The trademarked name is a contracted form of the Latin word pabulum, which means "foodstuff". The word "pablum" had long been used in botany and medicine to refer to nutrition or substances of which the nutritive elements are passively absorbed. In a broader sense, "pablum" can refer to something that is simplistic, bland, mushy, unappetizing, or infantile.
Pablum was developed in 1930 by Canadian pediatriciansFrederick Tisdall, Theodore Drake, and Alan Brown,[1] in collaboration with nutrition laboratory technician Ruth Herbert (all of the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto), along with Mead Johnson chemist Harry H. Engel.[2] At the time, breast-feeding had declined in the middle and upper classes, with the effect that the diets of babies were often deficient in essential elements. The cereal marked a breakthrough in nutritional science: it helped prevent rickets, a crippling childhood disease, by ensuring that children had sufficient vitamin D in their diet. From the bone meal, it had about 12 ppm fluorine,[4] which works out to about what pediatricians were prescribing about four decades later.
Although neither Pablum nor its biscuit predecessor[5] was the first food designed and sold specifically for babies, it was the first baby food to come precooked and thoroughly dried. The ease of preparation made Pablum successful in an era when infant malnutrition was still a major problem in industrialized countries.[6]
For a period of 25 years[when?], the Hospital for Sick Children and the Toronto Pediatric Foundation received a royalty payment on every package of Pablum sold. In 2005, the Pablum brand was acquired by the H. J. Heinz Company.[citation needed]
^Sarett, Herbert P. (1 September 1956). "Effect of Added Lysine on Growth of Rats Fed a Cereal and Milk Diet". The Journal of Nutrition. 60 (1): 129–135. doi:10.1093/jn/60.1.129. PMID13367900.