Remember these biscuits? Chances are that if you’ve ever had children, you’ve had these teething biscuits in your cupboard–and your coat pocket, your satchel, your purse, your car. I swear for months after Liam and Caleb each stopped teething, I would find half-gnawed biscuits in the most bizarre places (way under the couch, buried in the closet, deep in an unused backpack), which says as much about my housekeeping skills as it does about their love of these biscuits.

I bought Earth’s Best babyfoods even before I became “one of those people who are weird about food,” as Husband said the last time that I chastised him for taking our children to McDonalds. The baby-food was better than I could make myself (thus assuaging my guilt at not filling the freezer with icecube trays of homemade parsnip puree) and didn’t have any extra junk in it (sugar, salt, polysyllabic ingredients). I’m still using some of those little glass baby-food jars for storage: glitter, sparkles, little stick-on doodads, paint, other random craft supplies. Caleb even decorated one of the jars as a nursery school art project, and it’s on my desk right now holding change and a few buttons.

So you can imagine my delight at being invited to a real-life promotional lunch to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of Earth’s Best, at a lovely restaurant in midtown called Rouge Tomate. Yes, there I was, folks, sitting in an elegant restaurant around the corner from The Pierre, on a Wednesday afternoon–totally out of my usual orbit.  At the far end of the dining room were display tables for Earth’s Best products – did you know they make frozen mini-waffles, and multi-grain frozen pizzas, and chicken nuggets? And that each package has a list of ingredients that are actually recognizable as food?

The company has also launched a new series of products–wipes and diapers–and while I am thrilled that I didn’t have to pay attention to the diapers, I did actually talk to one of the Earth’s Best marketing people about wipes. The Eco-Team at Liam’s school have pointed out that classroom teachers ask us to buy these bleach-filled, alcohol-filled wipes, which the kids use to wipe their hands, the desks, and whatever else–and then all those chemicals get transferred to the kids’ little paws as they work at their tables all day. I’m wondering if there’s a way to get these wipes — “so organic you could practically chew on them,” said the marketing rep–into the classroom instead of the toxicloths.

We were served an amazing lunch–beautiful gazpacho! a wonderful chicken salad! and an luscious dessert made with Earth’s Best baby food (pear granita and a chocolate-banana napoleon-type thingy that was so good I wanted to steal the one that the woman across the table wasn’t eating, but I figured that it would be wildly inappropriate to pull a bait-and-switch on her when she turned around to watch the video of cute babies eating Earth’s Best). While we ate, we heard how the company grew from a $13 million endeavor to about $100 million–and about the company’s dedication to families and to organic, sustainable farming. Now okay, I don’t know the full story about Earth’s Best–but all the people that I met at that lunch had definitely swallowed the (organic, locally sourced) koolaid, for sure, and by the time I’d swabbed the last crumb of my dessert from the plate and gazed longingly at my (svelte) neighbor’s untouched plate, I was convinced too.

Plus that, I saw Nicole Feliciano in the room–she of Momtrends, where I actually won a contest this summer–and Mom-101, whose blog should be required reading for anyone who thinks that “mommy bloggers” are lightweights. I don’t know if she invented the term, but her blog was the first place I read the word “sanctimommy.” It doesn’t get much better than that. (Sorry, dooce).

I met a few other bloggers, including Heidi from NJ Moms and Jessie; discovered that Mom-101 and Momtrends have great hair; decided that I could give my kids mini-waffles for breakfast without (too much) guilt; and discovered that Earth’s Best Alphabet Cookies make a great post-school-bus ride/spelling lesson for a kindergartner.
 
All in all, it was a pretty great afternoon.