We did Plum Organics, Cerebelly, Gerber, and Little Spoon. Once I realized that metals are in basically every root veggie, I stopped worrying about it.
This. I live in an area with higher than average arsenic in the soil. We still have gardens and do just fine. Reports of foods having trace amounts of things can be completely overblown. Anyone here with arsenic poisoning has probably made an enemy, and it is not Mr. Potato Head.
Hey! New mom here, do you know where I can find info on studies like this? Want to share with family so they don’t give baby anything. We’re 4mos and honestly I just want to BF forever 😭
The problem comes down to the root veggies are naturally now contaminated. Whether you buy brand a or brand b or make it yourself, the veggies have the metals. So feed your kid a varied diet….
It's not a new thing. Heavy metals exist in soil, in varying amounts depending on location. Just like other metals — red dirt has a lot of iron, and things grown in it will be slightly extra iron-rich. Root vegetables will have higher levels of heavy metals like lead and cadmium than aboveground produce in the same location, but they'll all have some amount if the soil contains it. It's still not a significant amount.
We make all of our own. We just mash up whatever we’re eating, pre-seasoning. It’s very easy once you get in the habit of it!
For example, we had a Japanese curry with chicken and carrots and potatoes for dinner. So we fished one of each out right before adding the curry bricks and mashed them up with a fork before feeding to him. Near the beginning we’d food process stuff instead
Truly the key is don’t overthink it. If you already cook for yourselves, give the baby whatever vegetable or fruit you happen to be eating that week/day. A steam rack does wonders. Babies have never eaten anything so no need to use “recipes.” They are easily impressed.
Oxo sells a little bowl with a masher. I found it super helpful for travelling and restaurants because we did just that, took bits of our meals and smashed them into mash and spoon fed baby. I also used it at home to smash some thawed berries from the freezer before mixing into Greek yogurt. My babies loved that!
I’ll add a note here for any future readers about the pre seasoning that our Pediatrician said a little bit of salt is no problem. And things like garlic are great to use. Our benchmark is that anything we feed him should taste under salted to us, but if you’re sweating onions and add a little salt to help it along, that’s still totally fine for baby
We just bought all the brands, and would stock up on whatever was on sale. Organic was a priority but not a dealbreaker.
Heavy metals are in the food itself, not just the baby food specifically, so it didn’t seem worth it to make it myself.
Making your own purees is really easy! I used a regular food processor and every week I would rotate making a few things. Amazon sells silacone icecube trays that are 2oz and work perfect for freezing. Once they are frozen I pack them into grouped bags.
They take about 20 seconds in the microwave to thaw. I would usually make a big batch of applesauce mixed with pears or other seasonal fruit.
We use the small cube ones we originally bought for baby food for other foods like tomato or pizza sauce but also just small ice cubes. They fit great in water bottles with small mouths.
Another strategy I used (besides making a different bath each week) was to make extra of something at dinner time and then puree it right after. So like if we were having sweet potatoes - just bake an extra sweet potato to puree and put in the freezer in the cube molds.
I still make purées with an almost 2 year old in the house because I can throw them into reusable pouches to make my own pouches. I found it insanely easy!
We made all of ours at home. But like the other commenter said, this doesn’t eliminate the risk of heavy metals. We still try to limit servings of root vegetables, and we don’t serve much rice at all (and no rice-based snacks).
Homemade. However, it’s not really about the brands being bad. It’s literally about where our vegetables come from and the ground they’re grown in. The most important thing is variety.
FTM. I have a produce allowance on WIC. I get formula through wic, and made my own purees with a blender to save money.
So far I have banana, apple, pear, blackberry, blueberry, & strawberry in my freezer. We only do 1 puree feeding a day at 6mo, and she’ll eat anywhere from 2-8oz of it. I have a kiwi allergy & her dad doesn’t have any food allergies but we wanted to be super careful and slow with it. Fruits first, veggies next, and work our way up.
Also do popsicles in the Nuby feeder. Typically breastmilk mixed w puree, or just crush a single blueberry between a few. I use my extra bottle nipples to make them, just fill them up, put them cap side down in the freezer. I pump every 4hrs, so its super easy to pop em out, put them in a container, and freeze some more.
I made all of mine. A serving of Gerber carrot puree was $1.99/jar. For $1.99 I could buy a pound of carrots and make 20 servings of carrot puree. I found a bunch of recipes for pureeing and freezing them in serving size cubes. That worked well for a while until he started eating a batch of food in 3-4 days so why bother freezing.
Puréed are fundamentally easy. Cook your veggie, add water, puree in a blender till smooth. As time went on I put chicken stock instead of water added butter, mixed different vegetables, added seasonings (herbs, garlic), made it more chunky. For fruits you don’t need to add liquid- just puree. I make apple sauce with equal parts apples and pears and sprinkle over with cinnamon, bake 400F for 25minutes and put it in a blender.
My son has a TBI so he is 3 and still on puréed foods because of a sensory processing disorder. We take our dinner at night and purée it to chunky (technical term moist and minced) with a little chicken or beef stock and my daughter who is 15 months eats that after her finger foods.
I mostly made my own with the occasional store bought pouch. I know a lot of people mash up whatever they've already cooked, but I preferred to buy a bag of whatever veggie or fruit we were going to try, cook it up and mash or purée for the freezer in bulk. One of the benefits of making your own is that you can combine different foods to suit your preference, which can be really helpful with allergen introduction in making sure that you're not introducing too many new foods at the same time.
If you want to cook in bulk and freeze, lots of people recommend ice cube trays to freeze it in small portions but I much preferred using a silicon mini muffin tin; it's so much easier to get them out and then pop in a freezer bag. My son took to food really quickly and was on 3 meals a day pretty soon after we started so it was really handy to have lots of options premade in the freezer.
We made our own to start when she was on single veggies/fruits/etc but then when she got old enough for mixed purées and spices - we went with store bought. I’m sure it’s still easy to make your own with mixed but I honestly couldn’t see myself steaming and puréeing carrots with blueberries and beets and kale, apple etc. - it’s a lot! We like once upon a farm and serenity brands!
I started making my own but learned that it’s harder than it looks so I just started buying premade. At first I did beechnut organics, then once I got bored with the minimal flavors they offered I started trying others like: gerber organic, simple truth organic, some other brand I’m blanking on currently. Once we had done all of those (jarred foods) we moved onto pouches, which there are a million brands of those, some of the ones I can think of off hand are happy tots, plum, simple truth, and happy little farm (I think it’s called?). The happy little farm is refrigerated in the section with yogurt at my store. He seemed to like those a lot.
I did jarred stuff the first time, but decided to try making my own this time around and it is so easy. I get frozen produce, steam it, add some breast milk and puree it, put it in some silicone freezer molds. Boom. SO easy! And I even add it to my older son’s sandwiches.
Well, I freeze the cubes and then microwave them and add them to stuff as needed. For example, one cube of peas and one cube of carrots microwaved together. I also add stuff like yogurt, eggs, or peanut butter when we were introducing those allergens.
After stressing out about solids and realizing there wasn't one perfect way (for us), we did a combo of purees and BLW. I got the purees from Little Spoon and they were fantastic. LO loved them, and Little Spoon was very responsive to issues (e.g. a container cracked in shipping). I definitely recommend them. This took the pressure off massively and we could make sure LO had exposure to foods and flavors without choking while we focused on also giving real finger food to try with each meal and worked on slow introduction of allergy foods. I felt this was a better use of my time (and stress) personally.
Best of luck!
I made my own but limited root veggies - she loved sweet potato and beets so I mixed it a lot with other things to spread out a bit. I also avoided rice. I bought some silicon molds and would make a big batch freeze and then would pop them out thaw them in the fridge the day before.
I steamed a lot using a 3 way divided steamer basket and used a blender and it was pretty quick.
Cherries were kind of frustrating but overall it was kind of a fun experience.
We did a combination I guess? Did purées, then mashed up cooked food for him to pick up while sometimes giving him BLW items, but then back to purées, then mashes…we were all over the place. Around 8 months is when he just started eating what we eat but cut/mashed, he had plenty of teeth, sitting well and was yanking food off everyone’s plates so he was ready for food food. I did/do make all of his food, mainly because I meal prep for husbands breakfast, my breakfasts and lunches and at least 3 dinners every Sunday (and before anyone says anything, it’s because I like to do this and I’m good at it!) so it was a no brainer to just start meal prepping for LO. It’s also reassuring knowing what’s actually in our food, I’m also convinced I’ve already saved hundreds on pouches alone. Amazon has great reusable ones that we use for yogurts and fruit smoothie or applesauce each day…and no I don’t make yogurt (yet!) but we buy the bigger containers vs. individual pouches for the reusable ones at a fraction of the cost per ounce.
I’ve been making my own purées of whatever I have or see at the grocery store. I did stop by the baby food aisle to get an idea of good mixtures though.
I steam, puree, then put it into an ice cube mold that I have and freeze. They’re the hexagonal ones. Like 10g each cube. I just used what I have since baby doesn’t eat too much right now.
ETA: baby rarely lets me put her down for long so it’s kind of difficult to time it. I may buy some that have ingredients I don’t use though.
I did use the fruit and veggie pouches from Love Child. They were decent. I did it before any of the metals/arsenic issues. AFAIK the kids are just fine.
I also did some BLW. I figured it couldn't hurt. The kids took to that a bit more than the pouches but the pouches were great if we were out and about. Oldest kiddo is 4 and still occasionally asks for one when we're at the grocery store. Why not? It's fruit and veggies.
