At first I thought I’d been punk’d. Or redirected to The Onion. Or…is it April Fools? I mean, this has to be a joke, right?
Bizarrely, no. Not a joke. That’s a picture of Nestle’s BabyNes machine — an expensive pod-coffee-type thing that makes single servings of baby formula from twee little capsules. It launched last May in Switzerland (where it is priced at the equivalent of $297), but oh, DON’T YOU WORRY, it’ll probably be on this side of the pond by 2012.
BabyNes offers single-serve formulas for infants and young children up to the age of three years. The composition of the six consecutive formulas meets the evolving nutritional needs in the first three years of life: four formulas in the first year, and one formula for each of the following two years. The customised composition of these products is tailored to suit the growth pattern in early life and the baby’s changing nutritional needs, while taking into account the steady introduction of solid food into the infant’s diet.
Coupleathings, right off the bat: The extraneous amount of plastic packaging here makes my eyelid twitch. And those capsules? Are $2.40 EACH. Holy shit. And your baby doesn’t need formula for three years. You can switch to boring old regular non-fancy milk at 12 months, and while it doesn’t come in handy single-serving $2.40 capsules, you CAN, in fact, customize the amount you pour from the container, into any cup-like vessel of your choosing. But of course, once you’ve ponied up close to $300 for a fancy appliance, you probably want to “get your money’s worth” by continuing to use it…and continuing to buy expensive and completely non-necessary formula for your snowflake’s “evolving nutritional needs.”
Also:
Nestlé supports exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of an infant’s life, in line with World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendations, and continued breastfeeding thereafter for as long as possible. For babies who are not breastfed, Nestlé provides high-quality breast milk substitutes, such as BabyNes.
Oh, shut up.
R2D2 would like to feed your baby!
I’ve used my fair share of formula—my oldest drank it exclusively from about five months on, once mah boobs finally up and gave out after returning to work—so I’m not here to rail against the existence of the pricey powdered stuff, either used occasionally or all the time or WHATEVER YOU NEED. But…really? That giant fancy thing just to avoid pouring water and a scoop of formula into a bottle? Or buying the occasional bottle of the ready-to-drink kind for when you’re rushed or half-asleep? Hell, my first order of bottle business was to get my kids to accept formula at any damn temperature—by their first birthdays they were drinking it straight from the fridge, at which point I unceremoniously switched them to milk in a cup.
But I suppose I was simply not paying enough attention to “suit(ing) the growth pattern in early life and the baby’s changing nutritional needs” by providing them with a “customised composition” of powdered frankenmilk. I’m sorry, babies! You were raised in a different era by neanderthals who remembered a time when you couldn’t pause the teevee.
About Amy Corbett Storch
