 EnviroCitizen.org wants to encourage you by letting you know that making your own baby food is a lot simpler than you might think. There are a lot of reasons to make your own baby food. To start, it's better for the environment. Baby food is produced in a factory somewhere and then it's shipped to grocery stores. All of that traveling adds up to a big carbon footprint. It's also better for you and your baby. By making your own baby food, you can control what goes into the food and what stays out of it. You don't need preservatives or other chemicals that are added to conventional baby food. You can choose whether you want your ingredients to be organic or local. Finally, making your own baby food is much more economical than buying it.
Even when you buy organic, local produce for your baby food, it's still substantially cheaper than buying baby food in jars. Homemade baby food is also just as transportable as jarred baby food. You can throw a frozen cube of baby food into any container and take it with you. By the time your baby is ready to eat, the cube will have thawed and it'll be ready to go! Making your own baby food also means that your baby will be exposed to more tastes and textures than if he or she were only eating jarred baby food. When it comes to jarred baby food, regardless of the company, you'll find that your options are limited. Most companies make less than ten different kinds of baby food flavors and likely, you'll find the usual suspects on the shelf: bananas, apples, peas, carrots, sweet potatoes, pears and some kind of bean. There are so many more foods out there! By making your own baby food, you can expose your baby to dozens of different tastes and textures, instead of the ten or so options that you'll find on the shelf. This will enable your baby to gain a complex palette. Many experts have determined that the more tastes and textures an infant is exposed to in the first year of life, the more developed and diverse their palette will be, leading to a greater interest in trying new foods later in life.
Making your own baby food really is simple. You buy whatever fruit or vegetable you want your baby to eat, then you prepare it and puree it. Depending on the age of your baby, you can adjust the amount of water or breast milk that you add to the puree. As your baby gets older, you can start combining foods, such as apples and sweet potatoes or pears and oatmeal. The sky is the limit when it comes to making your own baby food!
If you decide to make your own baby food, decide what kind of a schedule works best for you. You can either make it monthly, weekly or daily while you make your own meals. It's as simple as that. You'll save yourself money, you'll reduce your impact on the environment and you'll have total control over what your child eats. EnviroCitizen.org believes that those are benefits worth the little extra effort it will take!
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