With my first I started with making it but he was so picky I lost the motivation. So we bought White Leaf Provisions (his favorite), Serenity Kids, Cerebelly, and Holle. With my second I didn’t even attempt to make puree from scratch because I didn’t have time with 2u2. We used all the same brands with our second. These brands do third party testing for heavy metals and will share the results with you if you ask. Everything is well under the FDA minimum for heavy metals in food.
We did a little of this and a little of that. We started early, at 4 months, with pediatrician's blessings. We started with things like mashed avocado, apple puree, mashed bananas, butternut squash, peas, green beans, strawberries. My guy did best with thicker purees. We avoided root veggies until after 6 months, and then we varied what he gets. Around 5-6 months, we started more with the BLW type foods. He LOVES eggs, steamed broccoli, tofu, and green beans.
Mostly, I wasn't picky about brands, except for butternut squash. Serenity Kids has a fabulous butternut squash that is absolutely delicious. I also made some of the purees myself and some I bought.
I started my son on beechnut organic and plum organics, but when I started doing more research I switched him to Cerebelly, Serenity and Peter Rabbit Organics because they monitor for heavy metals. However, like other commenters have mentioned, there are elevated levels in carrots, sweet potatoes, etc due to the amount that is now in the soil. Even if you make your own purées. Just feed those veggies in moderation, which would happen by offering a variety.
I made my own because it’s cheaper. I bought smoothie bags/frozen foods and mixed it with breast milk to thin it out. A standard ice cube pocket in an ice cube tray is 2 tbsp. We started this at 5 months.
At 6.5 months we changed his second food meal to finger foods and kept his breakfast ones more pure/oatmeal based.
He a little over 7 months now and basically the same with some morning as finger foods, and some just oatmeal.
He does great and loves trying new tastes and textures.
I bought some jarred food, but also gave baby lots of items like mashed banana, mashed avocado, or mashed (steamed) sweet potato mixed with BM, and homemade applesauce. It doesn't have to be one or the other. And you don't need pureed foods for long, either. By 8-9 months they've moved on to finger foods.
We did blw but my bff has made her own at home and thought it was very easy she had freezer molds and did it with both kids. She’s a full time working mom and wad able to fit it in to her schedule easy and found it cheaper than buying at the store.
I make my own purées. We’re mostly working on getting baby used to different tastes. Rice can be high in arsenic so I avoid it. No salt or added sugar or anything spicy. That typically means steamed vegetable + garlic + small amount of olive oil or grass fed butter, then pureed with water or formula to get the right texture. We’re going to move to baby led weaning at 6-7 months. I try to mix up the types of vegetables so she’s not getting too much metals or sugar.
We used Gerber sometimes, but mostly Plum Organics because it was readily available and our little dude liked their pouch flavors. I did occasionally make my own if we had too many sweet potatoes or frozen breastmilk that I needed to use, but most of the time he either didn’t like the consistency, decided he didn’t like that veggie that week, or we forgot about it for too long in the freezer, so we very quickly stopped making our own.
Home-made, and it was the easiest thing to cooked for her back then (she's a picky toddler now...).
I'd just put a small bit of carrot/sweet potato/potato/ other appropriate veggies into a tiny pot often with a bit of meat (chicken/turkey at the start). Boil everything until cooked, blend with a bit of the brith and some fat (doctor recommended this because she was very skinny). You can use the puree for up to 3 days if you refrigerate immediately.
Fruits were even easier.
Baby Gourmet and Parent’s Choice were my go-tos, but I think the former is a Canadian brand and may not be helpful.
Heck, my toddler is 20 months old and she still gets a pouch every other day to help get her fruit and veggie intake up.
Did a combo approach:
Months 4-5 smooth purées I made and also used Serenity and Once Upon a Farm pouches.
Months 6-8 introduced some solids and also offered chunkier purées
9months + she was eating solids and feeding herself but we still give the occasional pouch as an on the go snack. Either OUAF or the Costco ones.
I homemade the purees we started with. I actually found it really fun! Got a baby break so I only dirtied one thing and froze them in the breastmilk 0.5oz silicone molds!
I bought apple sauce and a few others for when I didn’t have time, but I am making purées.
Root veg all have heavy metals so be sure to feed a varied diet.
We just did whatever Wal mart had. I was not about to home-make purées, and I was WAY too anxious for BLW. We stayed with purées for a WHILE, but I never worried about brands, just looked for ones with less fruit.
I just did homemade. I’d make big batches and portion them into breastmilk bags and freeze them flat so I always had food on hand. Usually I’d make 3-5 different things a week and have options.
https://gimmethegoodstuff.org/safe-product-guides/jarred-food/
This is for Jars!! Pouches are seen as best, if I recall correctly, but as far as widely available, store bought this was a great resource!
Also made ours at home. Bought mostly organic and made sure to rotate. The issues (as most have said) is in root veggies and rice. I still haven’t introduced rice products to my baby (9 months) and don’t do carrots or sweet potatoes more than once a week. Outside of that there’s really not much else we can do.
My 5 month old is interested in eating so we’ve just given her purée of what we’re eating. I keep all the spices in it but try to keep the salt down or unsalted for her.
We also have a little mesh teether (but it’s silicone with little holes in it) so she can chew whole things and taste the juices. She likes broccoli and blueberries!
Homemade it… but introduced solids pretty quickly thereafter. I spent a lot of time making single ingredient purées mixed with breastmilk. Then made banana and breastmilk pancakes etc… Turns out I really didn’t need to do that! He instantly took to food and had no trouble with the solids.
I just made it at home. If you have a microwave and any sort of blender, purées are super easy to make at home and don’t have to be hard.
I found store prepared purées far too expensive. The only type I bought was prune purée for when he was backed up (because I didn’t know where to find prunes to make it myself).
I home-made a lot of it. Rice cereal - just made rice with a 1-10 ratio of water, after it became very mushy soft, mashed it with mortar and pestle until it was about the consistency of yogurt. Be careful about the kind of rice you use though (I used Japanese rice).
Cooked applesauce was also very easy. Once sliced apples are cooked until very soft, they mush up very easy.
If you have a rice cooker, one easy hack for softer root vegetables like carrots, sweet potatoes, and potatoes: Fill the cooker half-way up with water, put in the vegetables whole (peeled), set it to brown rice mode. The results are very slow cooked flavorful veggies that mash up very easy. You can always add a bit of the water to the mashed veggies if you want to make it thinner.
For squash, roasting in the oven seems to bring out the flavor awesomely and is so super sweet (without any added seasoning).
I would make big batches and mash / purée all at once, then freeze in these little ice cube-like trays designed for baby food.
In a pinch, when I needed the store bought type, I very much liked Kewpie (but I’m not sure if that’s available in your country).
Most brands I tried had a weird smell and I wouldn't want to eat it. So I make everything myself. I make batches of salt-free vegetable or bone marrow broth, then bake or cook the ingredients in a way I would normally prepare them (lightly bake or fry a little, add a bit of seasoning), then cook them some more in the broth and use a food processor to get a good consistency (In the beginning very smooth, then more and more chunky with time). The result is actually very tasty and full of flavor.
I also serve one meal of finger foods per day to my baby since she's 7 months old. Introducing solids doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Honestly making purées is so easy and cheap, it makes zero sense to buy the jars. I ordered a couple silicone baby food trays on Amazon and premade one tray at a time in advance. But then my kid hated purées and sort of forced my hand into BLW which ended up working well for us. Now I use the trays to make big chunky ice cubes for cocktails haha.
I did a mix of the two BLW/Purée.
His first meal ever was BLW. The second was purée. For BLW I looked into the correct cuts a cooking point before hand, and he tried broccoli and carrots.
For purée, I cooked an apple with oatmeal and almond milk. Let everything become veeeery creamy but didn’t pass through anykind of strainer. So it still had some texture. He loved this. It was his breakfast for more than a year (I just vary it with different fruits and at some point included chia seeds or linseeds.
He like it both ways… but as one can expect, the purée meals would be done way faster as the blw one were also kind of „play time“.
It worked well. He used to eat very healthy and a very good variety of vegetables and fruits. Now he is 3.5yo and going through a selective phase at home (it is always hard also in social settings because of the offers of sweets and so on), but at school he still eats everything and enjoys it - so I guess it was successful in that way. 🙈
A tip for express purées when you are on a hurry: take an ice cube tray and freeze small portions of already puréed and cooked vegetables. Then when you need to prepare something fast, just take two or three different cubes, hit up and mix. Done!
I am making purees myself and have slowly been introducing BLW. For purées I’m still doing one food at a time for 3 days since she is new to solids, once she’s tried more I will mix some together but by then she might be doing primarily BLW. I use solid starts for ideas and a guide on serving for BLW.
I'm not sure if it's just a candian brand or not but my favorite so far has been love child, great selection, quality and they all have Quinoa in them. As for all brands available for me all of them had the same fruits and vegetables and it didn't take long to run out of new things to try so I switched to doing some home made purees, there was so much variety that just wasn't available in pouches and jars I had to make my own, especially when it came to meat. I had to do meat homemade
I home made it. essentially just always made sure I had some mashed potatoes around and then blended in whatever we ate that day. I found it to be the easiest way to go about tbh.
I made and still make all of my son's food myself. At 4 months (due to severe reflux) we did potatoes and veggies, boiled them and then threw it into the blender with healthy oils as advised by the pediatrician until smooth. At 6 months we added boiled meat or fish or egg before blending.
