Instead of buying off the shelf, a growing group of parents is opting to make their own. It’s actually a return to tradition. Because before Gerber launched its jars of pureed peas in the 1920s, moms filled the role of executive chef to the bottle set.
Nicole Duncan, a Brunswick mother of three, says she turned to her own mother for advice when she decided to ditch the store bought food and go all homemade for her youngest daughter Keeli, who is 7 months. Using the same style of hand-cranked food grinder her mother used, Duncan is thrilled with the results.
“It’s much cheaper and it’s very convenient, because whatever we’re eating we just grind it up,” Duncan says. “And my older two like helping with it. Before I thought making baby food was a huge process with canning and stuff, but it’s not.”
Dr. Stephanie Phelps, the chair of the pediatrics department at Mid Coast Hospital in Brunswick, says her patients frequently ask about making their own baby food.
“Just because it’s in a jar people think there’s something different or better,” Phelps says. “But if you make it yourself, you can control what goes into it and it’s cheaper. It has a lot of benefits.”
Sensing the growing interest in all things natural, Mid Coast Hospital decided to pilot test a series of classes this fall with topics like infant massage and baby wearing. The class on making baby food attracted 45 people, including three dads.
“The response for the class seems overwhelming,” Phelps says. As a result, the hospital will repeat the classes in the new year.
3 moms, 3 different approaches
Michaela Cavallaro, a Portland-based writer and an instructor at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies, decided to give the make-your-own route a try after she had her first child, Skylar Cook, who’s now 18 months and eating solid food.
“We belong to a CSA (subscription farm) and buy a fair amount of organic fruits and vegetables, so it just made sense,” Cavallaro says. “If we’re not doing a lot of processed food, it made sense to do the same for our daughter. I started doing it exclusively, but that wasn’t practical for me. So we combined it with the Earth’s Best baby food.”
Cavallaro used her food processor to make Skylar’s chow until she was a year old. To keep it simple, she stuck with just one ingredient (such as sweet potatoes, squash, chicken or beef) and didn’t venture into combinations. The one mixture she did create was leafy greens with yogurt, which gave the pureed spinach or kale a much more baby-friendly texture.
A mother of three from Gorham, Terry Sands made her own food for her two youngest girls until they were each 8 months old. She used fresh veggies from her garden and store-bought organics, when she could get them. Sands used a simple process of steaming the vegetables and then pureeing them in her kitchen blender, using a strainer only when necessary.
“I couldn’t do peas, because it was too time-consuming, because you have to remove the skins,” says Sands, who is a vegetarian.
She found success with staples like green beans, beets, bananas and melons. After she made a batch, she would freeze the leftovers in ice cube trays for later use. Then all she’d need to do is pop the cubes in the microwave and baby dinner was served.
Duncan up in Brunswick says she doesn’t make her baby food ahead of time and freeze it. She prefers to use whatever she has on hand that day in the kitchen. Her first made-from-scratch foods were concocted from canned pears or peaches. Then she began to branch out, doing combos like cooked chicken with rice or ham, broccoli and rice.
“One thing I’ve noticed is if I want to do a meat it will be dry, so I add applesauce or ground up pears,” Duncan says and adds that breast milk is another good choice for moistening ground up meat.
Expert advice
Dr. Phelps says the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends broadening your baby’s diet beyond breast milk or formula around 6 months. Typically, parents begin with a watery baby cereal and then follow with pureed foods.
“We recommend veggies first and then fruits,” Phelps says, “because babies have a natural inclination to favor sweet foods. Every couple of days you can do something new. You should try one for a couple days to make sure the baby can tolerate it before moving on to something new.”
Between 6 and 9 months, Phelps says you can begin to try food combinations. At 9 months, parents can start introducing some cheeses, yogurts, meats and tofu. Because of the potential for allergies, Phelps says parents should wait until their kids are at least 1 year old before trying cow’s milk or eggs. Nuts shouldn’t be introduced before the child is 2.
For parents whose babies seem to spit out more than they eat, Phelps offers this advice: “It usually takes 10 to 12 tries for a baby to like something.”
And while all that wasted food may wear on some parents, at least you can console yourself that getting your baby to like brussels sprouts will take a lot less time than getting him to make the toilet his friend. (For that, you’re facing at least three to six months of bathroom fun.) Which makes a few weeks of spit up food seem like a dream, particularly when you didn’t have to go to the expense of buying it in a jar.