Nina Planck is the wife of Murray’s Cheese proprietor Rob Kaufelt. Nina is a food writer and activist, who has written two books about the benefits of eating “real” or traditional food. Real Food for Mother and Baby focuses on the kinds of food that expecting or new mothers and their children should be eating. Join Nina for a special class at Murray’s, on Sunday, May 19th, at 4pm.
“The modern pregnant woman cannot be blissfully happy,” writes obstetrician, surgeon, and midwifery muse, Dr. Michel Odent. “All of them have a least one reason to be worried.” Blood pressure too high or too low, weight gain too rapid or slow, anemia, gestational diabetes, too old, too young, too active, too sedentary. Plus the long shopping lists for the new, unnecessary nursery, the bedding, the bouncy seats, the dishes, and most of all, the toys to “entertain.” The true message of the ad copy serving the Pregnancy Industry is two-fold: First, “What to Worry About When You’re Expecting” and second, “How to Spend All Your Time and Money Easing Your Brand New Worries.”
The woman carrying a new life has some decisions to make, yes, and now is not the time to pick up a heroin habit, but her time would be better spent in wonder at her wonderful and maddening years before children, because she has no idea how wonderful and maddening will be the years with children. No idea whatever. The pregnant woman is one of those rare creatures: an innocent one. I include the woman who is pregnant for the second or third time, because she has no idea that the next baby she meets will be quite unlike her last. Some mothers during this time will look to many different ways in helping themselves through their pregnancy, from checking out a yoga school online to seeing a nutritionist specifically for pregnant women.
Still, a woman has to eat, and as Ashley Montague wrote in 1962, “Were they called upon to name the most important factor in contributing to the healthy development of the human conceptus, most authorities would unhesitatingly declare for the good nutrition status of the mother.”