I'm asking because it seems like there is a perception that your baby must have teeth in order to chew. As far as I recall, Babybear's teeth hadn't started coming in when she started solids, although the two bottom ones appeared very soon after.

As it happens, when she is teething she tends to go through a period of non-eating (by which I mean no food apart from pesto, pasta and frozen peas - lord knows there would have to be something terribly wrong for her to she stop eating that).

However, once the teeth were beginning to cut I found that she enjoyed something quite tough like a big crust of bread or hunk of steak and I rather got the impression that this helped the teeth to break through.

To those of you just starting out, if you think about it the teeth are there already, they're just encased in gum. So it simply isn't the same as watching your granny struggle with a lamb chop, because by that time her teeth have gone.