First Bites is a tall, narrow book, roughly proportioned like an airline boarding pass and about half an inch thick.  It’s divided into three major sections.  The first section talks about what children need from their food: calcium, vitamin D, etc., and contains some basic information about feeding children.  The second section is the “superfood index.”  It lists the fifty superfoods in the book, each accompanied by a brief description, a few bullet points of “ways to enjoy” it, and a list of the recipes in the book that incorporate the food.  The final section is the recipes themselves.

The fifty “superfoods” are apples, avocados, bananas, beans, beets, bell peppers, berries, bison, broccoli, brown rice, butternut squash, carrots, cheese, chicken, cocoa, coconuts, corn, cucumber, edamame, eggs, grapes, green beans, herbs, honey, kale, lentils, maple syrup, melon, milk, oats, oranges/citrus, pasta, peaches, peanut, pears, peas, pineapple, pork, potatoes, pumpkin, quinoa, seafood, spinach, stocks, sweet potatoes, tofu, turkey, whole grain breads & flours, yogurt, and zucchini.

It’s a little unclear exactly why these are chosen as superfoods.  The author says that for a food to be considered a superfood, “it must be delicious, beautiful, unprocessed, and bursting with nutrients.”  She also says that the recipes in the book use “real foods” in addition to these superfoods.  To my mind, that’s what these “superfoods” are — simply real foods.  They’re good — nutritious — but it isn’t clear to me why these particular foods should be any better than other real foods.

A lot of the introductory material is very handy.  There are tips for how to recognize when your child is ready for the introduction of solids, foods that present particular choking hazards, etc.  I’m not crazy about the fact that the timeline of what to introduce when is pretty conventional.  There’s no basis (that I’m aware of) for this in either science or traditional diets.  It is, in fact, almost entirely backward from traditional practice and from what makes sense to me based on the logic of digestive development.

The recipes are kid-friendly and unprocessed, divided by food group and by age group.  This, together with the bulleted lists in the superfood index section, makes the book very easy to use as a quick reference.  That seems to be what the author was going for.

If you’re an inexperienced parent and/or new to whole foods, you might find this book very helpful.  If you’re already pretty health-conscious and accustomed to cooking from scratch, it’s probably mostly superfluous.  There’s nothing really new here in that case.