https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/mar/15/ultra-processed-babies-are-toddler-snacks-one-of-the-great-food-scandals-of-our-time
I was surprised this article didn't get more reaction on MN.
Jars of baby food have been around for a long time. The pouches and baby snacks were relatively new when I was weaning my teenager.
They have their uses, particularly as a spare at the bottom of a changing bag so you know that there's something reliable and suitable to hand at any time. DS1 had food allergies, so we did need a safe, allergen-free option which got used a few times.
As an every days staple they would be bland, expensive and unstimulating for texture. For a small number of infants that struggle with weaning, bland and unstimulating is better than total refusal of solids, but for the majority, this isn't the ideal starting point.
BLW was a big buzz term at the time and I went along with this approach as it just made sense. I had to cook for myself (& DH) anyway, so serving up food that we were eating, or parts of it was easy, and logical for introducing our long term diet. When DS went onto his exclusion diet, I had to cook and adapt anyway (even after a long working day). I wasn't zealous about it and didn't sweat about minor issues like spoons for yoghurt.
The big problem is that a lot of people have a limited idea of what balanced nutrition is anyway, and limited cooking skills. For a long time weaning advice overcomplicated phasing in foods making pre-made baby food the easy solution to the problem (that was probably created by the food companies anyway...) MN is of a much higher literacy and more critical than the average population level so it's not surprising that people take health claims at face value n the front of a pack and don't get much sense from the small print. Lots of people only take advice from what their parents and friends did. Not that the Children's Centres have widespread coverage now.
Food will have fewer benefits when it's been over-cooked and pulverised down. Digestion starts with chewing, so by-passing that with purees is not good for the body's processes. Cooking food long enough to sterilise it changes the structure of it and changes the nutrients. The importance of gut bacteria is a new science and where children's diets are predominently based on sterile, very processed foods rather than a broad range, it will restrict their gut bacteria.
The baby snacks didn't make much sense to me. They weren't filling, didn't have much nutrition and didn't really add anything to a young child's experience of food other than building an expectation to snack out of routine.
As a casual observation, in recent years, there seems to have been a gear change in fussiness of the young people at my youth groups. There's always been the occasional restrictive eater, but there is now a cluster struggling to eat fresh foods (no ND suspected). On residentials, the contents of the fruit bowl go down far less than they did in the 2000s/10s. There is a strong corelation between the ease of eating fruits and the rate at which they get eaten. Grapes, then bananas. Some apples. "Easy peeler" oranges not being touched at all. I suspect that they're more used to instant fruits like grapes and blueberries or pre-prepared fruit salads and just aren't used to having to chew around a whole apple or peel and pick at an orange themselves.
There is a perfect storm of corporate greed/ advertising, lack of general knowledge about health, lack of accessible support and lack of time affecting children's health.