Baby Food

Montgomery Township police are investigating a possible product-tampering incident in which glass particles were discovered in a jar of baby food, police announced yesterday. Lt. Gordon Simes, of the Montgomery Township Police Department, said a Horsham Township woman, whom he would not identify, said she had purchased jars of baby food Jan. 18 from the Acme Market in the Montgomery Commons shopping center on Route 309, just north of Route 63. He said she noticed the glass while feeding her child from one of the jars on Monday.

Montgomery Township police are treating the discovery of glass in a jar of baby food on Monday as an isolated incident, rather than as part of more widespread product tampering, police said yesterday. Lt. Gordon Simes said the jar and its contents had been sent to the Food and Drug Administration for further analysis. The results will not be available for several weeks, he said. "There is no evidence to suggest that the jar was tampered with," Simes said. Simes identified the woman who made the complaint as Sharon Spence, 26, of the English Village Apartments, Horsham Township.

If you buy baby food at the supermarket, you're bringing home a product that is just as healthy as any baby food you could make at home, according to a recent health report. Home products sometimes contain more salt, sugar and additives than their commercial counterparts, the report, prepared by the American Council on Science and Health, stated. The report does not discourage parents from preparing baby food at home. But it does point out that parents are not sacrificing quality for the sake of convenience when they purchase commercial baby foods, said Elizabeth Whelan, executive director of the group.

A recent study contended that eating lots of fish didn't reduce the risk of heart attacks. Then the Center for Science in the Public Interest panned commercially prepared baby food. Finally, the National Heart Savers Association bought advertising space in 40 newspapers and commanded: "Don't drink 2 percent milk. " If this kind of news leaves you feeling confused and discouraged, come get a spoonful of reality: THE FISH ISSUE. One study does not refute an entire body of evidence.

Vincent Martorano is no baby. Not at 5-foot-5 and 190 pounds of muscle. Not with 11 years of weight lifting under his belt, years that have left him looking like a cross between a human-size cinder block and a scaled-down tugboat. That's why it's so surprising to hear the affable, ponytailed 24-year-old take a break from his daily workout at Hardbodies Gym in Lindenwold, to speak out, unashamed, about his love for Gerber's mashed bananas. "It's easy to digest and it's pure," he said, above the blare of rock music and the effortful grunts and shrieks of his fellow lifters.

H. J. Heinz Co. is a lot like a slow bottle of ketchup these days. Slam it on the table. Smack it. Pump it straight up and down. No matter what, after more than a decade of growth fed by fat price hikes, the 1990s have been slow-going for Heinz. As with other large food companies, sales of Heinz's big U.S. brands - Heinz ketchup, Star-Kist tuna, Ore-Ida potatoes, and 9-Lives cat food - have been hampered by mature markets just now staggering out of recession. Cheaper no-name brands remain a threat at home and abroad.

The timing couldn't have been better. Just as the film Baby Boom was bringing the idea of wholesome, homemade, "gourmet" baby food to the American consciousness, similar products were being readied for store shelves. The "Country Baby" applesauce "made in Vermont" by Diane Keaton's Baby Boom character may have been fictional, but Earth's Best and Simply Pure are not. They are the real thing - 100 percent organic, all-natural baby foods. Earth's Best was introduced in natural-food stores nationwide just one year ago and now sells in 1,500 such specialty markets as well as in supermarkets in New England, Upstate New York, northern New Jersey and Colorado and, via home delivery, through diaper services nationally.

Hey, baby, what's for dinner? Might be organically grown rice and lentils with a carrot-parsnip mix on the side and guava juice. Maybe even a papaya-pineapple dessert. In the $1 billion-a-year baby food industry, organic and Hispanic foods are among the newest items competing for pint-size palates. These consumers may not have much to say about the variety of foods available, but they do eat a lot of them - an average of 500 jars during the eight to 12 months that a child usually is fed prepared baby foods.

You could go to Wal-Mart today and buy a tube of Revlon lipstick for $6.47. Or you could wait until Saturday, drive to the Cowtown flea market near Woodstown and, at Nancy Bea's booth, buy a tube of Revlon for about $2. But don't wait until April 8 to save a few dollars. On that Wednesday, a law signed last month by Gov. Whitman will put Bea, of Elmer, who said she had been selling cosmetics at flea markets for the last 12 years, out of business. It would do the same to flea-market vendors selling baby food or any over-the-counter drugs marked with a date.

Swiss pharmaceuticals firm Sandoz Ltd. said yesterday it was buying Gerber Products Co. for $3.7 billion in cash - a surprisingly high bid that sent shares of the baby-food maker up 44 percent. The long-rumored takeover of Gerber came after a private auction process that left Sandoz ahead of its rivals with a bid that appeared to have sealed the U.S. company's fate. "You're not going to see someone else coming in and making a bid," said Dean Witter analyst David Adelman. "This price is going to deter anyone.

