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11/05/06 // Baby (food) geniusesFrom the Orange County Register
The latest trendy infant meals are organic and refrigerated or flash-frozen. But will they make tykes healthier?
By LISA LIDDANE
The Orange County Register
Matthew Lepper is an organic gourmet in training.
For lunch, he’ll sample a puree of organic carrots, apples and tofu. For dinner, it’ll be organic pasta marinara. A specialty food company in Los Angeles prepares his meals without artificial ingredients or fillers, packs them in jars and delivers them chilled to Matthew’s doorstep in Orange.
By the way, Matthew is 10 months old.
He belongs to a growing coterie of young consumers who eat refrigerated or flash-frozen organic meals – the newest trend in baby food.
Some parents say the convenience is essential when busy Mom and Dad lack the time or culinary confidence to make Junior’s meals from scratch. Others say it’s an example of parents’ food anxiety gone overboard.
Not Matthew’s mom. “I did a lot of reading on baby foods and I wanted to start him out on the right foot from the very beginning,” says Valerie Lepper, 40, convention services manager for the Anaheim Visitor & Convention Bureau. “I bought a couple of books on making my own baby food and I was totally into it. My problem was time. I work full time, so I don’t have the time to prepare and freeze food in ice-cube trays.”
Enter the new organic baby food generation. In the past year, half a dozen companies, including Baby Cubes & More, Bohemian Baby, Happy Baby, Homemade Baby and Plum Organics, have launched flash-frozen or refrigerated renditions of infant and toddler meals made entirely from organic ingredients. These are foods that, by federal law, are grown without use of pesticides and prepared without chemicals and artificial ingredients.
What separates them from purveyors of conventional jarred organic baby food is their claim to less processing and, therefore, to more freshness, better flavor and perhaps more nutrients. The new products are meant to be eaten within weeks, not months.
As a result, the companies say, the taste buds of babies who eat these organic foods will be programmed to seek that which is fresh and healthier.
The refrigerated or flash-frozen organic baby foods are also pricier, sometimes up to three times more than jarred organic food.
‘Yoga Mommies’
The companies’ timing appears on target. And right in the bull’s-eye are Yoga Mommies and their Hipster Babies, demographic groups named by Packaged Facts, a consumer market research firm. The company, in a recent report, described the market force this way:
“Today’s children are the most pampered generation, thanks in part to their Yoga Mommies, who pay premium prices for everything from cribs and strollers to clothes and bedding.”
The company says such spending helped to boost the overall sales of baby accoutrements to more than $8 billion in 2005, up by 5.2 percent from a year earlier.
The mind-set applies to baby food as well, specialty grocers say.
“Organic baby food is probably one of the fastest-growing categories in our stores,” said Mo George-Payette, a director and buyer for Mother’s Market, a Costa Mesa-based group of specialty grocery stores.
It’s about convenience, adds Robin Rogosin, regional buyer for the southern Pacific region for Whole Foods Market. “Parents do not have to stand over the stove, prepare the vegetables, steam them, puree them, pour them into trays and freeze them.”
Value is relative
But organic baby food makers say the common denominator among their customers is a belief in the value of organic food, not affluence.
Parents are willing to pay more if they believe they’re getting something better that will benefit their children, says Gigi Lee Chang, the Huntington Beach-raised founder of Plum Organics in New York.
“Take the Bugaboo stroller,” Chang says. “There have been $900 strollers around, but what was unique about (the Bugaboo) was the value for the modern-day mom. It’s functional and stylish at the same time. I think the same is true for organic baby food. Parents see value in it.”
Parents who buy organic baby food come from many walks of life, says Theresa Kiene, who with her husband founded Homemade Baby in Los Angeles. Kiene says her customers will find a way to fit organic baby food into their budgets, even if it means cutting back on something else.
“Yes, I have seen nannies of famous celebrities come in and buy the baby food,” Kiene says. “But a janitor walked into our baby food tasting room and introduced me to his son. He had done his research on baby food. He had his baby taste our food. He lives pretty far away and doesn’t have it sent to him. He comes into our baby food tasting room and picks it up.”
Anni Daulter, co-founder of Bohemian Baby in Los Angeles, says this is what she and her customers believe: “Babies are pure things. They need to have the best possible foods, not foods sprayed with pesticides.”
Pesticide worries
More research is emerging to shed light on whether organic food makes a difference.
A study led by Chensheng Lu, assistant professor at the department of environmental and occupational health at Emory University in Atlanta, concluded that organic food given to children provides a “dramatic and immediate protective effect” against exposure to two commonly used agricultural pesticides: malathion and chlorpyrifos. Lu and his colleagues measured the levels of these two pesticides in the urine of 23 Seattle children ages 3 to 11. The tests looked for pesticides during periods when the children were given nonorganic food and, again, when they ate food the testers deemed organic.
Concentrations of pesticides in the kids’ urine dropped dramatically to undetectable levels when the children ate organic food, according to Lu.
The National Academy of Sciences reported in 1993 that children eat more of certain foods relative to their body weight than do adults, and that the amount of pesticides children ingest may be proportionally higher than that of adults. That, in turn, may increase risk of cancer.
“These chemicals are designed to poison the nervous systems of insects so they can’t eat the food while it’s growing,” says Dr. Bob Sears, a San Clemente-based physician who is a member of the nationally known Sears family of pediatricians. “An infant’s developing nervous system is also susceptible to pesticides. In my opinion, even a little bit of poison is too much for a growing brain.”
Your baby eats what?
Not everyone agrees that organic is the best route to go.
Parenting writers such as Paula Spencer, columnist for Women’s Day magazine and author of “Momfidence!: An Oreo Never Killed Anybody and Other Happy Secrets of Parenting,” say organic baby food is turning into another issue that divides mothers, much like debates about spanking or breast-feeding.
“Organics,” Spencer says, “is just the latest hysteria.”
At some moms’ message boards, such as at urbanbaby.com, organic baby food has become a topic of mommy anxiety and contention. A wide range of posters debate what babies should eat and drink.
One poster commented: “Any mom who feeds her kids organic food and doesn’t watch TV thinks she is better than you.”
Another poster asked: “Doesn’t it boggle your mind when people are cheap about little things? I know a woman who bought a Bugaboo, designer clothes for dc (dear child), etc., etc., but won’t buy organic milk for her kids because it’s ‘too expensive.’ So idiotic.”
Spencer says some moms should chill out.
“Moms who are strict about giving their babies only organic are in for a rude awakening when their kids grow up, start playing with other kids, and go to school.” When it comes to food and kids, being too restrictive can backfire on parents and make their toddlers more obsessive about “banned” foods, she adds.
Her suggestion: Eat healthy foods most of the time, but don’t make a big deal about the occasional cookie.
Sue Freck, a registered dietitian and director of clinical nutrition at Children’s Hospital of Orange County in Orange, agrees that parents should relax. “There is not anything solid (from the government) that organic is healthier than conventionally grown and marketed baby foods.” Parents, she says, should focus instead on giving their infants and toddlers a “diversity of fruits and vegetables,” and that they should be good role models about eating.
“The bottom line is that jarred and processed baby foods made of conventionally grown ingredients are absolutely fine, and organic is fine, too … . But nobody should feel guilty about not using organic foods.”
Contact the writer: 714-796-7854 or lliddane@ocregister.com