Ghost of Pregnancy Cravings Past (& Present)
When I hit the “Save” button on last week’s column, I had a brief OH CRAP moment where I wondered if the reaction would be total dead silence. Crickets. Maybe a couple comments saying that no, they never experienced post-pregnancy food aversions, punctuated with a gentle-yet-patronizing LOL. The unmistakable sense of a post going over like a big fat lead balloon.
I should have known better. By the time I timidly checked the published post, comments were already well into the double-digits. Hummus! Turkey meatballs! Scrambled eggs! I don’t think there was a level of the food pyramid that someone didn’t admit to a lingering grudge against.
So this week, I am kind of curious if we can have a repeat performance of mass commiseration, or if THIS is the week I’ll be left awkwardly shuffling stage right because I’m the only weirdo in the room.
Do you have any pregnancy cravings that still linger in a deliciously inappropriate way? Or did, for any extended postpartum period of time?
Pregnancy Cravings That Outlasted My Pregnancy
During my first pregnancy, I developed an absolutely inappropriate fixation on chocolate pudding. I was insane for chocolate pudding. I bought Kozy Shack pudding cups by the cartload and ate at least one a day for a good six months. If I was alone in the house for a few hours I was pretty much powerless to resist polishing off two or three cups, one right after another. But whatever! A simple pregnancy indulgence, right? Almost textbook, really, except for the dipping pickles in it part. I was never particularly passionate about pudding pre-pregnancy so I’m sure I won’t even THINK about chocolate pudding once the baby is here.
And then Noah was born, and Jason came home from our weekend farmer’s market with a GIANT ASS TUB of homemade chocolate pudding from a local dairy. He bought it mostly as a gag, and even joked with the vendor that they signed onto the market about 10 months too late: he would have probably paid for their oldest child’s college tuition just in pudding alone.
Oh! How we laughed. Until I opened the plastic tub and took a taste. And then another taste. And then an hour later the entire vat of pudding was GONE.
To this day, chocolate pudding is a weakness that I no longer even pretend to understand. It’s like comfort food gone haywire — the one consistently delicious food in a pregnancy full of nausea and aversions. It’s the one snack I CANNOT keep in the house, and it’s the one dessert that I simply MUST order if I see any variation of it — chocolate mousse, pot du creme, creme brulee — on a restaurant menu.
My second pregnancy was even weirder, and I won’t go into quite as much rapturous detail because…well, it’s a really gross combo/follow-up to chocolate pudding…but I very literally ate an elephant’s weight in vegetarian burritos with extra black beans and hot salsa from Chipotle when I was pregnant. I would have eaten that every single day if it hadn’t been for OTHER FAMILY MEMBERS begging to eat something — anything — other than Chipotle for the fourth day in a row. And it was STILL one of the first meals I requested once I got home from the hospital. This past weekend marked the first time since Ezra’s birth that someone else suggested Chipotle for lunch and I actually turned it down because — HOLD THE PHONE — I was tired of it. It’s taken almost 19 months, but I think I’ve gotten the Chipotle craving out of my system. I think.
(Not so much with the black olives, though. Eaten right out of the can with a spoon. Jason caught me doing this again a few weeks ago and demanded that I take a pregnancy test immediately.)
(I wasn’t pregnant. I was just hungry.)
Your turn — I can’t be the only one still craving pregnancy comfort foods. Can I?
