Guide

How to keep a food and reaction log

Most baby food records are useless three months later, and it is always for the same reason. Here is what to write down so the log can actually answer a question.

Almost every parent starts a food log. Notes app, spreadsheet, back of an envelope, one of those laminated fridge charts. Most are abandoned inside a fortnight, and the ones that survive usually cannot answer the question that eventually gets asked, which is some version of: "has this happened before, and what was going on when it did?"

The fields that earn their place

You are not writing a diary. Five things are enough, and skipping any one of them is what makes a log unhelpful later.

• The date. Not "week 3" — an actual date. Everything below depends on it.
• The food, specifically. "Yogurt" and "Greek yogurt" are different entries if you care about which one you actually served.
• How it was prepared. Steamed, raw, in a puree, mixed into something else. Reactions to a food and reactions to a texture look identical in a log that omits this.
• What happened, including nothing. "No reaction" is real data. A log with only the bad days makes every food look suspicious.
• How long afterwards. Twenty minutes and six hours point at very different things, and it is the detail people most reliably forget.

The mistake almost everyone makes

Treating "tried" as a checkbox.

A single tick tells you a food has been offered once, ever. It cannot tell you it was six weeks ago. It cannot tell you the mild rash showed up on the second and third exposures but not the first. It cannot tell you that you have served egg twice this month and peanut not at all since April.

Once you start logging every time rather than the first time, the record starts answering questions instead of just recording history. The cost is a few extra seconds per meal; the payoff is being able to say "three times, and the second one was the only one with a rash" rather than "I think so? Maybe?"

Repeats matter more than firsts

The first exposure gets all the attention because it feels like the risky one. But the useful signal — the pattern that tells you something is or is not going on — only ever comes from repeats. A one-off event with no comparison is unreadable. Two or three logged exposures with the same outcome is a fact you can take to an appointment.

What to bring to a pediatrician appointment

If something has you worried, the record is what turns a vague worry into a useful ten minutes. Bring:

1. The dates of every exposure to the suspect food, not just the bad one.
2. What the reaction looked like each time, in plain words. Photographs if you have them.
3. The gap between eating and the reaction.
4. What else was eaten in the same meal — this is the question you will be asked and the one nobody has written down.
5. Which of the nine major allergens have been introduced so far, and roughly when.

Notice that four of the five are impossible to reconstruct from memory a month later, and trivial if you wrote them down at the time.

Paper or phone?

Paper is genuinely fine, and a fridge checklist is better than an app you do not open. It has exactly two weaknesses: it cannot be sorted, and it gets covered in food. If your question is "what have we tried?", paper answers it. If your question is "when did we last do sesame, and how many times now?", paper makes you count by hand.

A phone wins on the counting and on being in your pocket at the appointment. It loses if logging takes more than a couple of taps, because then you will not do it while holding a baby.