Eating for two

Finding a definitive formula for healthy eating while pregnant is no easy task.

I have always been a bit food obsessed, ever since I learned to crack eggs over a bowl in my grandmother’s kitchen and subsequently turned them into my own scrambled breakfast. I stood there many other times witnessing her pinch piecrusts, chop onions, shell peas or make meatloaf. It was a hobby that I took to with vigor and one of the only ones from my youth that remains, which, considering how incongruous it would be for a 36-year old woman to play with Breyer horses or sell Girl Scout cookies, is probably for the best.

I went through my Ramen years, my foray into vegetarianism and a fairly long-lasting Asian period alternately improvising, obsessing and studying food, but I can honestly say I have never thought about food as much as I am now that I’m pregnant. Being in this state, over a certain age and a “learner” personality, I dedicated myself to absorbing as much information as I could about eating right, sticking to a program and being a diligent provider of nutrients to my unborn child. It had another thing in mind however. I quickly learned that there’s really nothing that can kill your appetite or your desire to do anything other than find a position on the couch that doesn’t make you feel even more exhausted or sick to your stomach faster than the first trimester. Oddly enough, though I could stomach very little in the way of actual food, I craved food reading. So, while I munched on Saltines and sipped ginger ale, I devoured all of Ruth Reichl’s books for the second time, appreciating all over again her direct (to the point of unflinching) style, the story of her fairly non-traditional rise from hippie chef to ultra-powerful critic and the self-inflicted torment that accompanied it. I enjoyed traveling around the globe with her, vicariously sipping wine in French vineyards and enjoying enough foie gras to make my heart stop.

After I left Ruth, I sat flipping through cookbooks and creating fantasy meals, most of which included food that was contraband, or at the very least controversial, in my current state. While in France last year I probed the women there about their eating habits, so I knew that unpasteurized cheeses, organ meats and glasses of wine still passed the lips of the femmes.

At Christmas, as I turned down Hollandaise sauce, blue cheese and cured meats, my mother commented how much easier it was to be pregnant when she’d had children than it was now. I listened as different friends told me different things about shellfish, cheeses and daily-required servings and tried to play the voice of reason as a fairly heated argument over whether crab cakes could be eaten arose. In an early educational class that I was required to attend prior to my first exam, a Japanese woman’s arm shot up at the mention of no raw fish. “But everyone eats sushi in Japan, whether you’re pregnant or not,” she said with some dismay.

The nice Minnesota nurse pursed her lips and in her best Marge Gunderson-inspired lilt said, “Ohhhh nooooo, you can’t do that here.” (I found directives both ways in different books and though I’m tempted to go a get a Winter Roll or some unagi right this second, I’ve decided to abstain for now.)

Truth be told, after poring over a variety of prenatal tomes and cookbooks, the only solid pieces of advice that held true across each one was to drink coffee in moderation and don’t eat raw beef. In short, if there was one thing that came to the forefront of eating for two, it was confusion.

Finally, just as I had become thoroughly overwhelmed by the do’s and don’ts of eating, I started to be able to stomach food again. It was at that point that I picked up Michael Pollan’s latest release, In Defense of Food, and in the introduction found that the very first line provided me with sage advice to keep in mind about eating both while pregnant and afterwards. “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” Enough said.