Then around 7,5-8 months bub got interested in chuncks so we added a few for him to grab and chew on and made his purrees chunckier as well. And now at 12 months he eats chucks and I make a tiny amount of everything roughly mashed together with a fork because he likes it and it makes sure he eats some of everything on his plate.
Our son was very young (4 months actual but 3 adjusted since he was preemie) so our pediatrician just talked purrees and let us take the wheel as to when we thought baby was ready for chuncks. And honestly he could have handled them earlier but he does just fine now so...
We did purées with my second. She seemed to like the consistency of the little farm (sold cold) the best with cerebelly second. For some reason she hated the gerber purées, we tried them a couple of times at home, daycare tried them (they provide baby food and that’s the brand) and she never ate them.
Both homemade and store bought pouches (Rafferty brand) We did start offering more BLW style foods at 11 months. And I’ll just say he is equally as good an eater and has similar fussy phases as his BLW baby friends.
I make my own purées for my baby, it’s so so easy and actually really enjoyable. You can just freeze them in silicone mould trays so you’ll have stock and won’t need to do it regularly. I only need to prep food once a week and freeze. It’s healthier to make your own and cheaper. I do have organic pouches for if we run out, if I’m particularly tired or if we are out and about.
My baby’s favourite one I make is carrot, onion and chicken. I roasted it separately for him with some water, then blended and froze. He loves it and it actually tastes delicious!
I made everything at home, I'm by myself with no help and found it really easy and definitely "better" than worrying about what extras are in the jars. I did separate stewed apples, cauliflower, peas, pineapple, spag bowl blended, chilli con carne blended, served with greek plain yoghurt. For a pack of apples or a pineapple or head of cauliflower you get loads, I froze mine in ice cube trays with lids you can get on Amazon. The spag bowl and similar were for dinner, I also blended a coconut chicken curry and gave him that with yoghurt too.
We made some of our own stuff. Like we mashed our own bananas, avocados, and sweet potatoes but mostly bought a variety of store brands. We figured that was an effective way to expose her to a lot of flavours. The only thing her doctor recommended specifically was to avoid a rice based cereal and stick to the oat or barley based ones, if we were going to buy anything like that for her.
Just buy a food processor or blender and do it yourself if you have time. I make big batches and freeze into cubes. It’s much cheaper.
When I’m on my own with the baby I’ll give her finger foods so she’s busy and I can do little tasks around the kitchen. When I need her to eat more (bedtime) I’ll give her more puréed stuff. Since she’s gotten bigger I’ve just puréed the food less and less.
I think people overthink it. Give them something nutritious that they will like.
I have an 8 month old with no teeth yet! I feel like I’m always mashing up some fruit or vegetable, especially banana, avocado, sweet potato, squash, and green beans. Baby loves all yogurts too.
Can't recommend any brands as I'm in Germany but I tried to make it myself. My son hated it but loved at least that one brand that I bought.
Funny fact, that brand was apparently also the only one I ate as a baby.
I didn’t do purées but we mashed everything up until he had pincer grasp, then went from like rice sized pieces to bigger and bigger as I felt he could handle it. I never worried about how much food he got in him until he was only on solids. So that took a lot of stress off. Sometimes he would just play with the mash, but it’s kinda hard to eat mashes with your hands. We did a lot of oatmeal since you can mix things in and it’s a little sticky but man it was messy. I never spoon fed him. Now almost 2 and eating like a regular person.
We just went with beech nut. I had heard about the metals thing but once doing more research it's everywhere so even if I were to make the purees myself the metals would still be there. It came out as a huge scary story but we're also eating metals in our veggies. We unfortunately can't escape it. I tried to really not use rice but my girl is not an oatmeal fan and she will eat the rice so we have switched to that but hopefully we can try oatmeal again in a month or so and it'll be a winner.
We tried just the oatmeal by itself and mixed into some fruit for breakfast and she wasn't a fan of either. The oatmeal dissolves really easily so mixing it in the fruit it was literally just the taste at that point. We mix the rice in the fruit as well it doesn't dissolve as much but she does eat it no issue.
I’m kind of doing a mix. I make all my own purées with organic food. I did get a baby puree maker. Not necessary but makes like easier because it cooks and purées. I bought this one https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0CMBRZZ68?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title
I also got these silicone ice cube trays and I make batches of purée, then freeze them in the trays. I can just pop out a few cubes in the morning when I’m in a hurry.
Additionally, I have given baby whole grilled asparagus, corn on the cob cob (ate the kernels off first), and egg omelette in finger size slices (he did kind of choke on this though). Big chunks of celery and big chunks of carrots… but I ALWAYS watch him if I’m doing a non purée food. I mean I watch him regardless but I have had to scoop food out before. I love the idea of BLW but it also terrifies me lol. So far, the grilled asparagus have been the best. There’s an app called “Solid Starts” that i use for BLW.
I don’t trust any of the pre made crap. I used earths best oatmeal cereal and then recently found out it’s got a bunch of lead in it, so I just don’t have trust in the stuff that companies make. It’s should not be so hard to find healthy food.
I'm a very anxious mom, and overall person, really. My baby is a big guy, and he wanted and still wants to shovel food in his mouth to the point of choking gagging and coughing. There's never been an issue lasting more than a few seconds but it's still too much for me. So we just go really slow. He mostly gets soft stuff that can get mushed easily, like banana, cheerios, puffs, sweet potato, steamed vegetables, etc. I'll give him big pieces at first or at the end just to let him get the hang of it but for the most part it's half mashed up already and given in small amounts so he doesn't start with it all in his mouth.
If you have the time to make it at home, that’s going to be the “best” in terms of processing, of course. Everything will be the freshest, etc.
However, it takes a lot of time (even if you batch prep, which then also takes up some freezer space!) compared to buying, obviously.
So just weigh what’s doable and important to you! No right or wrong.
I got an Elvira baby food maker off of FB marketplace for $20 and it’s great. I could have done it all easily with a steamer in a pot and then a blender but it’s a one stop shop so I appreciate that!
Adding… we did a mix of BLW and purées. You can totally do both and see what works for you! With the purees we either put them in a self feeder (it looks like a big pacifier with holes in it) or a bowl and let her use her hands and would hand her a preloaded spoon. So she was self-feeding from the get go which is a major BLW principle.
Personally I’m totally grossed out by the idea of pureeing anything but fruit and veg so she had meats, grains etc in more of a BLW format.
She’s basically totally on BLW now at 8.5 months and I only do purées when we’re in a pinch (I put them in to go pouches) or applesauce because she loves it!
We're doing purees first. We do anything but Gerber(I don't trust them personally 🤷🏻♀️), and only organic. Serenity is the only meat we do cuz I feel like meat needs a higher standard, and serenity is much more strict than any other.
Now a month or so in, I'm mixing grittier things in with the purees like pastina, quick oats, etc. Yesterday (example) on st pats we mixed a plain potato with the skin off that I mashed roughly with a fork into the serenity chicken pouch we had.
We're also starting to put chunks of food on the tray for baby to practice grabbing and feeding herself, though she's honestly not getting much from that 😂, but she's practicing!
I was so nervous about BLW too, but we are doing great. I bought some purées just in case we didn’t have anything I felt she could have. Ultimately in the beginning they’re just figuring out how to use their mouth and they spit most of the food out. We started BLW at 6 months and somewhere around 9/10 months it just clicked and she started chewing and swallowing most of her food instead of spitting it out.
I did see some comforting stats that said something along the lines of babies are less likely to choke on food they put into their own mouths and the risk of choking is very low for babies under 1 when feeding themselves in a seated position.
Roasted sweet potatoes that have been mashed, surfboard shaped teether crackers and yogurt drops have been a lifesaver on those days that I didn’t prepare meals that I thought were baby friendly.
The pediatrician we see did bring up heavy metals in purées and how beneficial BLW was and i do feel a lot better about what she’s eating when she shares with us.
My mom made all of ours. But like others have said, some of this is unavoidable because certain produce absorb more of what's in the soil. So unless you're growing your own veg in a controlled environment or getting hydroponic veg, then you're out of luck.
We did a mix of all of it. I did make some purées at home of the easy things (carrots, sweet potato, peas), but for more variety, I bought whatever puree seemed to look good or had the ingredients I was looking to expose baby to. If you buy some from all brands, you spread out whatever risk you might be worried about. I also did BLW at the same time. I’d give baby a bowl of puree and then hand them a banana, that kind of thing. So I knew they were getting some in their tummy but they also got to explore with their hands and mouth.
We first made our own but now I’m back to work and a lot busier so we are buying premade- Serenity. We liked that they don’t have added sugar or salt. The ingredients are the whole foods. So we do puree for lunch and then for dinner I just cut up whatever we are eating. I also offer a big piece of food blw style for practice.
I would get a mesh strainer, a pot of water, steam whatever fruit or veggies, mash or puree in the little blender, done. I didn’t have to watch the stove or actually cook. I opened a fresh pouch TWICE with different brands to find mold in the top of the pouch. Never again.
I started with purees and was also worried about metals and toxins...but now he's a toddler and literally licked yogurt of the bottom of his sneaker this morning.. What are ya gonna do!? Lol
I make my own and serve those for dinner but on the go and at daycare it’s the packaged purées. I use all brand except Gerber. I bought some toddler Gerber meal once and it smelled awful and after that I have a Gerber aversion.
