In the 1930's, Pablum, the first pre-cooked, dried baby food was sold in America. Pablum took its name from the Latin word pabulum, which meant "foodstuff" and was also used in medicine to refer to a passively absorbed source of nutrition. While Pablum contained vitamin D and thus helped to prevent rickets in an era in which child malnutrition was still widespread, ironically, the word pablum – undoubtedly influenced by the negative connotation of the word pabulum as well as the physical reality of a mushy, bland, rehydrated cereal – today means "trite, naive, or simplistic ideas or writings; intellectual pap."