out at some point though.

[MaryN]

True, but I hear they are delicious spit-roasted.

[BeardyMan]

[Mortblanc]

As soon as my children were old enough to eat any solid food their mom would mash up table food into a mush and feed it to them. After that they would not even eat commercial baby food.

They were eating mashed rice at about a week old. I do not know if it was being properly processed but my kids seemed to be needing some "filler" in addition to the milk they were getting. They wanted food.

I am old enough to remember hearing the old folks talk about feeding their babies back during the Depression when they could not afford commercial baby foods, and pre-chewing the food and transferring it to the baby was the standard procedure.

Back in the 1800s and earlier there was no "formula" and if a wet nurse was not found a child would die. It was not until the development of canned evaporated milk that a child could expect to survive without a wet nurse.

Evaporated milk was not only purified and pasteurized, it had a shelf life. Before that, you could not use raw milk due to bovine TB which would transfer to humans and kill the child.

Sometimes they would place sugar in a piece of cloth, wind up the cloth and dip the bulb of sugar into water, then let the baby suck on it. This was known as the famous "sugar tit". (Yep the same thing the government uses to quell the masses)

In extreme cases they would do the same thing with flour and feed it to the child but the nutrition level was deplorable and the baby usually died.

I did know a woman at one time that had survived after he mother's death being fed the "flour tit", but she had calcium deficiencies for her whole life and never grew teeth. She was toothless for her whole life.

SHTF one might reason a child to be a hindrance. That is a very 20th century concept developed after conquest of disease had insured a high infant survival rate. More than a certain number of children were viewed as a hindrance rather than an asset and having "too many kids" came to be considered irresponsible.

In a long term survival scenario, at some point the survival of the clan/tribe takes precedence over personal survival and each life becomes a continuation of the species. You do anything you have to do to keep the children alive and you have as many of them as you can to insure at least a few survive.

[Steve]

(25 July 2015, 22:16)Mortblanc Wrote: As soon as my children were old enough to eat any solid food their mom would mash up table food into a mush and feed it to them. After that they would not even eat commercial baby food.

Some babies are hungrier than others, my lads were ravenous from an early age, finishing a 9oz bottle of milk and them some mashed veg or meat.

Maybe that's why my oldest lad is 6'7" and youngest not far behind.