I'm Slightly Jealous of My Baby's Food

At 10 months, her palate is more sophisticated than mine was as a teenager

There is something in my fridge right now called “Adzuki Mushroom Soup.” The ingredients on the label are: adzuki bean, mushrooms, onions, carrot, tomato, nutritional yeast, and tarragon. Give me access to some seasonings and those ingredients sound like the makings of a fucking delicious lunch.

There’s only one problem: it’s baby food. Same thing goes for the black bean and farro cubana bowl, the apricot crumble, and the ancient grain banana cream pie.

Baby food has come a long way since it was the food of choice for Y2K-era high school girls who read online that eating it instead of a regular adult-sized lunch would help them get Christina Aguilera’s abs in time for prom. (The Y2K era was an incredibly messed up time to be a teenage girl, apropos of nothing.)

There are options now for parents that fall in between the convenient-but-preservative-filled little jars of food at the grocery store and making one’s own baby food at home, something often embarked on with the kind of quixotic hope that motivates some somewhat crunchy parents to consider cloth diapers or a home birth. I never entertained the fantasy that I’d find the time to make my own baby food. At least, not while I was caught in the neverending churn of the life of a freelancer and there were still only 24 hours in a day.

So every week, the baby gets a delivery of moderately fancy baby food and smoothies. And not only is it better than the little glass jars of pureed carrots and prunes I’m sure most millennial adults were fed as infants, I’m actually a little jealous of what she gets to eat. That’s one perk of being born into a dying world– the baby food options are better now than they’ve ever been in human history. Sorry about the glaciers, little one! Here’s a white bean salad made with coconut milk and cacao!

The boxes even come addressed to her. Almost to add insult to injury. You might want this, Mom, but this Jon & Vinny’s chef collab is for babies only.

I thought I ate well. My husband cooks, I cook. Some of our best times together have been spent preparing and enjoying dinners we’ve made for each other.

During the day, however, I still eat so poorly that I’d probably benefit from intervention. I don’t really eat full meals before dinner unless I’m hung over or traveling. Under normal circumstances I prefer to constantly graze. Because we don’t have any low-effort non-junk food available for me to snack on in the house, today I’ve had black coffee and a bowl of cereal that I ate piece by piece, without milk. It’s almost 1 pm.

Just a couple rooms away, the bottom shelf of the fridge brims with individually packaged tubs of possibility. If I only had a baby food subscription of my own, I could travel the world in purees. I could snack and snack on foods made of mostly fruits and vegetables and various grains. And I wouldn't feel like I feel right now, which is: hangry.

No more handfuls of stale walnuts I bought six months ago because I was going to bake something with them and then forgot. No more week-old rotisserie chicken eaten by hand. My body would be shocked by the uptick in quality of food I was sending it.

“Legumes?” my stomach would say to my mouth in disbelief. “Before 7 pm? Is she traveling? Did my cell phone not automatically reset to a new time zone?”

The baby doesn’t appreciate her food as much as I do. Only about half of it even makes it to her mouth, and some of it she’d rather play with than eat. The beet hummus, for example, quickly became high chair paint. The overnight oats with açai were much more interesting to roll around between her fingers than to provide her tiny little body with fiber.

I have temporarily sated my curiosity by having bites of baby food while I’m feeding my daughter. I don’t even have to sneak; she loves to put a spoonful of food in my mouth and laugh about it between bites (I truly don’t get this new Generation Alpha humor.) None of it has tasted bad. It’s all passable, and what it lacks in spice, salt, and sweetness it makes up for with wholesomeness. It’s like mediocre vegan food in that way.

And don't even get me started on the smoothies. It hurts my heart that I can't walk around with a little pouch of sugar-free peachy yogurt parfait in my purse and take a quick hit of it like it's a vape pen whenever I need a sweet treat. Can we normalize adult smoothie pouches? It's much healthier and less humiliating than standing in a long line at a Jamba Juice.

Maybe next shipment I’ll order a few more portions than usual. At least then I won’t need to sit here fantasizing about baby ratatouille. I’ll have my own.

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