Twins Blog: Organic Baby Food

May 27, 2011, By Josh Katzowitz 4 comments

Josh Katzowitz

By contrast, my eating habits suck. They’ve sucked most of my life. Like many of my peers growing up in the 1980s and '90s, I ate plenty of sugared cereal as a kid (not the worst of the worst like Cocoa Krispies and Count Chocula and Fruit Loops, but Cinnamon Toast Crunch isn’t exactly the paragon of a healthy breakfast). I ate Lunchables during middle school, and in high school I ate too many fried platters and drank too many empty-calorie fruit drinks (does anybody remember Fruitopia?).

In college, I ate too much fast food and too much Hamburger Helper (though I somehow managed to escape the Ramen craze). I grazed at a proverbial processed foods buffet—multiple times a week.

The past few years, my wife and I have made positive changes in our diets, though I had much further to go than her. She reads all of Michael Pollan’s books (hey, I’ve read half of one. Not too shabby). We watched the movie Food Inc. We shop at local farmers markets when we can. I’ve started buying grass-fed beef. I’ve tried to cut out sodium as much as possible (whatever will I do without my beef jerky and canned soups?).

I want my kids eating healthy right from the beginning. They’ve done so well already, since spending the first six weeks of their lives in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. They emerged from the womb at two pounds, 14 ounces (Noah) and two pounds, seven ounces (Stella), and we were told it could take as long as two years before they caught up on the growth chart.

But at their six-month doctor’s visit, they made their “normal” growth chart debut for head size, height and weight. I give the credit to my wife—she’s still breast-feeding twins seven months into their lives—and with our decision to give our kids organic products, we want them to continue on that march toward healthy living.

Look, it’s not that I’m snobby, though I imagine that’s how I’m presenting myself. I know plenty of parents who blow the budget on healthy food for their children while shoveling less-costly--and probably less-nutritious--foods into their own gullets because that’s the best they can afford. Their kids are too important to go cheap with their eats.

That’s my opinion, as well, snobby or not. So, we spend $6 for a gallon of organic milk. We splurge on the industrial-sized container of organic animal crackers. We pay $2 more a pound to buy the fruit that the USDA has deemed pesticide-free.

Basically, it boils down to this: we don’t want their eating habits to suck, and we don’t want them ingesting processed foods into their developing bodies. We want them to eat organic, and we want them to eat healthy. They’re too important for us not to spend the money.

For some reason, I just don’t see Lunchables in their future.