My family is poor enough to receive WIC, so we always end up with jar upon jar of baby food and several boxes of that instant cereal powder stuff.
The baby will eat it for a couple months, but my children always end up on table food sooner than the government expects them to.
WIC forbids selling it or giving it away; you're stuck with it. So what's a homemaker to do? How do you use this stuff to feed your family?
In order from most efficient to least...
1.) Always opt for the applesauce.
You get your pick of a variety of fruits and vegetables with the canned stuff. We always get several of the 'apple' or 'pear' ones because they're pretty much indestinguishible from 'normal' applesauce. Some of the fruit mixes can be used for athis as well. My toddler will eat it without question.
2.) Bake with it.
You can substitute up to half a cup of flour in muffins with the baby cereal powder. It gives you a slightly more moist, heavy crumb, but they hold together fine. You can also replace some of the liquid with baby food puree. I've found that the pumpkin, sweet potato, squash, and banana based ones work well for this.
It's worth noting that the banana based ones are the ones that translate least well into a potential 'big kid' snack because they have an odd, slimy texture on their own. This ceases to be a problem when you use it to bake.
3.) Sneak it into other foods.
If you have a glut of them on hand, the vegetable ones can be used to stretch spaghetti sauce or soup. Try to avoid conflicting flavors or colors though.
4.) Feed livestock with it.
This one could technically be considered an abuse of the system, so tread carefully. I would avoid claiming benefits on food just so that you could do this -- use stuff you've claimed anyway and then found you couldn't use. I would NEVER open a jar of WIC food to feed a non-contributing pet like our dog.
We also have laying chickens however, so if I have no other use for the food, I use it to stretch the table scraps we use to supplement their feed (it also happens to be the only use we've found for leftover pureed meat...that stuff is disgusting).
I justify this because our hens lay eggs that we then eat, so the food is still going towards my family's nutritional needs. It's just meeting those needs in a more roundabout way. If we happened to have an animal we were raising for meat, similar logic would apply.
Of course, if you're not on WIC and just happened to end up with a formidable stash anyway, no such caveat applies.
Finally, if all else fails or it spoils...
5.) Compost it and use it to fertilize a vegetable garden.
This is the least efficient way to get any nutritional value. Gardening can be a fickle way to get food on the table, and you'd have to compost a LOT of stuff before you had enough to do much with.
That said, it's still less wasteful than throwing it out in the garbage. And I could see a more concentrated effort like a vermiculture operation (worm farm) benefitting from this route. Even in that case though, this should be the absolute last ditch effort to get use out of this stuff.
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