A Baby's First Foods

Breast milk should always be a baby’s primary food. They do not need any additional food until they are around 1 year old. Nor do they need vegetables as food. They can have a few bites at meals to explore and taste, but keep whatever you offer low oxalate and lectin-free. Fruit and honey can wait until the baby is much older. Neither is necessary, and both tend to make issues like eczema much harder to resolve. Wait until age 3 or older, and choose the older end of that range if yeast or eczema is present. Babies do not need seeds of any kind - this includes nuts, grains, and legumes. We should not introduce these until the child is much older, around age 3. If there are any symptoms present, we should wait until at least 5 or 6. If you choose to introduce grains in later childhood, they must be sprouted first and then fermented. Grains can be especially problematic, and we need to learn how to prepare them properly before introducing them. See the book Eat Like a Human by Dr. Bill Schindler for how to do this well.

A Suggestion for Breastfeeding Mothers

Make kefir from your own milk and place it on the breast before every feeding. You can also use a few specks of Just Thrive and BioKult Infant (both probiotics) on the nipple and areola before one feeding per day. If you cannot breastfeed, please see the recipes for real food formulas from the Weston A. Price Foundation.

The Order to Introduce First Foods

Kate Pope, an ancestral nutrition educator known for her work helping families raise babies the traditional way, teaches that the mainstream instinct to start with vegetables and purées has it backwards. Meat-based foods come first, not last. Vegetables are added in slowly afterward, not the other way around. She starts babies on meat stock - not bone broth - as the true first food. She refers to meat stock as an elixir for the gut and she introduces egg yolk right alongside it, starting with just a small taste of the yolk alone and building up gradually to two or three yolks daily. Organ meat, blended into a fatty pâté, and other traditional animal fats come in early as well. They are essential building blocks for a baby’s brain and immune system. Fermented foods are introduced carefully and gradually once the gut is ready for them. Vegetables come later still, and only fully cooked and very soft at first. Her reasoning is simple: when a baby’s gut and immune system are genuinely healthy, there is no need to rush foods in on a fixed calendar just to prevent allergies - a well-nourished gut is what actually prevents them. This lines up closely with our own food list, and here is the order we follow.

Foods to Introduce at around 1 Year Old

• meat stock (not bone broth)
• baked marrow
• raw egg yolk
• organ pâté made with 50% animal fat
• A2 butter
• ghee
• lard
• tallow
• mineral salt
• meat cooked close to the bone until very tender
• 24-hour fermented plain dairy
• fermented vegetables
• vegetables cooked in meat stock until soft¹
  • carrots
  • onions
  • garlic
  • broccoli
  • turnips
  • rutabaga
  • radishes
  • mushrooms

Play

Encourage play with the food. Do not clean baby up at all until after mealtime, so there is plenty of time to eat, or simply to make contact with the food and play with it. Interact with baby, make eye contact, sing and talk to them while they eat. Eating outside is highly encouraged.

Make sure to incorporate breast milk “baths” - rub breast milk all over baby like a lotion, working it into the mucous membranes as well. This is not restrictive. It is age-appropriate and species-appropriate. Imagine a world where children never tasted an ultra-processed food, and were taught as they grew how to prepare real food properly - there would be no need for a microbiome-shifting protocol at all! That is our job in this present time: to remember the ancient wisdom, and to share it with the generations still to come.