Speaking to women about their food cravings and aversions during pregnancy and postpartum, Yamini Vijayan examines changing tastes and why these occur.
I recently had a well-meaning stranger at the airport—a woman in her late sixties—tell me that it’s still not too late to try to get pregnant. Since I had met her only 15 minutes prior to this conversation, and she had just told me about the recent loss of her mother, I didn’t have the heart to be impolite.
I decided about five years ago that a child-free life would suit me best. But here’s the thing: whether or not you choose to be a mother, if you’re a woman in your late thirties, you’re always reminded that there’s still a bit of a window. Hurry, quick, tick-tick-tick. Despite these minor annoyances, I will admit that I remain intensely curious about pregnancy—what it feels like, how it changes a woman’s body and mind, the act of giving birth, and what it means to mother.
A couple of years ago, I listened to a podcast in which a woman talked candidly about her history of eating disorders, and how becoming pregnant had complicated it, as she now had to consider the child she was carrying. Since then, I’ve thought an awful lot about pregnancy and taste—how women experience a range of cravings and aversions for those nine months, many of which are incomprehensible even to them.
It astonishes me that my mother still remembers her pregnancy cravings and aversions vividly, from four decades ago. In her twenties during both her pregnancies, Amma was ravenous in the mornings. She couldn’t stand the sight or smell of milk for those few months, so she drank black coffee instead. I couldn’t picture her as someone who drank black coffee; I kept getting stuck on that minor detail as she went on to elaborate how pregnancy had impacted her taste. We know so little of our own parents.
Amma craved sour things, I learned, which is perhaps why she hasn’t forgotten the taste of rasam at my uncle’s house in Chennai—“nice hot Tamil-style rasam in the middle of Madras summer.”
It was when she started longing for rasam and black coffee, four years after her first pregnancy, that she suspected that she might be pregnant again. Twice, the test results indicated that she wasn’t. “I wondered then—why was I having these cravings?” she told me. But a third test proved that her instincts had been right. She was, indeed, carrying me.
During her pregnancies, Amma was asked by doctors and elders in the family to eat a lot of curd, milk, nuts, and leafy vegetables like spinach and moringa. The general advice was to avoid heat-producing fruits such as papaya or pineapple. “I still don’t know about the papaya theory, whether there’s any merit to it,” she added.
It was when she started longing for rasam and black coffee, four years after her first pregnancy, that she suspected that she might be pregnant again.
I found a reference to this claim in Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India (2015) by Colleen Taylor Sen. Sen writes: “According to Ayurveda and folk belief, pregnancy is considered a ‘hot’ condition. As a result, the pregnant woman is not allowed to eat whatever foods are considered ‘hot’ in the region, since it is believed that they will cause miscarriage. In Bengal, for example, pineapple and certain fish are considered hot. Cold foods such as milk products, on the other hand, are considered to promote strength and a successful delivery. In parts of North India, the mother’s parents send her dried dates, pieces of coconut and wheat bread and laddoos fried in ghee in the fifth month, while in Andhra Pradesh, she is fed spicy and sour dishes to tempt her to eat.”
In my conversation with 29-year-old Daphisha Gabriela Pyngrope, papaya surfaced again, along with pineapple, both of which she has been asked to avoid. This is rooted in the belief that “it is too strong, and it will affect the foetus,” causing a miscarriage. Daphi lives in Laitumkhrah, Shillong town, and was eight months pregnant when we spoke.
Apparently, the decades-old papaya-pineapple theory is equally relevant in the southern and eastern parts of India, though Dr. Shaibhya Saldanha—an obstetrician-gynecologist with 30 years of experience—told me that there is no truth to it: “It’s all nonsense,” she said, “No fruit will cause any miscarriage.”
As someone who usually enjoyed her share of fast food—chips, burgers, pizza, pastries—Daphi was taken by surprise when her body started rejecting these once she got pregnant. And desserts too. “I used to have a sweet tooth. But now, maybe a chocolate once a month. I’m okay with sweetness in terms of fruits, but I’ve cut down on carbonated drinks and pastries. Even if I have them, my body doesn’t want it. I don’t know how to explain it,” she said.
Daphi seemed genuinely baffled by how pregnancy has impacted her tastebuds. She told me that she had expected to have “really bad cravings,” but in reality, she hadn’t had any strong ones. What she constantly wanted to eat was home-cooked Khasi food, her staple being steamed rice and syrwa (a stew made with pork or beef) with boiled vegetables.
