The dilemma about baby food

We are friends from college who started families around the same time. Both of us hoped to feed our kids whole foods with real flavors. As committed and adventurous home cooks, neither one of us planned on feeding our kids from a Gerber jar. As we started looking into home-cooked baby food traditions, we realized there was little information out there for moms ready to move beyond rice cereal and fruit purees. "Gourmet" baby food recipes were dumbed down versions of adult food, usually with less flavor. There were recipes that tried to hide vegetables in "kid-friendly" flavors like chocolate. There were recipes that made you fashion a medieval castle in order to convince your child to bite into it. Wasn't there anything out there for moms who already make homemade bread, cheese and preserves? Wasn't there anything for familes who don't eat "American" food every night? Wasn't there anything better than "recipes" for fruit salad? What do moms across the globe do? What are baby food folkways, both near and afar?

In pursuit of this information, we hit up university libraries, anthropology collections, and the medical literature. Information was scarce. We don't understand this culinary black-hole. A few theories:

1) across time, most cultures just fed kids what was fresh and available to everyone
2) female cultural practice, including the care and feeding of children, is not an area of interest in the academic patriarchy
3) information like this is likely part of an oral tradition, and indeed, the idea of a written recipe for adult food is fairly new
4) introduction of industrial baby food created a gaping abyss worldwide between generations of mothers
5) "making your own baby food" has been demonized as of questionable nutritional benefit and "too much work" for the busy modern mom

We searched high and low, and given the little information out there about traditional practice, defaulted into whole mashed food and raw food, planning to slowly introduced adult food and flavors. We believe there are moms out there who are interested in this information. Not for being "green" or trendy foodies, but because we are searching for a return to tradition and lost folkways after several generations of industrial brainwashing.

On this blog we are going to explore and post information on global baby food traditions. Using published literature and personal interviews, we will ask:

What are traditional first foods (the first things babies are fed)? At what age are they traditionally started on solids?
What are more "advanced" foods for infants and toddlers?
What foods are taboo and why?
What foods are considered health-promoting or medicinal?
What liquids are the babies given?
How and who feeds the baby? When is the baby expected to feed themselves?
What foods are "all-time baby favorites"?

We will also post on the care and feeding of our own children, currently 2 years old and 3 months. We are hoping to speak to moms who know their way around the kitchen, who believe in fresh, local food, who like to explore the world throught their cooking, and who want to create wholesome food traditions for their families.