Baby jar foods

[Blueone]

I'm on WIC and when my son turns 6 months we'll start getting jarred food. I plan on buying organic, but I'm still wary about jar foods. I had planned on just making my own food.

So, are jar foods really that bad if they're organic?

[Harmony08]

One thing to know is that Earth's Best organic jarred baby food contains BPA. Most jarred baby foods do. The BPA is on the plastic lining on the top. I fed my son a lot of this before I found out. Gerber has an organic line in plastic which they claim is BPA free and safe. I switched to those when I needed jarred food (at the beach, for emergencies, etc). I made food and gave him the bought stuff when I needed to. I would have rather made him all the food but you do what you can.

[FernG]

Baby foods are just dead, factory, canned foods.

We let DD feed herself table foods instead. She didn't eat enough to change her poop until after 10 months and she had some months where she would go back to EBF (11 and 14 months). She grew significantly while being EBF at 14 months. She eats great variety now! I'm so happy with her eating habits. She loves fermented foods, veggies, berries, beans, spicy foods, kombucha, and sour breads.

It was so, so easy to skip the baby food and just trust DD to feed herself what we offered on her own time. My DH is totally sold on baby-led solids now and tries to convert his friends.

[Karamom]

You can organic baby food with your WIC? Your lucky I can only buy conventional.

I'm not a big fan of purees and I do baby led solids but since we are on a very tight budget I still get the WIC baby food and I mix it into our meals such as added to muffins or waffles. Last night I mixed sweet potatoes in with our meat loaf.

I know it is a processed food but I figure there is a little nutrition in them that can enhance our food and I like hiding them in foods 3yr old ds eats because he is really picky.

This might not be ok with everyone but I feel like it works for us and helps me stretch the food budget. The rest of our diet is very unprocessed and it does make me feel better that the ingredients on the bfood says "bananas, water, vit c" so I still feel it is better than most processed food.

[sewchris2642]

When I was on WIC, I just skipped those checks and didn't use them. WIC has to give you the checks; you don't have to redeem them. Just throw them away when they expire and go ahead and make baby food. Although, ime, the pureed food stage only lasted a couple of months. You could just as easily skip it all together and go to table food when your lo is interested in solid food.