Daphi admitted that pregnancy hadn’t been smooth-sailing for her. There had been much discomfort and uneasiness. While she hadn’t experienced any morning sickness, nausea was a constant. She had been extremely sensitive to smells—coffee, perfume, oil. Additionally, anything fried put Daphi off.
Nausea is a running theme in all my conversations with pregnant women, regardless of where they live, and there is no getting around it. I knew, of course, that pregnant women get nauseous, but I certainly had no idea of how bad it could get. Zainab Kapadia, my colleague at The Locavore, was in her third trimester when I began working on this story. In her mid-thirties, she lives with her husband and his family in Mumbai.
In her first trimester, Zainab could barely eat because of severe nausea. It wasn’t quite that she didn’t experience hunger, but the feeling of wanting to throw up was persistent. “There was no breakfast, lunch, or dinner. If I could, I would eat fruit. I couldn’t even drink room-temperature water!” Twice, Zainab needed to be put on IV fluids.
In well-known nutritionist Rujuta Diwekar’s book Pregnancy Notes (2017), there’s an FAQs section in which the question arises: “Is there a special way to avoid nausea/ morning sickness?” Diwekar’s solutions—after a confident “Yes, there is”—include waking up to dried fruits, and avoiding tea for the first two hours in the morning. “Drink a glass of kokum sherbet with a pinch of kalanamak before noon as a midmorning meal,” she advised. Other suggestions include an extra dollop of ghee at lunch and dinner, and a warm water bath to which freshly cut lemongrass should be added.
Fortunately, as Zainab’s doctor predicted, the nausea faded, and her appetite magically returned by the second trimester. It even grew, along with new cravings. “I now need something sweet with every meal,” she said. Craving Indian mithai and chocolate was unusual for Zainab because up until then, she had never had a sweet tooth.
According to Diwekar, the high progesterone and growth hormones during pregnancy make it difficult for the body to keep the acidity down, but she asks that women pay attention to their lifestyles as well. “Please stop eating packaged stuff or take-outs,” she writes. My favourite bit of advice, though, is this: “A quick nap of fifteen-twenty minutes every afternoon, right after lunch.” Now if I’d ever gotten pregnant, this I would have dutifully followed.
Dr. Saldanha also emphasises the need for good sleep to reduce nausea: “Complete sleep, without waking up with an alarm. Have an early dinner, sleep early.” In her view, women should avoid eating anything they don’t like. “There is this absurd idea that pregnant women should drink milk, and it makes some of them pukey. Have curd, have buttermilk, they’re better than milk.” She also recommends starting the day with something dry. “Dosa, toast, or chapati will prevent vomiting.”
Since many pregnant women are averse to certain smells, Dr. Saldana advises staying away from the kitchen in the first trimester. “Let the husbands do the cooking,” she said cheekily. “It’s also good for their moral character.”
What causes changes in taste during pregnancy?
While I made a note of what different pregnant women were hungry for, or repulsed by, I still didn’t understand what caused these changes. In the paper Pickles and ice cream! Food cravings in pregnancy: hypotheses, preliminary evidence, and directions for future research (2014), Natalia C. Orloff and Julia M. Hormes explore the following hypotheses: that cravings are caused by fluctuating levels of hormones; that they are a response to nutritional deficits in the body; that cravings occur due to pharmacologically active ingredients in the desired foods; that they are caused by cultural and psychosocial factors.
Despite the study being a decade old and being focused on American women, one of its stronger insights apply here too: that of pregnancy cravings bending to cultural norms. This made complete sense to me—how could it not be shaped by what someone has grown up eating, and even has access to? Like how my mother craved rasam, while Daphi, who grew up in Meghalaya, turned to home-cooked Khasi food.
Nandini Nayar, a Bengaluru-based mental health practitioner in her late thirties, didn’t have the easiest relationship with food during her pregnancy. When we spoke, her son was seven months old. Looking back at that period and narrating it “feels weird, almost theoretical now,” she said. “I can no longer feel what I was going through then.”
Nandini experienced a fair bit of guilt during her pregnancy. Partly because she was unable to eat the healthy food she had always hoped and intended to. Instead, she found herself drawn more to carbs. To add to that, she had turned pescetarian a couple of years prior to this—giving up other kinds of meat—and now found herself craving chicken again.
In their study, Natalia C. Orloff and Julia M. Hormes note: “Conflicting attitudes toward foods like chocolate that are perceived to be simultaneously appealing and “forbidden” have recently been hypothesised to be associated with a greater likelihood of craving.” Nandini had gestational diabetes in her third trimester, and was asked to avoid sugar and carbohydrates. “I would still have it, but guiltily,” she said.
