This weekend we offered Ingrid some baby food with chicken. She accepted it with great pleasure, and ate with more enthusiasm than she has shown towards my lovely vegetable purées recently. I have given birth to a meat eater!

(I have been a vegetarian for almost 15 years now, and Eric well over 10 years. I may eat a piece of fish occasionally, especially when we’re abroad and vegetarian food is hard to find, but that happens maybe once a month on average.)

The chicken smelled kind of gross, actually… I don’t think we’ll be buying that again any time soon. She can eat all the meat she wants at the nursery, but I’m not going to let any of that stinky stuff into my house if I can help it. This first time was only because the nursery staff will not experiment with food: they won’t feed her any kind of food that she hasn’t tried before. Now that she has tried chicken, she can eat some of their standard lunches. Once we’ve tried fish and pasta at home, she’ll be able to eat most (if not all) of their baby menu.

I wonder why she liked it so much, though. Possible explanations:

• They put some mysterious addictive substance in the baby food, that isn’t on the label. Like sugar.
• She just likes meat.
• She liked the more complex flavour. That jar contained more ingredients than three of her home-made meals do together.
• She liked the spices.

I think it may be time to get a bit more adventurous with her food. Mix it up, add some spices.