The Ballad of the Banana and B...personal account by Amanda

For anyone who knows my daughter Bridget, it seems impossible to think that bananas were ever a questionable part of her diet. They were her first safe food and still they are her first choice for any meal. (I swore for a long time that she was secretly a little
monkey. . . ). But they certainly weren't a clear pass and it took much tinkering with her beloved bananas before the love between baby and banana was mutual.

It started with Gerber. We were living overseas and qualified for WICO (similar to WIC but run by the Department of Defense). Through WICO, we got TONS of free baby food. I had fully intended on making my own but I thought I would try the Gerber and perhaps alternate between the two (I hate turning down free stuff!). She loved bananas from the get go, but after months of other food fails, worries about cross contamination and never any baseline in sight. . . we reconsidered whether or not free is always best. I stored up the Gerber food for donating and began my homemade baby food quest, which at that point only required one recipe. Bananas!

I picked some up at the local Japanese fruit market, made sure they were nice and brown speckled, and mashed them. She vehemently refused them. Since she already had texture issues going on, we chalked it up to this. But once she did eat the bananas (watered down with breast milk), we were met with lots of diarrhea, rashes and a very fussy baby. I was puzzled. So my friend K suggested cooking them. Really? I thought. Well, I broke out the skillet, sliced the banana lengthwise and cooked it on low heat until it was brown and syrupy. She absolutely loved it and gobbled it right up BUT the next day found us deep in diarrhea yet again. UGH. Since we had already had some delayed reactions under our belt, bananas were starting to make me wonder. Again, I talked to my friend K and she suggested changing the pan. I had been using the same skillet that my husband and I used for eggs, his bacon, grilled cheese. . .etc. (We have since had egg, pork, and wheat fails. Dairy is a big question mark.) And of course it was washed between uses and washed well, but you know how some foods leave a tiny, tiny residue? For us, this residue was just enough. I went out and bought Bridget her own skillet and voila! Happy baby, eating happy cooked bananas and no unhappy nappies!!!!

This experience really opened my eyes to trace contamination and how sensitive these little ones can be to changes in food proteins. From that point on, I cooked everything for her, whenever we would trial foods, even if they weren't foods typically cooked. We also use her own specific cookware and utensils. It by no means saved us from fails, minor or severe, but I do think it helped us to find foods that might not have been tolerated otherwise, such as pears for instance. At 21 months, I can now give her as much as 1/3 of a raw banana or a few slices of a fresh pear without any trouble, but if I increase the amount or give her that much every day, she has diarrhea, trouble absorbing foods and is miserable for a few days.

As parents, I think it is important to find our child's threshold for a food, if it can at all be a pass. Sometimes we get lucky and all we have to do is change our food preparation and the ways we think about serving foods to our children.