The study goes on to say: “Evidence suggests that efforts to avoid foods that cause these conflicting feelings may have the paradoxical effect of increasing the likelihood of craving. The result is a sort of “vicious cycle” of alternating restraint and overconsumption or binge eating.”
"Evidence suggests that efforts to avoid foods that cause these conflicting feelings may have the paradoxical effect of increasing the likelihood of craving."
It’s impossible not to be moved by how much Nandini is willing to share with me, unravelling what feels like a mysterious time, even to her. She told me about losing the desire to drink tea when she was pregnant—an essential and pleasurable part of her day’s routine up until then—and how she had even grown to detest anything curry-based. “I love curries, and so this was very complicated. I found myself getting affected emotionally and mentally,” she said.
Nandini’s son was born on a July afternoon. After his birth, she noticed that her appetite and taste slipped back to what it used to be. She went back to enjoying tea, fish, and even curries. “And I was thinking, is it psychological?”
Amel Anwar’s experiences with cravings and aversions contained some mystery too, although in hindsight, she does have some theories. Amel, now 39, had gone through three pregnancies in the span of a decade (2006-2016). She told me that when she first moved to Mangalore after marriage, she was excited to try the local food, having grown up eating mostly Malabari and Tamil cuisines. She discovered then that she loved the flavours of Mangalorean food, especially their chicken curry. “But as soon as I got pregnant—which was very soon after my move—the very same Mangalorean chicken curry only made me want to throw up. I was craving my mother’s naadan (traditional) food,” she said.
Although Amel is an adventurous eater, one of the things that she never took to in Mangalore was the way they made the velleppam—“they break an egg on top of it, and the yolk is kind of runny. It used to gross me out.”
But when she was pregnant with her second child, she craved appam and egg, made in the exact way that had until then repulsed her. However, once her son was born, she lost interest in it. “I was clearly eating what the baby was craving for,” she said. “My second son is a major mutta (egg) freak. He can eat eggs day in and day out.”
In her third pregnancy as well, Amel craved something that wasn’t usually a part of her diet: beef. “I wasn’t a fan of it. But when I was carrying him, I ate a lot of steak, or anything with beef in it.” Post-delivery, her cravings vanished, but she noticed that she was more open to its taste. Her son, it turned out, loves beef.
Cravings as a sign for social support
In the context of global cultures, the study by Natalia C. Orloff and Julia M. Hormes reports that Indo-Ceylon women craved childhood food (sweets), festival foods, rare or expensive foods, and food that has personal significance. In other words, this implies that pregnancy cravings and aversions are also shaped by our perception, associations, and relationships with certain foods.
Similarly, in rural Tanzania, provision of craved foods to pregnant women by their husband and his family is considered an expression of social support. This made me think of a story my mother once told me. In the 1980s, Amma temporarily moved into my granduncle’s home in Kochi, where her parents lived as well. It was a strictly vegetarian household, but there she was, yearning for fried fish and tandoori chicken. So, she would ask my father to bring something over, discreetly, of course, so that she could eat it on the sly.
My father would ride across town, carrying mathi (sardine) fry and tandoori chicken for my hungry mother. The tragedy, though, was that by the time he got there, it no longer appealed to my mother. “By the time Achan reached, it would be cold. Suddenly, the smell would also put me off, and I wouldn’t feel like eating it. I would feel really bad then,” she told me, her voice laden with traces of guilt even now. Could this then, her yearning for restricted foods, have to do with seeking social support?
My father would ride across town, carrying mathi (sardine) fry and tandoori chicken for my hungry mother.
Dr. Saldanha told me about this one patient of hers, who was always a vegetarian, but couldn’t stop craving chicken kebab when she got pregnant. “Her husband was delighted since he was meat-eating!”
A test of four evolutionary hypotheses of pregnancy food cravings: evidence for the social bargaining model (2017)—a more recent study by Caitlyn Placek published by The Royal Society—investigates how pregnant women crave foods perceived as harmful or dangerous when under heightened social pressures, such as the pressure to have a son, or a certain number of children. Placek’s study is based in 13 agricultural villages in Tiruvannamalai, Tamil Nadu, a region that experiences high levels of food insecurity.
Here, pregnancy is considered a period of increased desire (‘acai’ in Tamil), and women are discouraged from eating ‘hot’ foods (unripe mango, palmyra sprouts, chicken, fish, eggplant), and ‘black’ foods (black grapes, jamun) that are believed to increase heat in the body. And yet, despite dominant beliefs, it is common for women to crave foods that are culturally perceived as dangerous.
