There surely has to be something unnatural about paying 75p for a titchy jar of pureed carrot ("and nothing else added", according to the label, though you'd want a spoonful of caviar mixed in at that price). But there is now another objection to the £120m-a-year baby-food market: babies don't actually need it at all.

Gill Rapley, deputy director of Unicef's Baby Friendly Initiative, has said that spoon-feeding mush to babies is unnatural and a waste of time: if you keep them on a milk-only diet until they are six months old, as per official Department of Health advice, you can skip the tedious phase of coaxing purees down them, and let them put morsels of food into their own mouths. Rapley says that this is better for their chewing skills and digestion.

It sounds like common sense: after all, would you want to be strapped into a high chair and force-fed spoon after spoon of bland vegetables? It's surely much more exciting to be able to exercise a bit of control over your diet.

Not necessarily, says Roger Clarke, the director-general of the Infant and Dietetic Foods Association, which represents baby food manufacturers such as Heinz and Nestle: he thinks a lot of babies want more than milk earlier than six months, whatever the government says. "There's a traditional way of doing things that involves moving from milk to purees and then to solid food."

But the DoH says Rapley's research makes sense. "Our advice is that if you milk-feed babies to six months, the whole weaning process can be completed a lot more quickly," says a spokeswoman. "By six months babies can sit up, they might even be getting a tooth or two. We're not going to say pureed foods are bad for them, but mashed foods or soft pasta shapes they can pick up might be better."