Thistle Baby: The Best Choice for Your Baby’s Health

by Margeaux Vittoria

Making homemade baby food is not easy. The process of selecting and purchasing organic produce, bringing it home, washing, peeling, and chopping it, and then steaming or cooking it and portioning it into baby-friendly containers is labor-intensive to say the least. In fact, it’s nearly a part-time job! However, the benefits of homemade baby food can’t be underestimated. What’s a parent with other responsibilities to do?

That’s where Thistle Baby comes in. It’s meal prep for your baby! We purchase and completely prep the most nutrient-dense organic produce available and deliver it flash-frozen to your door, setting you up to jump right in for the ‘fun part’ of making homemade baby food — cooking it and feeding it your baby! We’re interested in optimizing nutrition from Day 1, so to speak, and we’re conscious that healthy habits and tastes begin at a very young age. Here are our five favorite reasons for committing to homemade baby food:

Homemade baby food is far more nutrient-dense. Jars and pouches of store-bought baby food are processed at extremely high heats in order to make them shelf-stable for months. This processing unfortunately ends up stripping the food of nutrients and decreasing the quality of the food itself. Gently steaming fresh produce at home helps to maintain vitamin content and ensures that your baby is getting the benefits that fruits and vegetables offer in the first place.

Homemade baby food accustoms your baby to a far wider variety of tastes and textures. Store-bought baby food is incredibly homogenous in texture, and although many labels now list ‘exotic’ flavors like ginger and turmeric, one taste of most jars or pouches reveals a single-note, overarching theme — bland and sweet. Teach your baby to enjoy a wide variety of flavors and textures — and quell the desire for sugar — by creating unique homemade baby foods. Doing so will also make the transition to table food much easier for you and your baby as well.

Homemade baby food is better for the environment. Avoid throwing away packaging every time you feed your baby by prepping your own food and storing it in reusable containers. Ice trays and food storage containers that you probably already have in your kitchen work well for refrigerating or freezing baby food and they won’t end up in a landfill after meal time. This is a simple way to begin teaching the importance of care for the environment to your children at a young age.

Many baby foods are made with concentrates and contain fillers and preservatives. Unfortunately, many commercial baby foods are prepared from highly-processed fruit and vegetable ‘concentrates’, resuscitated with water and propped up by starches, thickeners, and fillers. The resulting food is far removed from its original state, even though the package may have an image of a whole apple or banana on the front. When you prepare your own baby food, you know exactly what goes into it and how it was prepared, which is far from true when it comes to store-bought.

Homemade baby food is more affordable. Ounce for ounce, when you compare organic, high-quality store-bought baby food (which is the only product even somewhat comparable to homemade food) to homemade baby food, the latter is cheaper every time. If you can pay less for a better quality product prepared with your own oversight and care, why wouldn’t you?

If time has been the main hurdle preventing you from exploring homemade baby food, let Thistle Baby be your solution. The benefits of homemade baby food are undeniable and the process itself can be easy and fun once the ‘grunt work’ is taken care of for you!