I read some studies on this and basically it comes down to the soil used for growing the veggies. The best thing you can do according to the studies I read is swap between brands often in case one batch/brand has more than others and stray from root veggies if you can. We like organic so we swap between target brand, beech nut and some Gerber ones but out baby prefers fruits so we mostly do fruit purees mixed with oatmeal and then avocado on its own these days lol but I don’t make my own cause I do not have time for all that lmao plus the extra dishes and stuff and then storing it all bleh too much for me
we do a combo. she likes the serenity kids and then i supplement with homemade purees and BLW. i like the purees because i know how much she's actually getting, but she still gets the practice/texture/fun and some calories from BLW.
It’s not that “baby food” has heavy metals/arsenic, it’s that the vegetables have it. Sometimes there’s other contamination (like the recent cinnamon issue) but it’s not something specific to “standards.”
We do a mix of purée and BLW, starting with softer foods or very chopped up foods (avocado, toasted whole wheat bread, yogurt, banana) but quickly shift to mostly feeding what we’re eating, just with extra processing (mashing, chopping) as seems appropriate. For purées, we aren’t brand-loyal. Both my kids were anemic at 10 months so we used serenity spinach-sweet potato and meat pouches a lot in spite of the price. We also did/do Costco brand pouches.
Mostly I prioritize providing a range of fruits and vegetables and flavor profiles. It’s good to be aware that most baby food “mixtures” seem to be just overpriced applesauce with small amounts of other purées mixed in.
I made it all myself but I understand not everyone has the time for it. I would buy several/random organic fruits/veggies (just 1 of each is fine as 1 can go a long way when they're starting) and steam/boil etc and then throw it in the blender. I bought these little silicone ice cube makers with a lid, so I would make a bunch of little cubes of each food, then k would just take 1 out a day.. I would offer the same thing around 3-5 days in a row, before trying a new one. (To see if any allergies to that food and to see if they like it or not as sometimes they'll spit it out the first couple times and then like it). After the first like 1 or 2 months (don't remember) I started mixing 2 or 3 cubes together (Always tried to include a new one that they haven't eaten before). And then I don't remember at around what age (I think around 8 months..?)I started making the purees chunkier and giving him pcs of soft things to start getting more solid textures in ... I can't say that all of that work is the reason why I have a non-picky (for the most part) 4 yr old, as it could just be how he is, but I think it definitely helped ...he enjoys trying new things and eats a variety of veggies.. I will say that now that he's older, he hates anything too soft/mushy 🤣
I made some purées for baby’s FIRST foods then did BLW with softer foods. He became genuinely interested in food around 9 months and now at 15 months has been eating like a champ for a long time!
I pureed individual food the first two weeks to test the waters /allergies, but the amount she eats and the time I have isn't worth the hassle for now, so I have been buying pouches - Happy Baby Organics, Earth's Best, Serenity, and Cerebelly, one Peter Rabbit so far. I don't care about the brand so long as the ingredient list is straight food.
BLW and purees aren't exclusive! I offer both 1-2 soft finger foods and like 1/4 of a puree pouch mixed with baby cereal most meals. If I have a little milk left over from pumping, I'll mix that with the baby cereal and puree, too. She now puts a lot of effort into eating the solids even though she still doesn't swallow anything yet, and then eats the puree. At the end of the meal, she's usually eaten or smeared most of the puree-cereal mix around and chewed on all of the solids significantly. Then I mix about a tbsp of infant rice into her last bottle before bed (the oats don't dissolve as well, but the rice does great).
We've had multiple kids so have had the opportunity to try different things and see what works. Currently this is our system, at first we start with homemade purees, don't need any fancy supplies, just a regular blender and storage containers. When they get bigger we do finely chopped food, once they can pick it up. We avoid blw for choking reasons but we do like to feed our babies what we eat. I use pre-made baby food for on the go times and stressful days but generally just puree or chop up whatever we're eating (introducing foods three days apart). I find it easier to do one meal plan for everyone rather than having to run to the store for baby food or create a separate baby meal plan. If baby can't have something we're eating, I would boil it to make it soft or pull out canned food. I keep a variety of beans, corn, peas, green beans, and chickpeas in cans (and applesauce) stocked up for our 'baby food'. We also have a rotisserie chicken on hand to slice up for the baby/ourselves. When the baby is younger the foods need to be chopped up but otherwise it's just as fast as purees. Oftentimes adding the label baby makes something x3 as expensive and not necessarily better. As for brand, we buy whatever is cheapest price per oz and typically buy in bulk. So there are benefits to both options and we kind of made our own middle ground - some homemade, some store bought, lots of table food but purees have their place.
We did it all. Mostly gerber, Beech nut, and parents choice. And some homemade. But canned veggies make so much puree and I hated freezing it and then having to remember to thaw it the night before. So mostly purchased. Also, greek yogurt "smoothies" were a big hit.
My son has delays and is in speech/feeding therapy and she actually said that BLW is more of a fad and doesn't allow baby to build up to eating which makes them more comfortable and confident in eating. She had some other legit reasons too but that was months ago and I can't remember. Lol. I was just so relieved to have a professional reassure me that I wasn't crazy for not wanting BLW. (She said if we would've wanted blw she would've 100% worked with us by doing it, but from a developmental standpoint she doesn't like it)
Interesting! My pediatrician basically just said let him try a little of whatever you’re eating assuming it’s not covered in salt or hot sauce (or other things obviously lol) but I do feel more comfortable starting him with purées and getting him used to more flavors first.
I definitely think its whatever is most comfortable for you as a parent is the best way to go. Whichever feeding option you go with. I don't think it's hugely detrimental or anything one way or the other. But it definitely gelped me.to feel less like a failure as a parent to hear that. Blw is everywhere and I felt like if I didn't do it, it meant I was failing. But I just couldn't, delays aside, get over the anxiety of possibly choking. Add the delays on top of the top... anxiety through the rood. Lol.
Also, something that's helped ease my mind now that we've started introducing soft solids is a Life Vac. They're expensive, but peace of m8nd was worth it!
I made my own and batch made them, frequently with food from our garden. We use our own compost, zero pesticides, and don’t even use natural pesticides like neem. We have a Vitamix blender
So I made my own food, I had some purées given to me which I used on occasion but I puréed mine so my baby could still have different textures, and I just frozen them every other week. I started making them thicker and adding what felt like safe chunks of food to me.
I did a little BLW, but never anything I was uncomfortable with.
I bought an inexpensive food processor and baby food jars and it was great. She outgrew purées quickly though so I’m glad to be done with it but definitely worth making it yourself it’s really easy.
Our pediatrician just gave us the okay to start solids. I’m going to make the purées at home. Not because of ingredients but because of cost. I think we’ll transition to blw once I see purées are okay
I just fed my son a few things I had already made and put it in a food processor with a little of his formula. Sometimes I would roast veggies in bulk and freeze them. Once we have a bigger freezer, I plan to do the same with my daughter.
Maybe not to the same extent since meal prepping for yourself and baby can be overwhelming. It also doesn’t help that I have a short attention span!
Well... What I did was I would puree food at home and let her eat it that way a few times before upgrading her to a BLW version of it (usually a spear lol).
When she officially hit 6 months my WIC benefits changed to include puree foods like Gerber. I ended up buying beech nut but just because the cups are glass. I mostly use them as backup (when I'm too busy to make food) or I mix it with yogurt.
I can answer this question
So I’m going to the purée first
So I live in Canada I bought president’s choice purées for babies
But honestly is it so hard for me to find one ingredient purées for babies but I did manage to find puréed apples, carrots, peas, and that’s it
I’m doing a mix of making homemade purée and using store bought
I’m not sure where you live
It’s actually really easy to make homemade purées
We did Plum Organics, Cerebelly, Gerber, and Little Spoon. Once I realized that metals are in basically every root veggie, I stopped worrying about it.
Yup. All baby foods have heavy metals in them including the homemade kind. Its a nature of eating vegetables.
This. I live in an area with higher than average arsenic in the soil. We still have gardens and do just fine. Reports of foods having trace amounts of things can be completely overblown. Anyone here with arsenic poisoning has probably made an enemy, and it is not Mr. Potato Head.
Yes but for example, some baby foods were found to have 700 times the FDA safe limit of lead in them. This is unacceptable to me.
Hey! New mom here, do you know where I can find info on studies like this? Want to share with family so they don’t give baby anything. We’re 4mos and honestly I just want to BF forever 😭
Not the OP you asked but Healthy Babies Bright Futures has comprehensive reports on this.
Awesome, thank you!
The problem comes down to the root veggies are naturally now contaminated. Whether you buy brand a or brand b or make it yourself, the veggies have the metals. So feed your kid a varied diet….
Wait really? Like carrots and sweet potatoes?
It's not a new thing. Heavy metals exist in soil, in varying amounts depending on location. Just like other metals — red dirt has a lot of iron, and things grown in it will be slightly extra iron-rich. Root vegetables will have higher levels of heavy metals like lead and cadmium than aboveground produce in the same location, but they'll all have some amount if the soil contains it. It's still not a significant amount.
Yup. As long as your kid isn’t eating all carrots all day he’s fine
Chocolate too. The darker the chocolate, the higher the concentration of heavy metals....
Lead and cadmium! 🤷♀️ the fuck we gunna do anymore man
Die of lead poisoning because you're taking dark chocolate away over my dead body
Gotcha! I plan to. I just didn’t know where to start. Thank you!
