I think the math on this one was particularly poorly done. Even if you can find bananas on sale for less, what about the costs of the milk or formula? That’s not even mentioned, which makes the figure of $0.50 seem like it was just pulled out of the air.

From the AAP:
Some commercially prepared infant food vegetables are voluntarily monitored for nitrate content by private industry, including spinach, squash, and carrots.

I hope you people who “know everything that’s in your food” also knew it’s not a good idea to feed your baby most types of carrots and beets. These foods can be incredibly high in nitrates and not a good thing to prepare on your own for your child. Baby food companies specially process (oh no, not process!) these foods so that they’re safe for your infant.

One of the perks of making your own food not mentioned here is that there is less food/money wasted if you make your own in small amounts, to test and see if your child will even eat the food you made. If you buy a jar of something that your child refuses to eat not matter what, that whole jar is wasted. If you make a small sample of something, and your child hates it, you can just chop up the rest and use it in your grown-up food.

When I was making baby food for my daughter, I knew several other people who were making baby food too. We traded little frozen samples of pureed veggies we’d made. This is how I learned that my daughter hated broccoli puree (though she LOVES broccoli as a toddler), but loved parsnip puree. This trading saved all of us food-makers time and money…

I suspect the issue isn’t with not knowing the ingredients list for commercial baby foods. Rather it is not knowing the source of those ingredients. For parents who only eat organic vegetables or humanely raised meat making homemade baby food would have a huge advantage. The possibly that a commercial baby-food maker applies the same standards when choosing ingredients as those parents would is incredibly slim.

@Lisa #6 – “To me, it doesn’t make sense to put a price of $8 per hour on your own time for making baby food but not for other “Saving Pennies or Dollars” topics such as making your own juice, grinding your own coffee or washing out ziploc bags.”

From what I have seen Trent always applies some minimal per hour rate to such tasks when determining if they are worthwhile or not. I don’t know if he has explicitly stated this for all of his Saving Pennies or Dollars topics, but he has mentioned applying such a minimum several times in the past, so it seems reasonable to assume they apply to these topics as well. I do know that he has calculated a per hour rate for washing ziploc bags. I checked and this was included in the Saving Pennies or Dollars article. He found that the savings rate of washing sandwich bags was not worth it, while the rate of washing gallon and quart bags was. Both did fall below the $8/hour rate, although gallon bags were close, but he also talks about the environmental impact of re-using the bags, so the decision obviously wasn’t entirely a financial based one.

Even if saving pennies is not deemed worthy of the time it takes to cook and prepare higher quality food, isn’t it a saving in the long run to do all we can to contribute to the immediate and eventual health of our children?

I never could agree with the feed your baby only x for a week to check for allergies. I’m pretty sure my adult body would react to a diet of x for a week, so I would expect an infants body to react to that overload. No wonder kids grow up hating veggies.

My son’s pediatrician was on board with eating from the table after we discussed our cooking habits etc. He was quite impressed when my son was dining on pheasant at 7 months.

When we had our first kid, I quickly got tired of buying tiny, expensive jars of bland baby food and bought a small baby food grinder. We’d just stick a little of what we were eating and grind it into a healthy mush. My kids are picky eaters, but I think it would have been a lot worse if they had been raised on that bland junk.

Honestly, using the little grinder was simply easier than carting around jars of baby food.