Food of love

Modern Britain scratches its head over children who are overfed, not underfed, while guilt-ridden mothers stand accused of feeding children badly even if they are not obese. These are not insignificant troubles since childhood obesity is set to cost the NHS many millions in years to come. But as a new exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London will show, infant and child nutrition is not a new science and the challenge of nurturing, not least keeping children alive before the age of five, was taken just as seriously two centuries ago as it is now.

Feeding the 400 is the first show at the museum, built on the site of the former Foundling Hospital (established in 1739, and closed in 1954), to examine how the many young boys and girls in the hospital were nourished. The place itself was established to house, feed and educate unwanted, mostly illegitimate, children who had been left there as babies. At one point nearly 800 lived under its wing.

Yet as the exhibition will show, the Foundling Hospital took a great deal of care with the welfare of the children and was a very different place from the workhouses (and gruel) that would inspire Dickens’s Oliver Twist. The exhibition’s curator Jane Levi worked from a vast number of documents, images and also recordings made with children in the 20th century, describing the latter as an extraordinary, must-visit-to-hear archive.

‘The fair number of records show that it was run by a typical bureaucracy who wrote down every detail,’ says Levi. ‘The records cover the full 200-year history of the Foundling Hospital, describing everything from infant feeding to older children. We can see on a daily or weekly basis what was ordered, what arrived, how much was spent and can also see the diet tables,’ she adds.