Our sec­ond child was born in Bal­ti­more and when it was time for wean­ing we fol­lowed what peo­ple around us, main­ly oth­er pae­di­a­tri­cians in train­ing, did, ie, we went to the su­per­mar­ket and bought those lit­tle bot­tles of “ba­by food”, filled with sweet pota­to or tapi­o­ca.

That was what you did in those days, in those coun­tries. But I al­ways used to boast that, in my coun­try, peo­ple gave their ba­bies re­al food, food from their par­ent’s plates, ta­ble food or “from the pot” as the Ja­maicans like to say, and when I read Ca­janus, the month­ly mag­a­zine pro­duced by the Caribbean Food & Nu­tri­tion In­sti­tute, I was en­cour­aged in this think­ing. Feed ba­bies breast milk first for some months and then feed them bits and pieces of what their moth­ers and fa­thers eat.

To my shock, on ar­riv­ing in T&T in the 70s I found the thing to do, the “mod­ern” thing, was the ex­act op­po­site. Every­body and their aun­ty were feed­ing their ba­bies bot­tled food and so proud of it. The first time I told the fam­i­ly of a nine-month-old child that she could eat callal­loo, bread­fruit, peas, and rice, they looked at me as if I was mad. They still do.

It’s tak­en many, many years to turn that at­ti­tude around some­what and part of the prob­lem has been the num­ber of doc­tors who con­tin­ue to rec­om­mend bot­tled food for in­fants and the lack of a pol­i­cy state­ment on in­fant nu­tri­tion from the Min­istry of Health. The ba­bies do their lev­el best to eat what their par­ents are eat­ing by beg­ging from around six months but too of­ten that is con­sid­ered old-fash­ioned!

It’s em­bar­rass­ing to hear par­ents say they don’t know what to feed their six-month-old be­cause “we eh have no good ba­by food down here” and in the States “it have pears and ap­ple and grape and tapi­o­ca and ting” but sur­prise, sur­prise, tapi­o­ca is cas­sa­va and the ba­by should be eat­ing man­go from the Julie tree in the back­yard. Big, hard­back men who love their blue food nev­er think of giv­ing it to their ba­bies. It’s per­fect as a first “ba­by” food.

Take bread­fruit for ex­am­ple. Not blue in colour but blue in spir­it. I grew up in the shade of a bread­fruit tree that was not in my yard but in the house in front. Its branch­es al­most reached over the street to our house. It’s a fruit that has giv­en many names to the sounds it makes as it falls. We be­came ac­cus­tomed hear­ing the bang of the fruit falling on to the gal­va­nized roof or the biff as it hit the ground and split.

One time, re­turn­ing from a hike to Paria and lead­ing the way with a com­pan­ion, we stepped over what looked like a squashed bread­fruit on the ground un­til it be­gan to move and turned out to be a coiled map­pipire tak­ing sun. Pan­de­mo­ni­um en­sued, women and men, scal­ing trees and so on.

There seem to be more bread­fruit trees up the is­lands. Grena­da, Bar­ba­dos and es­pe­cial­ly St Vin­cent. Bread­fruit was brought to the Caribbean by the Eu­ro­peans as cheap food for their slaves but it nev­er seems to have re­al­ly caught on. Food for slaves, you see. Yet, the sight of so many tow­er­ing, green trees filled with free, tasty food nev­er fails to de­light me. When the break­down comes, the ba­bies will have some­thing to eat.

It was fas­ci­nat­ing to read in last week’s Sun­day Guardian about a group, “Made in TT” whose mot­to is “Plant a tree, Eat for free”. Con­cerned about our food im­port bill, $6 bil­lion a year and ris­ing, they pro­pose to plant 1,000 bread­fruit trees through­out T&T. A bread­fruit tree can live up to 50 years, thrives on any type of soil and needs lit­tle care. Af­ter five years a ma­ture tree pro­duces up to 300 fruit a year. It’s lo­cal, it’s nu­tri­tious, it’s ours. We could do worse.