PITTSBURGH - Before the stock markets opened Thursday, Pittsburgh's world-famous ketchup maker, H.J. Heinz Co., announced that it had agreed to be acquired for $28 billion in cash and debt by an investment partnership between Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway and 3G Capital, owner of such well-known brands as Burger King and Budweiser. Heinz had been the subject of takeover rumors for years, as many thought it was a small enough and tempting enough player in the food business to be swallowed by another company.

I am not a homemade kind of gal. I'm not even a homemade kind of mom. While I admire the moms who paint their own furniture and sew their own diaper covers and regularly sit their kids down at the long beat-up farm table for craft time, it just ain't me. I make a mean brownie and a decent spaghetti sauce, but that's about as far as I'll usually go. But a couple of weeks ago, I was reading Jennifer Reese's inspiring book Make the Bread, Buy the...

Just a few short weeks ago, my daughter Mila, not yet 2, happily munched on tapas and demanded more flatbread with dip at Amada. She chowed down on grilled eggplant picked from Linvilla Orchards, and devoured pattypan squash from the Media Farmers Market. She also enjoyed eating shrimp and fish. I proudly thought I had a hearty - even adventurous - eater. But then, the other night, Mila opened her mouth to let a mass of chewed grapes fall out: "Mom - has skin. " Minutes before, she wouldn't touch her asparagus, which she usually inhales.

Like so many working mothers, Julie Hyland of Yardley treasures the moments she can spend with her 14-month-old daughter, Hanna, after day care and before bedtime. Hyland, deputy executive director of the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society in Philadelphia, says she spends few of those moments making baby food from scratch unless she can whirl it in a blender from foods already cooked for the family meal. Hanna, who was breast-fed, started eating cooked cereal and strained vegetables when she was about 6 months old. By her first birthday, she was making the transition to table foods, cut fruits, and toddler foods such as Gerber's Pasta Pick-ups.

A South Philadelphia man yesterday was sentenced to two years in prison for helping steal 3,618 cases of baby food and 570 Raleigh bicycles for the local Mafia. Robert Miller Sr., 61, of 20th Street near Snyder Avenue, who runs a private social club, the Santa Fe Club, on Hutchinson Street near McKean, was ordered by U.S. District Judge Charles R. Weiner to make restitution of $132,304.89 to CSX Railroad. The FBI recovered most of the stolen bikes and baby food, but the baby food, worth $126,483, couldn't be marketed because it had been stolen, said Assistant U.S. Attorney Zane D. Memeger, a case prosecutor.

To the consumer it's known as "hot stuff. " To the distributor it's called "swag. " But yesterday, federal investigators targeting reputed mob boss Joseph "Skinny Joey" Merlino and four of his top associates attached a different name to the truckloads of televisions, bicycles, baby formula, women's sweatsuits, toy trains and electrical ceiling fans that were allegedly the stock in trade of a South Philadelphia stolen property ring. The feds called it "evidence. " The U.S. Attorney's Office announced the arrest of Merlino and four other reputed mobsters yesterday morning on racketeering and conspiracy charges in connection with what they allege was a million-dollar stolen property ring operating in South Philadelphia.

They held a "Lactation Celebration" in the nation's capital last week, and one mother told this story: On a visit to one of the Smithsonian museums, Noel Marie Taylor was asked to leave when she tried to breast-feed her baby. The reason? No food or drink was allowed on the premises. It sounds suspiciously like a comedy sketch, but many women trying to breast-feed their children say they have been asked to leave the U.S. Capitol and national parks. Reasons given included the old standby: Even discreet breast-feeding offends the tender sensibilities of others.

New Jersey's flea-market vendors, blindsided recently by a new law that could have put some of them out of business, were breathing easier yesterday. Legislators who wrote the law after being prodded by lobbyists for the food industry and retail merchants are saying now they will undo their work. State Sen. Joseph M. Kyrillos Jr. (R., Monmouth), one of the sponsors, said he and his colleagues had "not heard a peep" from the vendors before they sent a bill to Gov. Whitman to outlaw the sale at flea markets of baby food, cosmetics and dated non-prescription drugs.

You could go to Wal-Mart today and buy a tube of Revlon lipstick for $6.47. Or you could wait until Saturday, drive to the Cowtown flea market near Woodstown and, at Nancy Bea's booth, buy a tube of Revlon for about $2. But don't wait until April 8 to save a few dollars. On that Wednesday, a law signed last month by Gov. Whitman will put Bea, of Elmer, who said she had been selling cosmetics at flea markets for the last 12 years, out of business. It would do the same to flea-market vendors selling baby food or any over-the-counter drugs marked with a date.

A recent study contended that eating lots of fish didn't reduce the risk of heart attacks. Then the Center for Science in the Public Interest panned commercially prepared baby food. Finally, the National Heart Savers Association bought advertising space in 40 newspapers and commanded: "Don't drink 2 percent milk. " If this kind of news leaves you feeling confused and discouraged, come get a spoonful of reality: THE FISH ISSUE. One study does not refute an entire body of evidence.