Baby food and the terrormoms

A terrormom email list I’m on has just spewed up the usual assortment of strident opinions about baby food. “Making your own is better, easier, cheaper, more nutritious, more varied.” “Only lazy people use premade.” We currently use a mix of premade and homemade, and we’re perfectly comfortable with that. Here’s some responses I didn’t send to the list:

Rational point: When you make your own food, plastic containers can leach small amounts of various chemicals into the food. Consider using glass containers if you want a more inert container.

As the terrormoms would put it: When you make your own food and put it in a plastic container for storage, you might as well be injecting your child with cancer. Use a glass container, or your child will probably die.

Rational point: Freezing food can reduce some nutritional value of the food. Include a mix of fresh foods along with the frozen foods.

As the terrormoms would put it: When you make your own food and freeze it for later use, it’s no better than your child eating styrofoam. I love my child, so I would never freeze her food.

Rational point: If you trust the baby food manufacturer, they may have better quality control over their sources than what you pick out at the supermarket. For example, you probably don’t test the rice you buy for arsenic levels.

As the terrormoms would put it: Foods from the supermarket are full of arsenic! I only grow my own ingredients, in dirt that has never been near a road or a house, using only filtered water. I make my child’s yogurt myself at home, using milk from my own organic cows and hand-selected bacterial cultures from my own skin. Our aquaculture setup actively filters out all contaminants, and we feed the fish nothing but proteins we have synthesized in our own home lab. After final inspection in a level-4 biohazard lab, the food is carefully pipetted into our child’s mouth in a slightly pressurized environment to ensure that no food spills onto external surfaces before being consumed. Because unlike you, I care about my child.