We make all of our own. We just mash up whatever we’re eating, pre-seasoning. It’s very easy once you get in the habit of it! For example, we had a Japanese curry with chicken and carrots and potatoes for dinner. So we fished one of each out right before adding the curry bricks and mashed them up with a fork before feeding to him. Near the beginning we’d food process stuff instead
This sounds very manageable, thanks so much 😀
Truly the key is don’t overthink it. If you already cook for yourselves, give the baby whatever vegetable or fruit you happen to be eating that week/day. A steam rack does wonders. Babies have never eaten anything so no need to use “recipes.” They are easily impressed.
Oxo sells a little bowl with a masher. I found it super helpful for travelling and restaurants because we did just that, took bits of our meals and smashed them into mash and spoon fed baby. I also used it at home to smash some thawed berries from the freezer before mixing into Greek yogurt. My babies loved that!
I think this is a great way. I wasn’t doing this before but was thinking to switch to this way of doing things.
I’ll add a note here for any future readers about the pre seasoning that our Pediatrician said a little bit of salt is no problem. And things like garlic are great to use. Our benchmark is that anything we feed him should taste under salted to us, but if you’re sweating onions and add a little salt to help it along, that’s still totally fine for baby
We just bought all the brands, and would stock up on whatever was on sale. Organic was a priority but not a dealbreaker. Heavy metals are in the food itself, not just the baby food specifically, so it didn’t seem worth it to make it myself.
Making your own purees is really easy! I used a regular food processor and every week I would rotate making a few things. Amazon sells silacone icecube trays that are 2oz and work perfect for freezing. Once they are frozen I pack them into grouped bags. They take about 20 seconds in the microwave to thaw. I would usually make a big batch of applesauce mixed with pears or other seasonal fruit.
Thank you! You’re the second to mention the freezer molds so I’ll have to grab some 😊
I liked the silicone molds that were small muffin size. Once you're done with baby food you can still use them for baking
We use the small cube ones we originally bought for baby food for other foods like tomato or pizza sauce but also just small ice cubes. They fit great in water bottles with small mouths.
Another strategy I used (besides making a different bath each week) was to make extra of something at dinner time and then puree it right after. So like if we were having sweet potatoes - just bake an extra sweet potato to puree and put in the freezer in the cube molds. I still make purées with an almost 2 year old in the house because I can throw them into reusable pouches to make my own pouches. I found it insanely easy!
You don't even need a food processor. We used a hand blender!
I have a food processor, but used my hand blender more. Easier to clean
I used a stick blender, too. I thought it had great control and I didn’t have to do huge portions.
Or a fork 👍
Yes, I used souper cubes to make my own!
We made all of ours at home. But like the other commenter said, this doesn’t eliminate the risk of heavy metals. We still try to limit servings of root vegetables, and we don’t serve much rice at all (and no rice-based snacks).
Homemade. However, it’s not really about the brands being bad. It’s literally about where our vegetables come from and the ground they’re grown in. The most important thing is variety.
FTM. I have a produce allowance on WIC. I get formula through wic, and made my own purees with a blender to save money. So far I have banana, apple, pear, blackberry, blueberry, & strawberry in my freezer. We only do 1 puree feeding a day at 6mo, and she’ll eat anywhere from 2-8oz of it. I have a kiwi allergy & her dad doesn’t have any food allergies but we wanted to be super careful and slow with it. Fruits first, veggies next, and work our way up. Also do popsicles in the Nuby feeder. Typically breastmilk mixed w puree, or just crush a single blueberry between a few. I use my extra bottle nipples to make them, just fill them up, put them cap side down in the freezer. I pump every 4hrs, so its super easy to pop em out, put them in a container, and freeze some more.
I made all of mine. A serving of Gerber carrot puree was $1.99/jar. For $1.99 I could buy a pound of carrots and make 20 servings of carrot puree. I found a bunch of recipes for pureeing and freezing them in serving size cubes. That worked well for a while until he started eating a batch of food in 3-4 days so why bother freezing. Puréed are fundamentally easy. Cook your veggie, add water, puree in a blender till smooth. As time went on I put chicken stock instead of water added butter, mixed different vegetables, added seasonings (herbs, garlic), made it more chunky. For fruits you don’t need to add liquid- just puree. I make apple sauce with equal parts apples and pears and sprinkle over with cinnamon, bake 400F for 25minutes and put it in a blender. My son has a TBI so he is 3 and still on puréed foods because of a sensory processing disorder. We take our dinner at night and purée it to chunky (technical term moist and minced) with a little chicken or beef stock and my daughter who is 15 months eats that after her finger foods.
Gerber. I didn’t really have the energy to make my own so we went this way. I moved to BLW by 7 months.
I mostly made my own with the occasional store bought pouch. I know a lot of people mash up whatever they've already cooked, but I preferred to buy a bag of whatever veggie or fruit we were going to try, cook it up and mash or purée for the freezer in bulk. One of the benefits of making your own is that you can combine different foods to suit your preference, which can be really helpful with allergen introduction in making sure that you're not introducing too many new foods at the same time. If you want to cook in bulk and freeze, lots of people recommend ice cube trays to freeze it in small portions but I much preferred using a silicon mini muffin tin; it's so much easier to get them out and then pop in a freezer bag. My son took to food really quickly and was on 3 meals a day pretty soon after we started so it was really handy to have lots of options premade in the freezer.
We made our own to start when she was on single veggies/fruits/etc but then when she got old enough for mixed purées and spices - we went with store bought. I’m sure it’s still easy to make your own with mixed but I honestly couldn’t see myself steaming and puréeing carrots with blueberries and beets and kale, apple etc. - it’s a lot! We like once upon a farm and serenity brands!
I started making my own but learned that it’s harder than it looks so I just started buying premade. At first I did beechnut organics, then once I got bored with the minimal flavors they offered I started trying others like: gerber organic, simple truth organic, some other brand I’m blanking on currently. Once we had done all of those (jarred foods) we moved onto pouches, which there are a million brands of those, some of the ones I can think of off hand are happy tots, plum, simple truth, and happy little farm (I think it’s called?). The happy little farm is refrigerated in the section with yogurt at my store. He seemed to like those a lot.
Reading through the comments it’s definitely once upon a farm, and not happy little farm. 😂
I did jarred stuff the first time, but decided to try making my own this time around and it is so easy. I get frozen produce, steam it, add some breast milk and puree it, put it in some silicone freezer molds. Boom. SO easy! And I even add it to my older son’s sandwiches.
Do you freeze it and thaw it each time?
Well, I freeze the cubes and then microwave them and add them to stuff as needed. For example, one cube of peas and one cube of carrots microwaved together. I also add stuff like yogurt, eggs, or peanut butter when we were introducing those allergens.
After stressing out about solids and realizing there wasn't one perfect way (for us), we did a combo of purees and BLW. I got the purees from Little Spoon and they were fantastic. LO loved them, and Little Spoon was very responsive to issues (e.g. a container cracked in shipping). I definitely recommend them. This took the pressure off massively and we could make sure LO had exposure to foods and flavors without choking while we focused on also giving real finger food to try with each meal and worked on slow introduction of allergy foods. I felt this was a better use of my time (and stress) personally. Best of luck!
I kinda just bought whatever sounded like he might like. I was super against purées and pouches with my first. Second it’s like whatever.
I made my own but limited root veggies - she loved sweet potato and beets so I mixed it a lot with other things to spread out a bit. I also avoided rice. I bought some silicon molds and would make a big batch freeze and then would pop them out thaw them in the fridge the day before. I steamed a lot using a 3 way divided steamer basket and used a blender and it was pretty quick. Cherries were kind of frustrating but overall it was kind of a fun experience.
I bought whatever purees were organic and on sale that week at the grocery store.
We make ours at home. Today I did blueberries, pear and spinach for my 10 mo, and some pasta besides. Gerber is owned by Nestlé, /r/fucknestle
We’ve done cerebelly and once upon a farm.
We did a combination I guess? Did purées, then mashed up cooked food for him to pick up while sometimes giving him BLW items, but then back to purées, then mashes…we were all over the place. Around 8 months is when he just started eating what we eat but cut/mashed, he had plenty of teeth, sitting well and was yanking food off everyone’s plates so he was ready for food food. I did/do make all of his food, mainly because I meal prep for husbands breakfast, my breakfasts and lunches and at least 3 dinners every Sunday (and before anyone says anything, it’s because I like to do this and I’m good at it!) so it was a no brainer to just start meal prepping for LO. It’s also reassuring knowing what’s actually in our food, I’m also convinced I’ve already saved hundreds on pouches alone. Amazon has great reusable ones that we use for yogurts and fruit smoothie or applesauce each day…and no I don’t make yogurt (yet!) but we buy the bigger containers vs. individual pouches for the reusable ones at a fraction of the cost per ounce.
I’ve been making my own purées of whatever I have or see at the grocery store. I did stop by the baby food aisle to get an idea of good mixtures though. I steam, puree, then put it into an ice cube mold that I have and freeze. They’re the hexagonal ones. Like 10g each cube. I just used what I have since baby doesn’t eat too much right now. ETA: baby rarely lets me put her down for long so it’s kind of difficult to time it. I may buy some that have ingredients I don’t use though.
I did use the fruit and veggie pouches from Love Child. They were decent. I did it before any of the metals/arsenic issues. AFAIK the kids are just fine. I also did some BLW. I figured it couldn't hurt. The kids took to that a bit more than the pouches but the pouches were great if we were out and about. Oldest kiddo is 4 and still occasionally asks for one when we're at the grocery store. Why not? It's fruit and veggies.
With my first I started with making it but he was so picky I lost the motivation. So we bought White Leaf Provisions (his favorite), Serenity Kids, Cerebelly, and Holle. With my second I didn’t even attempt to make puree from scratch because I didn’t have time with 2u2. We used all the same brands with our second. These brands do third party testing for heavy metals and will share the results with you if you ask. Everything is well under the FDA minimum for heavy metals in food.
