This porridge is just right: homemade baby food that's big business in India.

Pedro_P

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Entrepreneurs are cooking up wholesome alternatives to sugary baby formulas in a country where only one baby in 10 gets the recommended nutrition.

One traditional porridge recipe includes more than 15 grains, lentils and nuts. Photograph: Yvan Cohen/LightRocket/Getty Images
▼ When her baby was six months old, Dr Hemapriya Natesan found herself appalled by the sugary commercial baby food available. With her mother, she began to make batches ofmullaikatiyasathumaavu, a traditional porridge for weaning infants in Tamil Nadu, southern India.
It’s a painstaking 10-day process with more than 15 grains, lentils and nuts. Many of the ingredients are first sprouted, then sun-dried in the sweltering heat before being slow-roasted, ground and sieved.
Natesan shared the old recipe on her blog, and parents from all over the country began to write to her, asking to buy the porridge. Four years on, her company, My Little Moppet, employs around 15 women making organic baby foods to order.
For decades, the only packaged baby foods available in India were wheat- and rice-based cereals such as Cerelac (Nestlé India) and Farex (Danone India). Natesan was wary of commercial formulations. In 2015, the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention analysed more than 1,000 infant and toddler foods and found that on average, sugars contributed 47%of the calories in mixed grain and fruit foods.

Dr Hemapriya Natesan founded My Little Moppet after parents wrote to her asking to buy her homemade porridge. Photograph: Courtesy of My Little Moppet
“If we start weaning babies with these kinds of foods, they’ll like only processed foods later on,” said Natesan. Research suggests that (▪ ▪ ▪)

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