The research revealed that the two most frequently mentioned cravings were unripe mango and unripe tamarind, both seen as harmful during pregnancy. “Cravings for items that threaten the pregnancy could, therefore, be an expression of this inability to conform to cultural norms of the ‘ideal family’,” the study notes. Placek builds a case for what is referred to as the ‘social bargaining model’, which predicts that women will crave foods that are harmful to the developing foetus if they are unsure of the future of their offspring. Emotional eating, or consuming of foods considered dangerous, Placek posits, can signal an increased need for social support during pregnancy.
The research revealed that the two most frequently mentioned cravings were unripe mango and unripe tamarind, both seen as harmful during pregnancy.
Contemplating this idea of social support, it struck me that the very first time that I cooked for my sister was when she had gotten pregnant with my niece, her first child. I tried to recreate the exact manner in which my maternal grandmother had cooked avil nannachathu, adamant to not leave even a single ingredient out. My grandmother didn’t cook for us often, but once we left for college, she would return to this dessert when we visited—a coconut-and-jaggery-filled reminder of our childhoods in Kerala.
It made me wonder why I had waited so long to cook for my sister. Why did I think pregnancy was the right time for me to shower her with affection? What made me choose a sweet dish, a childhood favourite, when I knew nothing of her cravings? Since then, embarrassingly, I haven’t cooked her anything else.
Pica: Eating like a Magpie
The word ‘pica’ is Latin for ‘magpie’ which is a bird notorious for eating almost anything. While there’s a wide range of preferences when it comes to what pregnant women typically crave in the context of pica, some of the common ones include soil, clay, chalk, stone, raw rice, and toothpaste. And while pica isn’t restricted to pregnancy—some children experience it too—it is something that can potentially cause harm to both the mother and the baby, if what is ingested is toxic or contaminated.
Just as pregnancy cravings have been woefully understudied, so is the case with pica, especially in India. But in The influence of pica practice on nutritional status, stress and anxiety of pregnant women (2022), an article about pica and pregnancy conducted based on 739 women in Chennai, it is mentioned that some of the most common cravings were for unripe mango, ice, pickles, and ash. They also found that many of these women practising pica were anaemic, experiencing increased levels of anxiety and stress.
‘It is easy to forget that the mother needs care too’
About an hour after I hung up with Nandini, I received a voice note from her. She had been thinking more about her relationship with food postpartum. Nandini explained that while you are conscious about how what you consume impacts your baby, it’s much more heightened and palpable postpartum because you are able to see exactly how it affects them.
For instance, her son—who has sensitive skin—once had an allergic reaction so strong (to something she presumes she had eaten) that he had to be rushed to the emergency room. “It was such a bad flare up that it almost left him looking quite disfigured in some ways. That’s made me a lot more mindful of what ingredients I’m consuming in a way that was different from when I was pregnant. What you can’t see doesn’t really impact you as much.”
After her son’s birth, Nandini followed much of her mother’s dietary advice; it seemed to work for her, especially as she was feeding. Nandini’s mother made saunf water, which she drank everyday, “despite it tasting gross,” because it seemed to help her produce more milk.
For Nandini, her mother’s presence was comforting as she navigated postpartum life. “One practice I really appreciated, which mum brought in, was to fry some onions and garlic in lots of ghee. It’s crispy, and it’s only for the mother. You can eat it just as it is, or with your food, on the side. It’s supposed to help with healing inside,” she said. With all the focus on the child’s nutrition, it is easy to forget that the mother needs care too.
Similarly, for Zainab, an essential part of postpartum healing involved spending time with her mother. As a Bohri Muslim, she was to follow Suvavar—a period during which your mother ensures that you get the rest that your body requires post-delivery.
“I moved to my parents’ home for a month. But it’s subjective—like, for instance, my sister did it for three months. During this time, my mother took care of my diet, feeding me things like bajra ka roti, kheema, fried egg, bone broth, soup twice a day. It was non-spicy, protein-rich, and I didn’t eat anything that would make me feel gassy because then my daughter would get gassy too,” Zainab said. In that month, she received daily massages and also learnt—from her mother—how to massage her baby too.
Dr. Saldanha has observed this in many of her patients as well—pregnant women craving food in the specific way their mothers cook it, indicating a longing to be taken care of. She often has to explain to their husbands why it might be good for them to go to their parents’ home for a while. “There’s a difference between being looked after by your mother, and your mother-in-law”, she said. “You can throw tantrums with your own mother.”
Yamini Vijayan is the editor of The Locavore.
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