Introducing Salmon Baby Food

Here's an idea for parents: try giving your toddler a generous helping of pureed salmon for dinner tonight. Here's another idea: make it a point to have a dinner No. 2 on hand after your baby throws dinner No. 1 at your head.

If there's one hard rule of childhood, it's that kids don't like fish. Yes, they'll scarf down tuna salad and fish sticks, but even Mrs. Paul would tell you that doesn't count. However, Susan Brewer, a professor of food science at the University of Illinois, is convinced that babies' growing bodies — particularly their growing brains — need fish, and she's developed just the baby food that she thinks could pass their taste (and tolerance) test.

There are a lot of reasons all people are encouraged to eat fish at least twice a week, not the least being that it's low in fat and calories. Just as important, it's also rich in omega-3 fatty acids, which are good for brain and nerve development and help reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease. For adults, the biggest benefits are the cardiovascular ones, but for babies, the brain is still very much a work in progress, and omega-3s — particularly a type called docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) — are critical. A baby's brain, says Brewer, is 50% DHA, but a baby's liver is not good at synthesizing enough of it.

"If small children are going to get enough DHA," she says, "they're going to have to ingest it in their food."

Salmon, Brewer decided, is one of the best possible ways to provide it. Not only is the fish especially high in omega-3s, it's also mild tasting, which is part of what drives its global popularity so far up (and also, unfortunately, is pushing its wild populations so far down). Brewer developed a baby food that uses wild salmon caught late in the fish's life, a time when its flesh has begun to soften. She also adds salmon bonemeal and roe to her mix, which boosts nutrient level.

O.K., that sounds nasty, but when the raw ingredients are processed into baby food, the result is a product that, Brewer says, tastes more like salmon and cream-cheese dip than plain salmon. Parents (if not yet babies themselves) seem to agree. In one recent focus group, 81% of 107 parents said they liked the product and that they'd feed it to their babies.

Brewer believes that introducing fish early will help nurture not just babies' brains, but their palates too. One reason so many Americans have an aversion to fish is that it was not made part of their diets when their tastes were developing. Fish-based baby food already sells well in Asia, Italy and the U.K., in part because those countries include fish early and often in a child's life. One downside, of course, is sticker shock: wild salmon is pricey stuff even for adult connoisseurs; for babies, it might simply seem too extravagant. For now, however, Brewer is focusing on taste and nutrition; economies of scale may come later.

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