November 20th, 2008
When Jeanne Wallace’s two daughters woke up from their nap the other day – the oldest girl is 3 ½, and the younger one 23 months – they ate radishes for their afternoon snack. Each girl happily ate ten radishes – washed, raw and fresh from their mother’s garden. It was a typical of their tastes – both the children love vegetables, and their favorites are broccoli and cauliflower. They didn’t even want any salad dressing.
Wallace, who lives in Austin, Texas, credits her young daughters’ healthy eating habits to the fact that she made her own baby food for them. Wallace ate many nutritious foods during her pregnancy and while breastfeeding, and making her own baby food for the girls when they were infants seemed to be the natural next step, she said.
When you make your own baby food, “you know exactly what’s in there,” Wallace said. “You can make the texture more varied than with store-bought baby food. When the texture is more varied it helps encourage them to broaden their palates, so they’re not disgusted by things that aren’t buttery smooth.”
Wallace also liked that she knew her homemade food was organic (she buys and grows organic fruits and vegetables), high in fiber, and free from sweeteners or filler.
It also cost less than buying baby food from the store. (A bonus: The girls, pictured, are garden savvy.)
With Americans increasingly aware of the benefits of organic food, and in these perilous economic times also more conscious of their spending, making your own baby food is an increasingly popular choice for parents of infants.
Maggie Meade is the founder and editor of www.wholesomebabyfood.com, based in Derry, New Hampshire. She has been running her site since September of 2003, reaching more than 1 million unique visitors every month, from all over the United States and from many different countries. With the economy slowing down, visits to her site have risen.
The biggest reasons parents choose to make their own baby food, she said, are cost, and concern for their children.
“People want to know what they are feeding their babies,” Meade said. “Also, it’s just so green. That’s very true, because you know everything that’s in it.”
Meade started the site when her twin boys, now 6, were ten months old. Her older son is 19 and she made his baby food.
“Back then (in the late 1980s) people would say, are you some kind of hippie or something?” Meade recalls. “But I was not going to spend extra money buying jarred baby food. It was a little scary at first but it worked out well.”
Although there is growing awareness of how freshly made food is more healthy than store-bought processed foods, Meade says she still receives many emails from parents whose own parents or grandparents disapprove of cooking baby’s food from scratch.
“The emails say, my mom says it’s not as healthy as the jarred kind, or my father-in-law says it doesn’t have the same amount of nutrients,” Meade said. On the contrary, she said, homemade baby food uses the freshest ingredients, is filled with nutrients, and baby generally eats the food the same day or week it was prepared.
“At the store, the jars of baby food there are probably older than your baby,” Meade said.
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