I don't include much processed food in my own diet, and so I certainly didn't want to feed it to my toddler. With our lives moving at a fast pace, I knew that I needed to come up with some simple, healthy, toddler-tempting foods if I were to continue raising our daughter Sarina on a vegan diet and still have time for all the other activities that are important to me. Of course, now that shes' nearly two and a half, she eats just about whatever I've prepared for the family, but often she's hungry at other times, or I need something quick and easy to send along with her for a visit to the grandparents. It's funny to think about this now that our eating habits are so well established, but I never considered buying a jar of baby food, although I knew that there were some pure vegetarian choices available. To actually bring a jar into my house and serve it to my baby would have been almost as unlikely as serving her Spam.
Breast milk is the ultimate convenience food.
It has given me the peace of mind that regardless of how picky she might be on a particular day, or how little actually gets swallowed, breast milk is filling in the gaps. And while many vegan foods are high-fiber and lowfat and can fill up a toddler's tummy before she has consumed enough calories to meet her needs, breast milk is calorie dense and contains the important fatty acids crucial for brain development. When introducing new foods to Sarina, who is now struggling to be more independent, I get better results if I don't offer them directly to her. She almost always comes a-begging. Yet she continued to mooch from me because I was so absorbed in eating.