What would you like for your dinner today? How about a tiny amount of low grade fruit & veg, lots of water, plenty of refined starch, arsenic & some pesticides?
Well, that’s what it seems you get in baby food jars!
I’m totally ashamed to say that for a short period of Lil Misses life I actually fed her some of this. Which is what I now realise to be, tantamount to baby junk food.
The most shameful bit is me being completely ignorant and very naive as to what these jars of baby food contained.
When Lil Man was weaned I proudly steamed, boiled & puréed lots of different types of veg, mushed fruit & gave him the best diet I could. We then went on to do a combination of baby led weaning & mushy food.
I think he only ever attempted a baby food jar once in his lifetime & rejected it.
Clever boy.
Unfortunately, Lil Miss drew the short straw. She arrived when Lil Man was 14 months old & rather a handful. By the time she was weaning he was an energetic, tantrummy 2 year old & I had limited time to bring out the food processor and the tiny food cubes & start the pureeing process. I tried, but failed miserably.
This meant that the poor mite ended up with jars of baby food. I even read the labels & thought they couldn’t possibly be that bad otherwise they’d have all sorts of nasty numbers on the ingredients. I knew they were second best to me making everything from scratch for her, but I just could find the time to do it.
How I wish I had MADE the time now. How I wish my fridge had been full of jars like in the photo above (that’s not my homemade baby food btw, mine never looked that good!)
You see, I’ve just stumbled across this very eye opening post, the truth about baby food jars. I know it was written a few months ago, but the sentiment is still the same. I doubt much has changed in the baby food industry since.
And now I feel very very ashamed.
I also feel glad that we didn’t do it for long, the cost started to spiral & it became apparent that she preferred what we were eating (not that I can blame her at all!!!) so we moved onto baby led weaning.
Thank. God.
How great is hindsight?
No wonder all these babies spit it right back out again!
Anyway, the moral of the story is, if you are thinking of feeding your baby jars of baby food, please don’t. Spend 2 mins mushing up a banana instead of spending your money on this crap & filling up your little one with the baby world equivalent of big mac and fries!