What people feed the postpartum body

Every culture seems to have had an opinion about what a person should eat in the weeks after birth, and the opinions rarely agree with each other except on one point: cold food is suspect.

A grandmother from Yorkshire will warn her granddaughter off squatting in a drafty garden. A mother-in-law raised in mainland China will eye a glass of ice water like it’s a small act of self-sabotage. Meghli is a Lebanese dessert made specifically to be warming, heavy on the cinnamon, handed over with the unspoken instruction that this is medicine dressed as a treat.

None of these traditions can prove themselves in a lab and none of them seem bothered by that. What every single one agrees on, without ever comparing notes across an ocean, is that a body which just built an entire second circulatory system and then evacuated it (an insane thing for a body to just do, but we’re not trying to dwell on it over breakfast) needs something more deliberate than whatever’s currently languishing in the crisper drawer, something warm and a little heavier than usual.

I took a nutrition course this past semester at Concordia, and the broad strokes were somewhat similar. Cooked food, it seems, is like really good for us. Cooked fruits, cooked seeds, cooked cooked cooked. Eat food, mostly plants, not too much and all that. Big takeaways were like … okay one, eating involves just so much chemistry and I was not prepared for memorizing what a glucose molecule looks like, and B, the more we can like pre-digest our food (by cooking it, not baby-birding) the better.

I’m not a very good cook. What? A doula who can’t cook? I CAN, I’m just not awesome at it. I can never make something the same way twice, and I can’t follow a recipe to save my hide. Everything is jazz in my kitchen. My husband can make bread (and does, and I bring it into new families’ homes) and I’m over here like “well I don’t have apples or cheese but pretty sure I can put together an american-style apple pie, yeah, I just need to sub the apples for pineapple and the cheddar for feta” (Now that I mention it I should try this).

Good news, the postpartum foods are usually quite forgiving. There’s a lot of “put a grain in a pot and cook it for A WHILE, add some fat, some veg, gtg”. That’s pretty hard to get wrong. I make a mean congee, a decent kitchari, and super bomb rice pudding – I can even do that one with oat milk for my non-dairy friends. All of these are secretly Good For You but also Super Good, TastyWise.

Another favourite in my house is banana muffins with secret lentils. Fiber, iron, protein and ‘nannas? Sign everyone up.