Japanese or American Infant Formula? Debates on Infant Feeding in Post–Korean War South Korea

Throughout history, raising children was never an easy undertaking. With the development of childrearing literature, consumer culture, and male-dominant childhood experts, questions of infant feeding became an important means of displacing women of multiple generations as experts of childrearing. In Cold War Korea, infant feeding paved the way for the growth of commercial childrearing literature, pediatric medical community, and the infant formula market. This paper examines how this triumvirate reshuffled the caretaker-infant relations in the midst of growing social and national concerns about children’s autonomy and freedom. The introduction of a new American infant formula in a market that was not only familiar but also highly regarded Japanese products allowed multiple racial logics to coexist and challenge each other, troubling our understanding of a bifurcated Cold War world along alliances. Through a race and gender-conscious reading of advertisements in local newspapers and childrearing materials, this paper demonstrates how the racialization of nursing babies enabled the eventual dominance of a certain American infant formula brand, followed by the new postcolonial nation-state’s nurturing of its own domestic dairy industry.