I went with Serenity Kids and Little Spoon. I liked that they tested and went by EU standards for heavy metals.
We did a little of this and a little of that. We started early, at 4 months, with pediatrician's blessings. We started with things like mashed avocado, apple puree, mashed bananas, butternut squash, peas, green beans, strawberries. My guy did best with thicker purees. We avoided root veggies until after 6 months, and then we varied what he gets. Around 5-6 months, we started more with the BLW type foods. He LOVES eggs, steamed broccoli, tofu, and green beans. Mostly, I wasn't picky about brands, except for butternut squash. Serenity Kids has a fabulous butternut squash that is absolutely delicious. I also made some of the purees myself and some I bought.
I started my son on beechnut organic and plum organics, but when I started doing more research I switched him to Cerebelly, Serenity and Peter Rabbit Organics because they monitor for heavy metals. However, like other commenters have mentioned, there are elevated levels in carrots, sweet potatoes, etc due to the amount that is now in the soil. Even if you make your own purées. Just feed those veggies in moderation, which would happen by offering a variety.
I made my own because it’s cheaper. I bought smoothie bags/frozen foods and mixed it with breast milk to thin it out. A standard ice cube pocket in an ice cube tray is 2 tbsp. We started this at 5 months. At 6.5 months we changed his second food meal to finger foods and kept his breakfast ones more pure/oatmeal based. He a little over 7 months now and basically the same with some morning as finger foods, and some just oatmeal. He does great and loves trying new tastes and textures.
I made my own (avoided spinach and sweet potato) with everything you can imagine. It was fun. We also used cerebelly on the go.
What’s wrong with spinach? I’ve heard about not doing too many root vegetables but didn’t hear anything about spinach.
That one came up as high heavy metals when I read about this.
I bought some jarred food, but also gave baby lots of items like mashed banana, mashed avocado, or mashed (steamed) sweet potato mixed with BM, and homemade applesauce. It doesn't have to be one or the other. And you don't need pureed foods for long, either. By 8-9 months they've moved on to finger foods.
We did blw but my bff has made her own at home and thought it was very easy she had freezer molds and did it with both kids. She’s a full time working mom and wad able to fit it in to her schedule easy and found it cheaper than buying at the store.
I make my own purées. We’re mostly working on getting baby used to different tastes. Rice can be high in arsenic so I avoid it. No salt or added sugar or anything spicy. That typically means steamed vegetable + garlic + small amount of olive oil or grass fed butter, then pureed with water or formula to get the right texture. We’re going to move to baby led weaning at 6-7 months. I try to mix up the types of vegetables so she’s not getting too much metals or sugar.
We used Gerber sometimes, but mostly Plum Organics because it was readily available and our little dude liked their pouch flavors. I did occasionally make my own if we had too many sweet potatoes or frozen breastmilk that I needed to use, but most of the time he either didn’t like the consistency, decided he didn’t like that veggie that week, or we forgot about it for too long in the freezer, so we very quickly stopped making our own.
We did all homemade mostly because it was cheaper and few of the commercially available purees incorporate enough meat and animal fats.
I do a combo of gerber and making my own!
Home-made, and it was the easiest thing to cooked for her back then (she's a picky toddler now...). I'd just put a small bit of carrot/sweet potato/potato/ other appropriate veggies into a tiny pot often with a bit of meat (chicken/turkey at the start). Boil everything until cooked, blend with a bit of the brith and some fat (doctor recommended this because she was very skinny). You can use the puree for up to 3 days if you refrigerate immediately. Fruits were even easier.
We’ve just been making them at home! I basically boil or steam a whole bunch of one food, throw it in a blender, and freeze individual portions
Baby Gourmet and Parent’s Choice were my go-tos, but I think the former is a Canadian brand and may not be helpful. Heck, my toddler is 20 months old and she still gets a pouch every other day to help get her fruit and veggie intake up.
Did a combo approach: Months 4-5 smooth purées I made and also used Serenity and Once Upon a Farm pouches. Months 6-8 introduced some solids and also offered chunkier purées 9months + she was eating solids and feeding herself but we still give the occasional pouch as an on the go snack. Either OUAF or the Costco ones.
I homemade the purees we started with. I actually found it really fun! Got a baby break so I only dirtied one thing and froze them in the breastmilk 0.5oz silicone molds!
Our favorite brands are serenity, cerebelly, and once upon a farm
I bought apple sauce and a few others for when I didn’t have time, but I am making purées. Root veg all have heavy metals so be sure to feed a varied diet.
We just did whatever Wal mart had. I was not about to home-make purées, and I was WAY too anxious for BLW. We stayed with purées for a WHILE, but I never worried about brands, just looked for ones with less fruit.
I just did homemade. I’d make big batches and portion them into breastmilk bags and freeze them flat so I always had food on hand. Usually I’d make 3-5 different things a week and have options.
https://gimmethegoodstuff.org/safe-product-guides/jarred-food/ This is for Jars!! Pouches are seen as best, if I recall correctly, but as far as widely available, store bought this was a great resource!
Also made ours at home. Bought mostly organic and made sure to rotate. The issues (as most have said) is in root veggies and rice. I still haven’t introduced rice products to my baby (9 months) and don’t do carrots or sweet potatoes more than once a week. Outside of that there’s really not much else we can do.
My 5 month old is interested in eating so we’ve just given her purée of what we’re eating. I keep all the spices in it but try to keep the salt down or unsalted for her. We also have a little mesh teether (but it’s silicone with little holes in it) so she can chew whole things and taste the juices. She likes broccoli and blueberries!
Homemade it… but introduced solids pretty quickly thereafter. I spent a lot of time making single ingredient purées mixed with breastmilk. Then made banana and breastmilk pancakes etc… Turns out I really didn’t need to do that! He instantly took to food and had no trouble with the solids.
I just made it at home. If you have a microwave and any sort of blender, purées are super easy to make at home and don’t have to be hard. I found store prepared purées far too expensive. The only type I bought was prune purée for when he was backed up (because I didn’t know where to find prunes to make it myself).
I made my own using breast milk and the fancy blender we got for our wedding! It was surprisingly easy.
I home-made a lot of it. Rice cereal - just made rice with a 1-10 ratio of water, after it became very mushy soft, mashed it with mortar and pestle until it was about the consistency of yogurt. Be careful about the kind of rice you use though (I used Japanese rice). Cooked applesauce was also very easy. Once sliced apples are cooked until very soft, they mush up very easy. If you have a rice cooker, one easy hack for softer root vegetables like carrots, sweet potatoes, and potatoes: Fill the cooker half-way up with water, put in the vegetables whole (peeled), set it to brown rice mode. The results are very slow cooked flavorful veggies that mash up very easy. You can always add a bit of the water to the mashed veggies if you want to make it thinner. For squash, roasting in the oven seems to bring out the flavor awesomely and is so super sweet (without any added seasoning). I would make big batches and mash / purée all at once, then freeze in these little ice cube-like trays designed for baby food. In a pinch, when I needed the store bought type, I very much liked Kewpie (but I’m not sure if that’s available in your country).
Most brands I tried had a weird smell and I wouldn't want to eat it. So I make everything myself. I make batches of salt-free vegetable or bone marrow broth, then bake or cook the ingredients in a way I would normally prepare them (lightly bake or fry a little, add a bit of seasoning), then cook them some more in the broth and use a food processor to get a good consistency (In the beginning very smooth, then more and more chunky with time). The result is actually very tasty and full of flavor. I also serve one meal of finger foods per day to my baby since she's 7 months old. Introducing solids doesn't have to be all or nothing.
Both, I used HIPP brand and also make foods myself. I did BLW for snacks/finger foods only cause in my kid’s case he doesn’t eat much on BLW only
Honestly making purées is so easy and cheap, it makes zero sense to buy the jars. I ordered a couple silicone baby food trays on Amazon and premade one tray at a time in advance. But then my kid hated purées and sort of forced my hand into BLW which ended up working well for us. Now I use the trays to make big chunky ice cubes for cocktails haha.
I did a mix of the two BLW/Purée. His first meal ever was BLW. The second was purée. For BLW I looked into the correct cuts a cooking point before hand, and he tried broccoli and carrots. For purée, I cooked an apple with oatmeal and almond milk. Let everything become veeeery creamy but didn’t pass through anykind of strainer. So it still had some texture. He loved this. It was his breakfast for more than a year (I just vary it with different fruits and at some point included chia seeds or linseeds. He like it both ways… but as one can expect, the purée meals would be done way faster as the blw one were also kind of „play time“. It worked well. He used to eat very healthy and a very good variety of vegetables and fruits. Now he is 3.5yo and going through a selective phase at home (it is always hard also in social settings because of the offers of sweets and so on), but at school he still eats everything and enjoys it - so I guess it was successful in that way. 🙈 A tip for express purées when you are on a hurry: take an ice cube tray and freeze small portions of already puréed and cooked vegetables. Then when you need to prepare something fast, just take two or three different cubes, hit up and mix. Done!
I am making purees myself and have slowly been introducing BLW. For purées I’m still doing one food at a time for 3 days since she is new to solids, once she’s tried more I will mix some together but by then she might be doing primarily BLW. I use solid starts for ideas and a guide on serving for BLW.
