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I was lucky enough to win a KitchenAid 9-cup food processor at the Big Summer Potluck in August. I’d never won anything before, and had also never owned a food processor. I was delighted, especially since the potluck took place just 5 days after I learned of my pregnancy.

I think it’s important for things to be natural, which is why I’ve always planned to breastfeed and to make my own baby food. As soon as I saw the food processor I knew I wanted to use it to make food for my daughter as soon as she’s ready to start eating solid foods.

There are a lot of benefits to making your own baby food. One, of course, is that you know exactly what your child in consuming. No preservatives will be eaten without your knowledge, no bad batches of tainted food will make it to her mouth, your kid will learn to like the foods you make (prepared with the same herbs and spices that you cook with just by simply mashing up some of the dinner you’ve made), and no hormone-affecting BPA will be making its way into her system.

Wait, are you sure about that last part? The BPA?

So you’ve bought BPA-free plastic bowls, you’ve gotten silicone coated baby spoons, you’re storing her food in glass jars. You nursed and pumped and managed to entirely avoid the issue of BPA lining in cans of formula. If you’re like me, you even completely avoided canned food while you were pregnant. So now it’s time to start grinding up natural and healthy food for your little one to eat, what could go wrong?

Well, KitchenAid food processor bowls have BPA in them. There is a timing issue as well as a heat issue when it comes to BPA. What that means is that BPA leaches out of plastics 50 to 60 times faster when heat is involved than when you’re dealing with cold items. If the items you’re placing in the bowl are cold, and they’re not in there for long, there wouldn’t be very much, if any, leaching. That’s good news! However, if you’re planning on processing some of the chicken and rice that you just made for your own dinner, to feed your baby while you all eat, there’s an issue. The food will be warm, and even the brief contact will likely be enough to put some BPA into the food.

I contacted KitchenAid personally, and was told that their bowls do contain BPA. I asked if they were working on creating BPA-free replacement bowls, and sadly they are not planning to do so. I don’t know why, but I know that I am disappointed. I like Kitchen Aid products. I use my mixer all the time, and I kick myself at least once a month for putting my blender into storage. That is even more true now that I learn about the BPA in the food processor bowls. The blender is glass, so that would solve my problem. Well, mostly solve it. It’s recommended to use a food processor rather than a blender because a blender requires adding liquid to get things moving, and the less liquid you can add to your baby’s food the better. Too much liquid will fill them up faster, preventing them from getting all the nutrition the un-watered food has to offer. One way to avoid that is to pump your breast milk and use that for the liquid, but that won’t work forever. Once you’re done nursing your options for wetting the food become pretty limited.

KitchenAid isn’t the only company that makes food processors, obviously. From my research, though, it seems that no one is making a BPA-free version. Apparently the BPA scare isn’t that far-reaching yet. Hopefully it will be soon, because I’d really like to buy replacement bowls for my food processor. It seems irresponsible of KitchenAid to not even consider making them, considering how terrible BPA is turning out to be.

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