Postpartum Food Is Just Good Food

Broth, slow-cooked meals, warming spices and food that asks almost nothing of the person eating it can nourish far more than the weeks after birth.

By Monika Knapp

I built Mothership for mothers after birth. That is still the center of the work, and it always will be.

But somewhere between the forty-eighth hour of a bone broth and the hundredth container of chicken soup, something became rather obvious: postpartum food is just good food.

I do not mean that everyone has the same nutritional needs as a person who has just given birth. They do not. Postpartum is a distinct physical and emotional passage, and the food traditions built around it deserve to be understood on their own terms. I mean that the principles underneath those traditions are surprisingly generous. Cook slowly. Use good ingredients. Make the meal warming and satisfying. Remove as much work as possible from the person who needs to eat it.

That last part matters more than we tend to admit.

A bowl of soup may be nourishing because of what is in it. It may also be nourishing because you can heat it with one hand, eat it from a mug if necessary and wash exactly one spoon afterward. There are seasons when this is not a small kindness. It is the difference between eating something substantial and standing in front of the refrigerator, tired beyond reason, hoping dinner will somehow assemble itself.

The wisdom belongs to postpartum. The food can travel.

Across cultures, postpartum meals tend to share a certain logic. They are warm, soft, cooked, aromatic and prepared by someone else. Broths simmer. Grains soften. Meat cooks until the fork does almost no work. Ginger, turmeric, garlic and other fragrant ingredients make their way into the pot. Recipes differ, of course, but the meal is generally built to be received rather than managed.

Our deeper look at the first forty days across cultures explores where those traditions come from and why protected time after birth appears in so many places.

I would never want to flatten those traditions into a vague promise of “wellness.” They are specific forms of care for a specific passage. Still, good ideas have a way of revealing other places they belong.

Someone coming home after a long hospital stay may not want a raw kale salad, however impressively green it is. A person caring for an ill partner may be perfectly capable of cooking and completely unable to face one more task. An older neighbor may want real food in the freezer without buying six onions and committing the afternoon to chopping them. A friend in grief may discover at four o'clock that coffee has been lunch.

None of these people is postpartum. All of them can benefit from a meal that has already been thought through.

“Nutritious” is only useful if someone can eat it

We have a peculiar habit of talking about food as a collection of admirable parts. Protein. Fiber. Fat. Vitamins. Minerals. All worth paying attention to, certainly. But dinner is not eaten as a nutrition label.

People eat dinner as tired parents, worried daughters, busy nurses, hungry teenagers, people with a deadline tomorrow and no clean saucepan tonight. The practical life of a meal matters.

This is one reason I love braises, soups, dals, broths and frittatas. They hold. They reheat. They are difficult to ruin at nine o'clock at night. They can contain protein, vegetables, grains, herbs and fats in a form that feels like dinner rather than homework. And, if I may say so, a turmeric and ginger dal with coconut milk is far more persuasive than a lecture about eating well.

I am not interested in assigning moral virtue to one kind of food or claiming that a bowl of broth can fix what is hard in a person's life. Food has limits. So do cooks. Sometimes toast is dinner, and toast is doing an excellent job.

But when we have the chance to make nourishment easier, I think we should take it.

Who else is this food for?

The honest answer is: anyone who wants it.

There are, however, a few people I think about often.

The caregiver. The person organizing appointments, answering family texts and remembering which medication is taken with food is very often the person who forgets to eat. A freezer containing several actual meals is one less system for that person to run.

The person returning home. After travel, illness, surgery or an exhausting stretch of work, even a familiar kitchen can feel oddly demanding. Individual medical needs belong with a qualified clinician; dinner can simply be soft, warm and ready.

The older adult. Cooking for one can require nearly the same shopping and cleanup as cooking for four. Food portioned into manageable servings offers variety without asking someone to live among leftovers for a week.

The athlete or very active person. A demanding day creates an extremely ordinary problem: hunger arrives before enthusiasm for cooking. A substantial meal waiting in the freezer solves that problem beautifully.

The household in upheaval. A move, a death, a new job, a divorce, wildfire evacuation, finals week—life has many ways of removing the hour in which dinner was supposed to happen. We wrote more about this in Nourishment During Life Disruption, because postpartum is not the only time a person's need for care rises as their capacity to arrange it falls.

The person who simply likes good food. This category needs no defense. You are allowed to eat chicken soup because it tastes fantastic. You are allowed to keep sourdough in the freezer because warm bread makes Tuesday better. Not every bowl of dal requires a life event.

The part that cannot be listed on the package

The food itself is only part of what postpartum traditions get right. The other part is that someone notices.

A new mother is not expected to research twelve recipes, compare grocery prices and coordinate a cooking schedule. Ideally, other people look at the situation and begin feeding her. The meal carries an ingredient we cannot put on a label: relief from having to decide.

That principle travels, too.

When someone is having a hard time, we often say, “Let me know what you need.” I have said it. You have probably said it. It is kind, but it hands the work of noticing, choosing and asking back to the person with the least room for it.

“I made you soup. Is Tuesday or Wednesday better?” is easier to receive.

So is, “There are three meals in your freezer. The lids have heating instructions.”

Specific care is a lovely thing.

A larger table, not a different mission

Broadening who may eat postpartum food does not make postpartum an afterthought. Quite the opposite. These foods entered my kitchen because generations of women understood that birth deserves a period of deliberate replenishment. Mothership exists because American mothers are still too often expected to move through that period with remarkably little practical support.

The lesson is not that postpartum food was mislabeled. The lesson is that postpartum care has something to teach the rest of us.

Make food that holds well. Make enough for tomorrow. Use ingredients with a reason to be there. Bring it before someone has to ask. Sit down and eat it while it is warm.

If you are feeding a new mother, wonderful. Feed her first, and feed her often. If you are feeding your father after a difficult week, your friend after a loss, your partner after a double shift or yourself on an entirely ordinary Wednesday, I am glad this food found you, too.

You do not have to earn a nourishing meal by reaching a breaking point. You can simply be hungry.

Cheers to you, and to whatever is warming on the stove.

— Monika

Postpartum Food Is Just Good Food