At first, I thought this sounded like a cool idea from a cool Swedish company. Really healthy, additive-free, organic baby foods in those nice little pop-in-the-microwave trays. 

I came across the concept browsing Springwise, which showcases innovative start-ups. GAPA is a Swedish company founded by two Swedish mums who obviously care about what babies, their own included, get fed these days. Since women, especially in Sweden, if not Malta where I live, are mainly in the workplace, they aren’t going to be in the kitchen using their Moulis to whizz up homemade delights for their little ones.

But, they know they should be, if they could be. And there’s the catch.   There’s such a lot of information out there about the kind of healthy diets our kids should be getting, that we can’t but help feel guilty if we aren’t steaming, mashing and pureeing.  So, what better way to ease the guilt, stay in the workplace and not the supermarket aisles, and get the requisite nutrients into our kids, than with GAPA-style ready meals? (GAPA, by the way, translates from Swedish as ‘open your mouth’ - a bit uncouth perhaps as a brand name, but it has resonance with most mums I suspect.)  All you need to do is buy a few GAPA ready meals to stock the fridge, and before you know it, it’s Thursday and you haven’t had to think about what to feed them.

But it’s at this point, I begin to worry. GAPA meals are billed (by Springwise at least) as organic, gourmet ready foods. The word ‘gourmet’ implies upmarket, ABC1 consumers. And organic always attracts a higher price.  That’s OK for the time poor and cash rich.  We expect a premium mark up on fresh-chilled, ready meals.  But read intelligent nutritionists’ writings on what and how to feed baby and you’ll see that most mention that a baby’s taste buds and preferences are formed pretty early on in life. But if a baby is weaned on GAPA, then it might just develop a taste for the gourmet part of the offer.   An active toddler’s, then a growing kid’s taste buds, are going to be finely tuned to ‘gourmet’ foods!  Start as you mean to go on. Eat GAPA and GAPA-style foods forever then!

The other problem I see is that of parental modelling.  If from an early age, a child equates mealtimes with something popping in and out of the microwave, how is it ever going to get its head around normal meal preparation and mealtimes? We are constantly told that parental behaviour goes a long way to helping kids adopt the right behaviour and attitudes to all manner of things - including eating more fruit and veg, doing sport and so on.  If a child is used to parents ‘prepping’ ready meals, then it too will probably see that as the norm for meals, and end up in adulthood popping in the ready meal. Not all adult ready meals are as healthy as the GAPA kiddy versions no doubt are. I don’t like anything that models fast food behaviour to kids.

The last point to make is that reheating food in a microwave isn’t necessarily the ideal way to cook healthily. Apparently, according to leading health experts and nutritionists like the UK-based writer and practitioner Dr John Briffa, microwaving food can alter its make-up and may cause the food to have a different way of interacting with our digestion and in turn our overall health. He advocates the age-old methods of cooking - bake, steam, fry (in healthy oil or none at all).  Perhaps it’s time to get back to that weird old concept of actually cooking from scratch.  It must be at least two generations since that happened much, yet it’s served mankind well for millennia.