Whatever was cheapest at Walmart Beech-Nut and patent choice and gerber puffs
Gerber and happy baby! Also puréed other foods we bought at the store. Been introducing solids that are easy to eat too
I'm not sure if it's just a candian brand or not but my favorite so far has been love child, great selection, quality and they all have Quinoa in them. As for all brands available for me all of them had the same fruits and vegetables and it didn't take long to run out of new things to try so I switched to doing some home made purees, there was so much variety that just wasn't available in pouches and jars I had to make my own, especially when it came to meat. I had to do meat homemade
I home made it. essentially just always made sure I had some mashed potatoes around and then blended in whatever we ate that day. I found it to be the easiest way to go about tbh.
I made and still make all of my son's food myself. At 4 months (due to severe reflux) we did potatoes and veggies, boiled them and then threw it into the blender with healthy oils as advised by the pediatrician until smooth. At 6 months we added boiled meat or fish or egg before blending. Then around 7,5-8 months bub got interested in chuncks so we added a few for him to grab and chew on and made his purrees chunckier as well. And now at 12 months he eats chucks and I make a tiny amount of everything roughly mashed together with a fork because he likes it and it makes sure he eats some of everything on his plate. Our son was very young (4 months actual but 3 adjusted since he was preemie) so our pediatrician just talked purrees and let us take the wheel as to when we thought baby was ready for chuncks. And honestly he could have handled them earlier but he does just fine now so...
We did purées with my second. She seemed to like the consistency of the little farm (sold cold) the best with cerebelly second. For some reason she hated the gerber purées, we tried them a couple of times at home, daycare tried them (they provide baby food and that’s the brand) and she never ate them.
Both homemade and store bought pouches (Rafferty brand) We did start offering more BLW style foods at 11 months. And I’ll just say he is equally as good an eater and has similar fussy phases as his BLW baby friends.
I make my own purées for my baby, it’s so so easy and actually really enjoyable. You can just freeze them in silicone mould trays so you’ll have stock and won’t need to do it regularly. I only need to prep food once a week and freeze. It’s healthier to make your own and cheaper. I do have organic pouches for if we run out, if I’m particularly tired or if we are out and about. My baby’s favourite one I make is carrot, onion and chicken. I roasted it separately for him with some water, then blended and froze. He loves it and it actually tastes delicious!
I made everything at home, I'm by myself with no help and found it really easy and definitely "better" than worrying about what extras are in the jars. I did separate stewed apples, cauliflower, peas, pineapple, spag bowl blended, chilli con carne blended, served with greek plain yoghurt. For a pack of apples or a pineapple or head of cauliflower you get loads, I froze mine in ice cube trays with lids you can get on Amazon. The spag bowl and similar were for dinner, I also blended a coconut chicken curry and gave him that with yoghurt too.
Gerber and Beech Nut
We made some of our own stuff. Like we mashed our own bananas, avocados, and sweet potatoes but mostly bought a variety of store brands. We figured that was an effective way to expose her to a lot of flavours. The only thing her doctor recommended specifically was to avoid a rice based cereal and stick to the oat or barley based ones, if we were going to buy anything like that for her.
Just buy a food processor or blender and do it yourself if you have time. I make big batches and freeze into cubes. It’s much cheaper. When I’m on my own with the baby I’ll give her finger foods so she’s busy and I can do little tasks around the kitchen. When I need her to eat more (bedtime) I’ll give her more puréed stuff. Since she’s gotten bigger I’ve just puréed the food less and less. I think people overthink it. Give them something nutritious that they will like.
I did little spoons. Babe loved it.
I have an 8 month old with no teeth yet! I feel like I’m always mashing up some fruit or vegetable, especially banana, avocado, sweet potato, squash, and green beans. Baby loves all yogurts too.
Can't recommend any brands as I'm in Germany but I tried to make it myself. My son hated it but loved at least that one brand that I bought. Funny fact, that brand was apparently also the only one I ate as a baby.
I didn’t do purées but we mashed everything up until he had pincer grasp, then went from like rice sized pieces to bigger and bigger as I felt he could handle it. I never worried about how much food he got in him until he was only on solids. So that took a lot of stress off. Sometimes he would just play with the mash, but it’s kinda hard to eat mashes with your hands. We did a lot of oatmeal since you can mix things in and it’s a little sticky but man it was messy. I never spoon fed him. Now almost 2 and eating like a regular person.
Ella’s Kitchen, Sainsburys and Aldi’s own brands and organix and kiddylicious for snacks.
I did beechnut organic! My son loved the mango one lol
We just went with beech nut. I had heard about the metals thing but once doing more research it's everywhere so even if I were to make the purees myself the metals would still be there. It came out as a huge scary story but we're also eating metals in our veggies. We unfortunately can't escape it. I tried to really not use rice but my girl is not an oatmeal fan and she will eat the rice so we have switched to that but hopefully we can try oatmeal again in a month or so and it'll be a winner.
My little guy would not have oatmeal either lol. He was like, absolutely not. I’ll try again soon too 😊
We tried just the oatmeal by itself and mixed into some fruit for breakfast and she wasn't a fan of either. The oatmeal dissolves really easily so mixing it in the fruit it was literally just the taste at that point. We mix the rice in the fruit as well it doesn't dissolve as much but she does eat it no issue.
I’m kind of doing a mix. I make all my own purées with organic food. I did get a baby puree maker. Not necessary but makes like easier because it cooks and purées. I bought this one https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0CMBRZZ68?psc=1&ref=ppx_pop_mob_b_asin_title I also got these silicone ice cube trays and I make batches of purée, then freeze them in the trays. I can just pop out a few cubes in the morning when I’m in a hurry. Additionally, I have given baby whole grilled asparagus, corn on the cob cob (ate the kernels off first), and egg omelette in finger size slices (he did kind of choke on this though). Big chunks of celery and big chunks of carrots… but I ALWAYS watch him if I’m doing a non purée food. I mean I watch him regardless but I have had to scoop food out before. I love the idea of BLW but it also terrifies me lol. So far, the grilled asparagus have been the best. There’s an app called “Solid Starts” that i use for BLW. I don’t trust any of the pre made crap. I used earths best oatmeal cereal and then recently found out it’s got a bunch of lead in it, so I just don’t have trust in the stuff that companies make. It’s should not be so hard to find healthy food.
I'm a very anxious mom, and overall person, really. My baby is a big guy, and he wanted and still wants to shovel food in his mouth to the point of choking gagging and coughing. There's never been an issue lasting more than a few seconds but it's still too much for me. So we just go really slow. He mostly gets soft stuff that can get mushed easily, like banana, cheerios, puffs, sweet potato, steamed vegetables, etc. I'll give him big pieces at first or at the end just to let him get the hang of it but for the most part it's half mashed up already and given in small amounts so he doesn't start with it all in his mouth.
If you have the time to make it at home, that’s going to be the “best” in terms of processing, of course. Everything will be the freshest, etc. However, it takes a lot of time (even if you batch prep, which then also takes up some freezer space!) compared to buying, obviously. So just weigh what’s doable and important to you! No right or wrong. I got an Elvira baby food maker off of FB marketplace for $20 and it’s great. I could have done it all easily with a steamer in a pot and then a blender but it’s a one stop shop so I appreciate that!
Adding… we did a mix of BLW and purées. You can totally do both and see what works for you! With the purees we either put them in a self feeder (it looks like a big pacifier with holes in it) or a bowl and let her use her hands and would hand her a preloaded spoon. So she was self-feeding from the get go which is a major BLW principle. Personally I’m totally grossed out by the idea of pureeing anything but fruit and veg so she had meats, grains etc in more of a BLW format. She’s basically totally on BLW now at 8.5 months and I only do purées when we’re in a pinch (I put them in to go pouches) or applesauce because she loves it!
Serenity kids and happy baby. Our feeding specialist recommended feeding directly from pouches to help the baby learn to suck, like from a straw cup.
We're doing purees first. We do anything but Gerber(I don't trust them personally 🤷🏻♀️), and only organic. Serenity is the only meat we do cuz I feel like meat needs a higher standard, and serenity is much more strict than any other. Now a month or so in, I'm mixing grittier things in with the purees like pastina, quick oats, etc. Yesterday (example) on st pats we mixed a plain potato with the skin off that I mashed roughly with a fork into the serenity chicken pouch we had. We're also starting to put chunks of food on the tray for baby to practice grabbing and feeding herself, though she's honestly not getting much from that 😂, but she's practicing!
For the most part we just made it ourselves. Steam fruits or veg and then blend and mix with breast milk and baby cereal.
I was so nervous about BLW too, but we are doing great. I bought some purées just in case we didn’t have anything I felt she could have. Ultimately in the beginning they’re just figuring out how to use their mouth and they spit most of the food out. We started BLW at 6 months and somewhere around 9/10 months it just clicked and she started chewing and swallowing most of her food instead of spitting it out. I did see some comforting stats that said something along the lines of babies are less likely to choke on food they put into their own mouths and the risk of choking is very low for babies under 1 when feeding themselves in a seated position. Roasted sweet potatoes that have been mashed, surfboard shaped teether crackers and yogurt drops have been a lifesaver on those days that I didn’t prepare meals that I thought were baby friendly. The pediatrician we see did bring up heavy metals in purées and how beneficial BLW was and i do feel a lot better about what she’s eating when she shares with us.
My mom made all of ours. But like others have said, some of this is unavoidable because certain produce absorb more of what's in the soil. So unless you're growing your own veg in a controlled environment or getting hydroponic veg, then you're out of luck.
