In the Virtual Stacks

Spent the morning perusing the stacks of the various university libraries here, using the keywords: folklore, food, pregnancy. Didn't come up with much. Found out about a couple of clinical manifestos; one from the (US) Institute of Medicine---one called "Nutritional Status During Pregnancy and Lactation" and the other from the (US) National Research Council---"Nutrition and Fertility Interrelationships." The most promising book is a tome by one Philip Wilson called: Childbirth: Changing Ideas and Practices in Britain and America 1600 to the present." But I have to order it from another library and am having trouble doing so. Seems like it's time to contact my friendly reference librarian!

The Birth House and the birth of this project

I just finished reading The Birth House by Ami McKay and enjoyed it. I was really taken, captivated actually, by the idea of the Groaning Cake. In the book, friends arrive to care for a woman in labor and create---instead of a anxious environment---a cake. They bake it together and eat it together and it's full of carbs and things to sustain the laboring mum till she births her babe.

The groaning cake got me to wondering if there are other traditional recipes that support fertility, pregnancy, birth, and lactation. I'm really interested in the sort of spiritual/superstitious aspects of the recipes, but am also interested how the foods support the body as it goes through the above conditions.

I'm just starting my research, so far have contacted about 3,000 moms in the DC area and will start looking at older published sources in my library in Nova Scotia tomorrow.

Of course, I'm expecting my own little baby, sometime in the next two weeks; so I have a heightened interest in the subject of food and pregnancy. Mostly, I suppose, because I'm hungry all the time.

More later.

Christine