Steam fruits and veggies, puree, freeze in ice cube trays and then store in freezer bags until ready to serve. Works well for meats like chicken and turkey too. Mix and match flavors just like the store bought varieties. You can get a whole week (or even a month) of baby food very quickly and it will cost pennies compared to the commercial foods.

No other cooking is needed unless you want it warmed. Add water to thin the food consistency as prefered, use more to make juice. Plop the frozen food cubes in a small plastic containers and toss them in your baby bag for instant meals on the go.

1) that the lead is not entering the food chain upstream of the grocery store where one buys one's apples, sweet potatoes, rice, greens, or whatever one is purée-ing into one's own baby food. There's no reason to believe that the lead is a result of the factory process. Since industrial food processing machinery has been lead-free for far longer than the current equipment lifespan, there's little chance that the lead is coming from those stainless steel machines. Which means it's in the food chain. Therefore, unless one is in control of the whole watershed that waters one's garden plot and pasture, has 200 years of records on that land's uses, kept that land inside a glass bubble during the majority of the 20th century, controls the wind and precipitation on that land, and eats only from that improbable garden plot, there's a good chance the lead is coming from the food, not the packaging. Most of the environmental lead is due to lead particles from 20th century leaded gasoline settling into the soil, lead paint flaking off of buildings and fixtures and washing into the watershed, and industrial lead leaching out into watersheds and soil. If the lead is in the food chain, DIY baby food is also likely to contain lead, possibly at higher concentrations, since most households don't have the means to test every batch of food.

2) assumes that everyone has the time, skill and tools to make their own, and assumes that child carers are willing and able to accept whatever home-brew purée gets packed in the baby's bag. Just like day cares usually don't have the facilities to deal with cloth diapers and thus insist on disposables, they may insist on sealed, commercially jarred foods because there's far less of a chance of the far more common food-born illnesses in sealed jars, and less chance of the major allergens that can affect another child. Maybe the DIY hipster Wellness Mama Woo model works for highly privileged, affluent, stay at home parents with no commitments on their time, but most working parents at least occasionally need to use commercial foods, because most working parents don't have infinite time, skills, tools and resources, and because parents and infants may have to travel beyond their perfect little HGTV bubble. If you're evacuating with your baby due to flood, fire or earthquake, the frozen cubes of squash aren't going to be available at the Red Cross shelter after a day or so.

3) We should in fact be able to trust our food system. Would you prefer the tests never be done and/or the results not be published, or that we do the testing, find the source, and fix it? We can't fix it if we don't know it's happening. We can't know it's happening if we don't test.

True, I had a professional career and a family, but I found time to do the things that were important and make it work for me. I want clean food and I enjoy cooking from scratch, and I try to be frugal, objectives that seem to go and in hand. Since I retired, I worked to get my Master Food Preserver Certification and now I like teaching those skills to avid preppers, and the teens who just want to make pretty jars of marmalade as a gift for their mothers.

It's all good! I don't judge. To each their own path, yeah?

Unconscious bias is still bias. That is why I'm pointing out poverty-shaming.

80% of my public mental health clients were suffering primarily from situational depression -- they were too poor, too time-stressed, too unsupported and too tired to address their social and mental health. Most of what comes into public mental health offices is not mental illness -- it's social work that is so easy to address. Feed, shelter and clothe the children. Don't terrify their parents with the regular threat of eviction, loss of utilities or job/support loss, or losing custody because they're poor. And don't poison them. If 80% of the client load drops because we support families, we can address learning disabilities and trauma and repairing the experience of being poor and neglected by the greater society.

Food should be safe. It's that easy. This is an easy test and can be handled.

Need food processor. Make big batches, and it happens once a month. Then you control salt, sugar, etc. Notcso much not trusting. Just "not liking".

Personally, I'd like to know the levels of lead detected. We're good at it. Parts per trillion.

The food processor/freezer also assumes the home always has electricity, the freezer works, that the parents have the time, money, and energy to obtained fresh produce in a possible food desert, have located even a thrifted food processor that works, and ice cube trays, and have an extra 45 minutes a week to steam half a dozen vegetables in different pans, process them, and then clean up. And can bear the financial cost of losing all of that labor when the landlord's cheap, refurb freezer fritzes for the fourth time this year, or when the building loses power during a summer brownout, or when they have to balance the rent versus the electric bill too many times and gamble wrong. Being poor is not easy.

Not to mention cost. A pound of squash yields 12 ounces of cooked squash and four ounces of seeds and peel. 12 ounces of squash purée either fills or half-fills one ice cube tray. A pound of squash costs about $2. Apples run $2-3 per pound, with similar waste. Bananas don't freeze well. Carrots can be as low as $1 a pound, but more often are closer to 2. Spinach and kale run around $3, and a pound of spinach only produces 4 volume ounces of purée. Reusable plastic containers run about $1 each. Most baby food fruit and veg run between 4/$1 to 2/$1 depending on sales, and the jars are either 2 or 3 ounces. Someone who shops wisely or even averagely well will be able to buy more or the same quantity of jarred baby food for less money and time.

Versus having a stash of little jars that don't require refrigeration, that even bodegas stock, and are covered by WIC/EBT.

Poor parents are not bad parents. They're doing the very best they can with what little help we give. These parents are making very wise economic and time decisions, so stop shaming them for not being rich.

Baby food should be safe. We have a problem with lead in the food supply. We have to fix that.

Seriously, the privilege in this thread is just disgusting.

Costs nothing aside from feeding yourself and contains no lead whatsoever.

...budget when the 2 kids were babies. I was able to be home long enough that each was nursed for a year. After that it was single motherhood, preschool, and daycare, and an even lower budget.

But from the time they started eating solids, I fed them what I cooked for me and their dad minus salt and sugar. I had a small hand cranked baby food grinder that I used for meats, and a plain table fork I used for mashing vegetables and potatoes. Whoopee, expensive high tech back-to-the-Earth equipment.

I used expensive prepared baby food only for travel, and if I had learned that 20% was contaminated with lead, I wouldn't have done even that. Forty years ago I just knew it was expensive and likely to be "contaminated" with salt and sugar, neither of which babies need.

Politicat, what you're engaging in is a combination of class-warfare and shaming women for the choices they make or have forced upon them. ALL mothers do the best they can with what they have. While you say that, your real message is that those of us who are not absolutely destitute are "disgusting" because "privileged."

with most of these manufactured in Brazil and Mexico. Geebus,their ingredients are so damn contaminated with Herbicides and Pesticides that are illegal in the USA.

No baby food in any of our kids lives. Every single one of them raised on breast milk. She put up with years and years of it.