Hooray for home made baby food!

Butternut squash is one of Zeke's ultimate favorite foods. Even as we're moving away from purees and into more solid foods, Zeke is pretty picky about the texture of his food, and we find that mixing grains and such with some butternut makes it more palatable. I also use butternut puree to bake Zeke's butternut squash muffin bites, which are a most healthy snack that he LOVES like it's candy.

Since we always make our own baby food, I don't usually give it much thought, but today I was curious how much it would cost to buy baby food jars of butternut squash if we didn't have time to make our own. The cost difference shocked me. I bought 3 organic butternut squashes from the farmer's market yesterday. My total cost was just over $10. I baked them in the oven last night, scooped out the cooked squash, pureed it in a food processor, and transferred it to storage containers. I wound up with close to 100 oz of puree. That's 10 cents an ounce for organic butternut squash.

Next I looked up baby food on Amazon.com. Amazon tends to have decent prices on things so I thought that would be a good comparison. One thing I discovered is that most baby food manufacturers don't offer straight butternut squash. It's butternut and apples, or butternut and corn. When I finally found a straight butternut squash, I found 2.5 Ounce Jars (Pack of 12) for $12.50. That's 42 cents an ounce. 4 times the cost of my homemade, and theirs isn't even organic! Now for a secondary comparison, I did find Canned Organic Butternut Squash in 15-Ounce Cans (Pack of 12) for $28.32. That's 16 cents an ounce for large cans, which is a much better price. But canned goods are lined with BPA, so we would be feeding him a hefty dose of BPA with his butternut. And it's still a good deal more expensive than the tasty homemade stuff. So I will have to say I'm feeling pretty good about my efforts today.

If you want to make your own pureed squash (butternut, acorn, pumpkin), wholesome baby foods has a good tutorial.