This is a story of a woman who wanted to make healthy food for her baby, and also wanted to sleep. She formed a group of like minded parent who each made a big batch of one kind of food and shared it with the group. This idea works for baby food, soup, casseroles, you name it. If anyone in the Santa Rosa area wants to try this, I'm in.
How do you create and host a local babyfood exchange?The concept is familiar; we simply followed the model of a soup swap that I attended last winter and cookie swaps I’ve attended in the past. In a nutshell: everyone makes a whole lot of one thing, we meet at one place and time, and we trade, resulting in variety and bounty for all. But unlike other food swaps I have attended in the past, feeding babies has a gravitas, a responsibility and depth beyond the typical potluck. And to share this intimate parental responsibility with our community took the idea of a food trade to a whole new level.
Here’s how it worked in the authors own words:
I contacted 18Reasons, my local non-profit food and arts space. (Certainly not everyone has one of these around the corner, but a home or a local park or community center would also suffice.) I chose Fridays as the gathering day, thinking that’s when stay-at-home parents and those who worked part-time are most likely be home. I chose 11:00 in the morning as a good time to catch 6-12 month-old babies awake and jolly.
I sent an email out to all of the parenting listserves announcing the event, asking everyone to bring themselves, their babies, and ten one-cup containers of homemade, organic babyfood ready-to-swap. Together, we sipped tea, nibbled muffins, and affixed labels with contents and dates. We eyeballed each other’s little ones and had the usual parental chit-chat about sleep, diet, crazy kid behavior, etc.
Best of all, I arrived with ten cups of mashed roasted pears (from a friend’s tree), lentils, and brown rice, and I left with a dietary plethora for my baby to enjoy for the next month: brown rice, caramelized onions, and curried lentils; roasted chicken, spinach, and rice; yam and apple; quinoa, zucchini, and white beans among them. Bonus points to some attendees, like Savet Doherty, there with her 8-month-old son, Finn, who brought food made with apples from her own tree that if not prepared in bulk, “would otherwise have gone to waste”, and the woman who’d included winter greens from a visit to a local farm. My finely-chopped gold was taken home, served immediately, and much of it frozen for later use.
And the benefits of the food swap continue to manifest. As usual, the strength of the community is far greater than the sum of its parts. Each family saves time in the kitchen: If I’m steaming green beans and cooking oatmeal, it’s almost the same amount of effort to make two- or three-times my usual amount. Our kids don’t get sick of our own cooking. Many parents, such as Doherty, are “blown away by whole new combinations of things I hadn’t even considered,” – such as millet, cottage cheese, and carrot – “because I had only ever before seen babyfood on the shelf.”
As a result, the babies also end up eating better. If we have delicious homemade food on-hand, we time-pressed caregivers are less likely to reach for expensive, less-nutritious tiny store-bought jars, boxes of instant cereal, or jarred applesauce.
But perhaps the greatest gift exchanged here was meeting like-minded parents who share the same values. Together, we hashed out when/if we’d start feeding our children whole eggs, nuts, wheat, or other common allergens. We pondered the tome of cooking for infants and toddlers, Super Baby Food, and other cookbooks. With our food processors revved into overdrive, we tackled the importance of feeding our children the best food we could possibly conjure and the challenges of life with a young family.
Read entire article at shareable.net
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