As I've mentioned before, since my first child, I've learned better, more affordable ways to raise my kids. Another major way we are saving money the second time around is by making our own baby food. Now, don't cringe. I'm going to illustrate how this is easy, healthier for baby and kinder to your wallet.
First, I want to put some perspective on store bought baby food. Even at the best price (occasionally grocery stores will sell the packs 10 for $10), they cost about 20 cents an ounce. For instance, each two-pack of Gerber, on sale 10 for $10, are 5 oz each. So, that's 5 ounces of food for a dollar, or 20 cents an ounce. Okay, if you multiply that by one gallon, you discover that baby food costs at minimum $25.60 a gallon!!!
(And if you consider how much you buy in a year, on average if you use two to four of these little baby food containers a day, then that's at best $1-2 a day, or $365-$730 a year just on baby food containers, but probably more because as baby grows, they eat more and the containers cost more and we're not always lucky enough to get them on sale.)
Now, how many of you tend to "thicken your baby food" with rice cereal or oatmeal? Well, when you do that, you are increasing the cost of your baby's meal even more. So, why do we even have to do that? Well, because baby food companies actually water down the food. This makes them less nutritious and it also means that a decent portion of that $25.60 per gallon you are paying is actually going toward water.
Dr. Daryth Stallone and Dr. Michael Jacobson state in research findings on this topic that,
"Gerber and Heinz add substantial amounts of water and thickening agents (flours and chemically modified starches) to more than half of their twenty-five most popular fruits, mixed and creamed vegetables, desserts, and dinners for babies over six months (second- and third-stage foods). Not only are those products a monetary rip-off, they are also nutritionally inferior to similar products made without fillers. Gerber and Heinz' bananas with tapioca, for example, contain less than half of the levels of nutrients found in their plain first-stage bananas. Gerber and Heinz' regular dinners, which contain at least two types of refined flour as thickeners, provide less than 50% of the nutrient levels found in comparable dinners."
Beech Nut, Growing Healthy and Earth's Best do a better job at this, but making your own is still the best way and I'll explain how and why in Part 2 of this post.
Commercial baby food brands market their products to mom's by making claims that they are specially formulated to give your baby the best nutrition and this just simply is not the case. Real, whole food is the only thing "specially formulated" for our kids. In order to give your baby the nutrition he or she truly needs from commercial baby food, you would have to feed them at least twice as much.
So let's look at real, whole food and compare quality, quantity and cost. Let's take and 8 oz sweet potato or yam. Sweet potatoes and yams are super foods. They are rich in nutrients and great for baby. They're also one of baby's first foods, so a good place to start. Ok, let's boil that sweet potato. Now it has perhaps doubled or maybe even tripled in volume, creating well over a pound of food. On average, sweet potatoes cost about $1.00 per pound at the grocery store, or about $1.50 per pound for organic. So, you just produced 16-24 ounces of cooked, nutritious food for about 50 to 75 cents. 16-24 ounces of Gerber Sweet Potatoes would cost you about $3.00 to $5.00.
And, a 2 ounce serving of cooked sweet potatoes contains almost 200% of our daily allowance of Vitamin A, 16% of our daily allowance of Vitamin C, 2% of Calcium and Iron, 6.5% of our daily dietary fiber, 2% of our protein, 7% of our potassium, and 30 mg of Omega 6 fatty acids.
A 2 ounce serving of Gerber Sweet Potatoes has about the same in Vitamin A, which tells you they may be pumping it back in, 0% of our Vitamin C, 0% of Calcium, 0% of Iron, 2% of protein (again, putting it back in?), about 6% of our potassium, and they say nothing about Omega 6 fatty acids.
In my next post, I'm going to talk about making your own baby food at home. Max is about 5 months old now and I've already saved so much money and I know that what I'm giving him is truly nutritious and it hasn't really cost me that much extra time at all. And that's important, because extra time is worth more than money to a busy mom.
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