We have decided to make our own baby food for Little Bear for several obvious reasons:
1) Saving money! The cost of baby food at the store is outrageous! I saw a very (and I mean VERY) small jar of mashed sweet potato for $1.00. I could buy 2 whole, organic sweet potatoes for about the same price!
2) Waste reduction. Buying all those tiny glass bottles with metal lids just seems like one more thing to have to recycle. And while they might be recyclable, the process of recycling still takes a toll on the environment. Better to reduce!
3) Nutrition. By making our own foods we know exactly what is (and more importantly, what is not) going into Little Bear's body. So many foods require heavy processing and preservatives to maintain a long shelf life. By making our own foods, we know that the ingredients are fresh - with no additives!
4) It's easy! While this is not the driving factor behind making our own baby food, it's a nice bonus that it is SO easy! More on that below ...
We mash Little Bear's foods in a BabySteps Hand Crank Food Mill. It cost us about $10 online. You can also find them at Whole Foods and other natural grocery stores for about the same price. There are all kinds of fancy baby food mills you can buy. One is call the Beaba Babycook Baby Food Maker. It cooks, grinds and warms. Seems a bit excessive to me, but if you have an extra $150 lying around, it might be worth it? Any sort of food mill/grinder will obviously work. I chose to buy the hand crank one because it is easy to wash and easy to pack up and take out of the house.
As of now we have introduced Little Bear to: avocado, sweet potato, banana, and pear. Her favorite so far is banana. The sweet potato is the only one I cook, and I do that by simply placing several sweet potatoes (in their skins) in the oven for about 45 minutes. When they are nice and squishy and soft, I take them out, skin them, mash them in the grinder, then separate them into an ice-cube tray to freeze. After they are frozen, I take out the sweet potato cubes and store them in a plastic bag in the freezer until ready to use. I set out one or two cubes in the fridge the night before and they are ready to go by the morning.
On most days, I feed Little Bear solids twice a day: mid-morning and in the evening. I usually mix 2 foods together at this point. Since she likes bananas so much, we are using that to mix with the less sweet avocado and sweet potato. She LOVES it.
When Little Bear was first starting foods, she would gag on the thick consistency of the mashed foods. Because of this, I added quite a bit of my own breast milk to the mash to make it very thin. This made it easier for Little Bear to swallow without gagging. Two weeks later, we no longer have to thin out the foods and she can take the thick mashed sweet potato and banana without any difficulty.
Here is a good link of foods to avoid with babies: Baby Foods to Avoid. I don't know how scientific it is, but most of what it says makes sense and reaffirms what I have heard in the past about avoiding wheat products, dairy, honey, etc.
The most important thing to remember (in my opinion) is that babies still need to continue to be breast-fed until 2 years of age if possible! The World Health Organization and La Leche League both recommend 6 months exclusive breastfeeding with continued breastfeeding with appropriate complimentary foods up to 2 years. If unable to breastfeed, still continue to give formula as it contains many important nutrients/fats in the right proportions that foods alone cannot provide at such a young ago.
