Hugh,
We raised six healthy kids on a diet best described as “locally grown, in harmony with the seasons”. Unless you’ve got the food stockpile of the century, you too will soon be eating primarily “locally grown, in harmony with the seasons” when those refrigerated rail cars quit rolling and are looted out. We live in the grain belt, and whole grains in one form or another play a major role in our diet as they have for much of mankind’s history. I’m not talking about white bread, Doritos, or noodles here but the “Staff of Life” freshly milled whole wheat, naturally sourdough raised bread, chapattis, whole grain corn meal mush, polenta, hominy, and tortillas, et cetera.
An Important Note to All: If you’re going to have to survive on a bin of corn and want to stay alive and healthy, you need to understand and use an ancient American Indian process called “Nixtamalization”. Ignore this at your own and your children’s peril. Back to the babies, we found a simple and I believe as old as mankind method to help them transition to solid food; that was to simply chew the food for them, almost to a liquid and yes, spit it back into a baby spoon and feed it to them. Starting with brown rice; fresh, steel-cut oats; millet; whole wheat bread; well cooked, low salt, non-oily, unseasoned, green and root vegetables; squash; and later a small amount of beans with meat mixed in. Lastly, but not really needed, was cooked, not raw fruit. Avoid sugar and honey like the plague; they don’t need any, ever.
Good digestion starts with the enzymes in your mouth, and bland, properly cooked whole foods chewed to a liquid and fed back are, in our experience, a better, completely natural, and loving way to start out those precious little guys and gals. There are no storage issues either. We never did trust Gerber, and they all did just fine. – Sergeant Dad