Sunday, February 3, 2013

Farm to Baby

Williamsburg, 2013


I was lucky enough to have coffee with the lovely Lauren Utvich of Farm to Baby this week.

Farm to Baby is a local service that delivers fresh baby food in Brooklyn and Manhattan. Lauren, who is a serious foodie, sources vegetables from local farms in the Hudson Valley, New Jersey, and Long Island, and makes seasonal baby fare with them. The menu changes each week and purees arrive by bike messengers in lovely little glass jars inside a cool, insulated pack. The service picks up the jars when you are finished so there's no waste in the process.

This week's offerings included carrots, sweet potato, turnip, and rutabaga and Lauren was nice enough to bring some samples for Axel to try (a roaring success.)

Our transition to solids has been mostly seamless, and I've been gamely making my own purees using whatever vegetables we have on hand and my immersion blender. The only hitch is that it's sometimes a messy process, and I'm not always able to get to a farmer's market or find an interesting range of things to blend. I haven't enjoyed the switch up as much as I might have, since I feel like I'm now worried about leaving breast milk and food for him during the week.

I first read about Farm to Baby when I was pregnant and thought: "Genius." As we've started to introduce Axel to food, I've instinctively avoided store bought options. Even the many organic options out there are often high in sugar content (since they use things like pears to mask the taste of things like spinach.)

So when I'm feeling overwhelmed by work or a particularly manic week, I love the idea of knowing that Axel's food is being prepared as I'd like to do it (in an ideal world.)

On our pediatrician's recommendation, we've avoided using baby cereals (on the basis that babies don't really need "white" food and benefit from early exposure to lots of flavors.) So Farm to Baby is a great way of keeping his taste buds on their toes. If taste buds have toes, that is.

Anything to keep me sane!

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