We are, thank heaven, fairly recently out of the baby food stage here – my one year old now eats whatever we eat with gusto, although I do swap out, say, snow peas for regular peas for his dinner and keep vigilant watch for “chokeables.”
But “what to feed the baby” is high on my list of things I didn’t stress about with my second child near as much as I did with my first. Thank goodness, too, because I suspect it’s going to become the next big competitive parenting thing (if it isn’t already). Exhibit A –this story from the Washington Post last week about homemade baby food. While it’s a good read and full of interesting information, there’s that ever-so-slight air of “You feed your baby store-bought food in jars? How déclassé and bourgeois of you!”
And yes, I did feed mine store-bought food in jars.
The article quotes Eric Ripert and Tony Bourdain, who cite things like free-range chicken and wild nettle risotto as favorites for their kids. Okay, fine, they are professional chefs. But at least in my boring stretch of the Midwest it’s become a hipster parent cliché to brag about how much your toddler loves sushi and Thai food and your child making the acquaintance of the McNugget is equivalent to copping to never reading to him.
That said, I’m eager to try the recipes that accompany the article. Curry chicken? Mexican beans and rice? Yum! These are things all four of us would eat, especially since I am trying to get my spicy-food-hating daughter to get accustomed to the flavor of spices that aren’t hot.
I’m all for giving kids more adventurous palates –I married into a family where no one save my husband will ever eat at a non-chain restaurant if they can help it, and let’s stamp that out of the gene pool as soon as possible. But can we all acknowledge it’s enough to feed them wholesome, healthy food without striving to turn them into culinary adventurers before they can cut up their own meat?
