The Case for Organic Baby Food

Glamour Magazine

Once your wee one starts eating solids, you'll have to decide whether to nourish her with fresh, frozen, or jarred foods. Here's our case for organic and healthy baby food.

By Deirdre Dolan and Alexandra Zissu

Sometime around 6 months, your babe will go from an all-liquid to a liquid-plus-puree diet. Advice abounds on how to introduce these solids; everyone and their neighbor will offer their theories on which foods to give first, what order they should be tried, and how best to avoid an allergic reaction. But welcome to another dilemma: trying to figure out where the food should come from-a jar, the vegetable bin, or one of the zillion new frozen options.

As the authors of The Complete Organic Pregnancy, we think that baby's spoon contents should be organic. We generally avoid jarred foods, because they are the least nutritious. "Jarred food is heavily cooked to avoid contamination," says pediatrician Michel Cohen, author of The New Basics. "It's processed food that stays in a jar." We don't like the idea of feeding our infants peas and carrots that are older than they are. (Make your own baby food with these easy-to-make puree recipes.)

This may be why there has been a run on freezer space at the supermarket these days, as organic-baby-food companies rush to create fresher prepared meals. Frozen often gets a bad rap. True, the most vitamin-packed way to feed your child is to give her "just-picked food out of the backyard," according to Alan Greene, M.D., author of Raising Baby Green: The Earth-Friendly Guide to Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Baby Care, but this obviously isn't always possible. And it turns out that fresh produce isn't necessarily more nutrient-rich than frozen. "Fresh is best when picked right away, but fresh in the supermarket, after being picked a month ago and traveling 3,000 miles across the country, may not be fresh," says Greene.

Shopping at local farmers' markets and making your own food is one way to circumvent this conundrum. Another is to buy these new flash-frozen (frozen immediately after harvesting) foods, which we had our daughters taste-test. "As with fish, if you flash-freeze, you keep the taste and the freshness and the nutrients, too," says Cohen.

We made our own early baby food (if you can call mashing up a banana, pureeing a baked sweet potato, or squishing an avocado "making" something). It's easy: no defrosting, and no guilt over adding baby-food packaging to overflowing landfills. But even though making single-food purees is simple and quick, most of today's busy moms lack the time to do this for every feeding. Plus, you may want your child to have some multi-ingredient purees, which take considerably more time to prepare. The next best thing to homemade is frozen baby foods. They can be paired as sauce with whole-wheat noodles for toddler-friendly fare and come in exciting flavor combinations, such as chickpea-eggplant-olive-fig.

Babies begin developing taste buds in utero, and busy parents shouldn't have to miss out on exposing their kids to a wide variety of flavors. Experts suggest that such an early introduction could lead to more adventurous palates later on. "Even if an infant appears to be very picky, all kids go through neophobia, which is a fear of new food," says Sharon Akabas, Ph.D., director of Columbia University's master's program in nutrition. "It's natural. Parents should reintroduce foods periodically and never give up." (Combat picking eating later on in a child's life with these helpful strategies.)

And it's easy to reintroduce foods when they are already in your freezer-so no worries if they don't take to something now. "Food preferences can change over time, just as your taste in music changes," says Greene. "Most people don't like beer until they're older."

Baby-Food Taste Test: See which organic baby-food companies got the thumbs-up from our testers, 11-month-old Saoirse and 20-month-old Aili.

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