Are you considering making your own baby food?  The benefits are many! Making your own baby food is a great way to save money, reduce food packaging waste, and provide fresh, flavorful food for your baby.

However, it can also be frustrating and time consuming. On the one hand, cooking in small, baby sized batches can be inefficient and wasteful (are you sure you want your oven on for an hour to cook one sweet potato?), but on the other, making larger batches, which saves time, leaves less room for variety.

One great answer to this conundrum is the baby food swap. Baby food swapping is a movement that is brilliant in its simplicity and effectiveness. Basically, parents make a whole lot of one or two baby food purees and swap the excess with other parents so they come home with many different baby food dishes.

Mom and food writer Karen Solomon writes about her experience starting a baby food swap in her article, “How Hosting a Babyfood Swap Saved My Sanity and Fed My
Child,” on Shareable.net.

She touches on the joys of swapping quantity for variety and the side benefits of socializing with other parents, as well as some of the nitty-gritty issues (do I trust a stranger to cook for my baby?) and logistics.

So the next time you find yourself with a fridge full of pureed sweetpotatos and your baby has that glazed look in his eye, you may want to consider participating in a baby food swap!