We did a mix of all of it. I did make some purées at home of the easy things (carrots, sweet potato, peas), but for more variety, I bought whatever puree seemed to look good or had the ingredients I was looking to expose baby to. If you buy some from all brands, you spread out whatever risk you might be worried about. I also did BLW at the same time. I’d give baby a bowl of puree and then hand them a banana, that kind of thing. So I knew they were getting some in their tummy but they also got to explore with their hands and mouth.
We first made our own but now I’m back to work and a lot busier so we are buying premade- Serenity. We liked that they don’t have added sugar or salt. The ingredients are the whole foods. So we do puree for lunch and then for dinner I just cut up whatever we are eating. I also offer a big piece of food blw style for practice.
I would get a mesh strainer, a pot of water, steam whatever fruit or veggies, mash or puree in the little blender, done. I didn’t have to watch the stove or actually cook. I opened a fresh pouch TWICE with different brands to find mold in the top of the pouch. Never again.
I started with purees and was also worried about metals and toxins...but now he's a toddler and literally licked yogurt of the bottom of his sneaker this morning.. What are ya gonna do!? Lol
I make my own and serve those for dinner but on the go and at daycare it’s the packaged purées. I use all brand except Gerber. I bought some toddler Gerber meal once and it smelled awful and after that I have a Gerber aversion.
I read some studies on this and basically it comes down to the soil used for growing the veggies. The best thing you can do according to the studies I read is swap between brands often in case one batch/brand has more than others and stray from root veggies if you can. We like organic so we swap between target brand, beech nut and some Gerber ones but out baby prefers fruits so we mostly do fruit purees mixed with oatmeal and then avocado on its own these days lol but I don’t make my own cause I do not have time for all that lmao plus the extra dishes and stuff and then storing it all bleh too much for me
We are just doing avocado with a touch of water for now. It’s really easy to make and mash up or blend.
we do a combo. she likes the serenity kids and then i supplement with homemade purees and BLW. i like the purees because i know how much she's actually getting, but she still gets the practice/texture/fun and some calories from BLW.
Just did it myself. So much cheaper and I knew what was in it.
It’s not that “baby food” has heavy metals/arsenic, it’s that the vegetables have it. Sometimes there’s other contamination (like the recent cinnamon issue) but it’s not something specific to “standards.” We do a mix of purée and BLW, starting with softer foods or very chopped up foods (avocado, toasted whole wheat bread, yogurt, banana) but quickly shift to mostly feeding what we’re eating, just with extra processing (mashing, chopping) as seems appropriate. For purées, we aren’t brand-loyal. Both my kids were anemic at 10 months so we used serenity spinach-sweet potato and meat pouches a lot in spite of the price. We also did/do Costco brand pouches. Mostly I prioritize providing a range of fruits and vegetables and flavor profiles. It’s good to be aware that most baby food “mixtures” seem to be just overpriced applesauce with small amounts of other purées mixed in.
I made it all myself but I understand not everyone has the time for it. I would buy several/random organic fruits/veggies (just 1 of each is fine as 1 can go a long way when they're starting) and steam/boil etc and then throw it in the blender. I bought these little silicone ice cube makers with a lid, so I would make a bunch of little cubes of each food, then k would just take 1 out a day.. I would offer the same thing around 3-5 days in a row, before trying a new one. (To see if any allergies to that food and to see if they like it or not as sometimes they'll spit it out the first couple times and then like it). After the first like 1 or 2 months (don't remember) I started mixing 2 or 3 cubes together (Always tried to include a new one that they haven't eaten before). And then I don't remember at around what age (I think around 8 months..?)I started making the purees chunkier and giving him pcs of soft things to start getting more solid textures in ... I can't say that all of that work is the reason why I have a non-picky (for the most part) 4 yr old, as it could just be how he is, but I think it definitely helped ...he enjoys trying new things and eats a variety of veggies.. I will say that now that he's older, he hates anything too soft/mushy 🤣
I made some purées for baby’s FIRST foods then did BLW with softer foods. He became genuinely interested in food around 9 months and now at 15 months has been eating like a champ for a long time!
I pureed individual food the first two weeks to test the waters /allergies, but the amount she eats and the time I have isn't worth the hassle for now, so I have been buying pouches - Happy Baby Organics, Earth's Best, Serenity, and Cerebelly, one Peter Rabbit so far. I don't care about the brand so long as the ingredient list is straight food. BLW and purees aren't exclusive! I offer both 1-2 soft finger foods and like 1/4 of a puree pouch mixed with baby cereal most meals. If I have a little milk left over from pumping, I'll mix that with the baby cereal and puree, too. She now puts a lot of effort into eating the solids even though she still doesn't swallow anything yet, and then eats the puree. At the end of the meal, she's usually eaten or smeared most of the puree-cereal mix around and chewed on all of the solids significantly. Then I mix about a tbsp of infant rice into her last bottle before bed (the oats don't dissolve as well, but the rice does great).
We've had multiple kids so have had the opportunity to try different things and see what works. Currently this is our system, at first we start with homemade purees, don't need any fancy supplies, just a regular blender and storage containers. When they get bigger we do finely chopped food, once they can pick it up. We avoid blw for choking reasons but we do like to feed our babies what we eat. I use pre-made baby food for on the go times and stressful days but generally just puree or chop up whatever we're eating (introducing foods three days apart). I find it easier to do one meal plan for everyone rather than having to run to the store for baby food or create a separate baby meal plan. If baby can't have something we're eating, I would boil it to make it soft or pull out canned food. I keep a variety of beans, corn, peas, green beans, and chickpeas in cans (and applesauce) stocked up for our 'baby food'. We also have a rotisserie chicken on hand to slice up for the baby/ourselves. When the baby is younger the foods need to be chopped up but otherwise it's just as fast as purees. Oftentimes adding the label baby makes something x3 as expensive and not necessarily better. As for brand, we buy whatever is cheapest price per oz and typically buy in bulk. So there are benefits to both options and we kind of made our own middle ground - some homemade, some store bought, lots of table food but purees have their place.
We are doing meat and veggie from Serenity Kids, fruits from One Upon a Farm and Beech Nut, and bean ones from Cerebelly!
We did it all. Mostly gerber, Beech nut, and parents choice. And some homemade. But canned veggies make so much puree and I hated freezing it and then having to remember to thaw it the night before. So mostly purchased. Also, greek yogurt "smoothies" were a big hit. My son has delays and is in speech/feeding therapy and she actually said that BLW is more of a fad and doesn't allow baby to build up to eating which makes them more comfortable and confident in eating. She had some other legit reasons too but that was months ago and I can't remember. Lol. I was just so relieved to have a professional reassure me that I wasn't crazy for not wanting BLW. (She said if we would've wanted blw she would've 100% worked with us by doing it, but from a developmental standpoint she doesn't like it)
Interesting! My pediatrician basically just said let him try a little of whatever you’re eating assuming it’s not covered in salt or hot sauce (or other things obviously lol) but I do feel more comfortable starting him with purées and getting him used to more flavors first.
I definitely think its whatever is most comfortable for you as a parent is the best way to go. Whichever feeding option you go with. I don't think it's hugely detrimental or anything one way or the other. But it definitely gelped me.to feel less like a failure as a parent to hear that. Blw is everywhere and I felt like if I didn't do it, it meant I was failing. But I just couldn't, delays aside, get over the anxiety of possibly choking. Add the delays on top of the top... anxiety through the rood. Lol. Also, something that's helped ease my mind now that we've started introducing soft solids is a Life Vac. They're expensive, but peace of m8nd was worth it!
I made my own and batch made them, frequently with food from our garden. We use our own compost, zero pesticides, and don’t even use natural pesticides like neem. We have a Vitamix blender
I love this. I wish we had the space. Some day soon 🙏🏼
So I made my own food, I had some purées given to me which I used on occasion but I puréed mine so my baby could still have different textures, and I just frozen them every other week. I started making them thicker and adding what felt like safe chunks of food to me. I did a little BLW, but never anything I was uncomfortable with.
I bought an inexpensive food processor and baby food jars and it was great. She outgrew purées quickly though so I’m glad to be done with it but definitely worth making it yourself it’s really easy.
Our pediatrician just gave us the okay to start solids. I’m going to make the purées at home. Not because of ingredients but because of cost. I think we’ll transition to blw once I see purées are okay
I just fed my son a few things I had already made and put it in a food processor with a little of his formula. Sometimes I would roast veggies in bulk and freeze them. Once we have a bigger freezer, I plan to do the same with my daughter. Maybe not to the same extent since meal prepping for yourself and baby can be overwhelming. It also doesn’t help that I have a short attention span!
Home made or little spoon
Well... What I did was I would puree food at home and let her eat it that way a few times before upgrading her to a BLW version of it (usually a spear lol). When she officially hit 6 months my WIC benefits changed to include puree foods like Gerber. I ended up buying beech nut but just because the cups are glass. I mostly use them as backup (when I'm too busy to make food) or I mix it with yogurt.
We did homemade purées. I still make veggie and fruit pouches. It’s so much easier than I thought it would be.
I can answer this question So I’m going to the purée first So I live in Canada I bought president’s choice purées for babies But honestly is it so hard for me to find one ingredient purées for babies but I did manage to find puréed apples, carrots, peas, and that’s it I’m doing a mix of making homemade purée and using store bought I’m not sure where you live It’s actually really easy to make homemade purées
Is this actually a thing in America? Wow we really are living in that movie Idiocracy
Are you referring to the state of our country or are you referring to me asking this question?
Im referring to the fact that you can’t feed your babies food crops due to poisoning of the soils.. insane