San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
ON TRADITION & HEALING
East Bay group finds recipes passed down from elders are key to healing
Bay Area mothers offer support with postpartum nutrition and education.
When Dr. Marilyn Wong gave birth to her daughters over 40 years ago in San Francisco, her mother invited her to stay at her home for a month. Wong, a Hong Kong immigrant and now a retired public health physician, rested and focused on breastfeeding while her mom cooked her traditional Chinese postpartum dishes like ginger vinegar with pigs feet and eggs, and chicken wine soup.
She didn’t know it then, but Wong was participating in centuriesold postpartum (postbirth) traditions that include eating foods that help new moms heal and breastfeed called sitting the month (zuo yuezi in China). Cultures around the world have their own postpartum traditions and recipes similar to sitting the month: la cuarentena in Latin America, omugwo in Nigeria’s Igbo tribe, yu duan in Thailand. The U.S. has been slowly warming up to using food as medicine, but the rest of the world has been on that train for centuries.
After three pregnancies with gestational diabetes and severe preeclampsia, my postpartum meals were mostly Mexican Coke and Tartine almond croissants because I wanted sugar and comfort. I had the privilege of postpartum help thanks to my doula and my mom, but no knowledge that food could help me heal and breastfeed. I struggled with both after my first birth (an emergency Csection with blood transfusions); my body took months to heal.
In the U.S., we don’t talk much about postpartum care or nutrition. A new mom’s first checkup happens six weeks after birth, and there is no national paid maternity leave. It’s not a shock that the latest estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the U.S. has the worst maternal mortality rate compared to nine other wealthy countries, with nonHispanic black women dying more than twice as much as nonHispanic white women and three times as much as Hispanic women.
Wong believes that this can change if we rebuild the culture surrounding postpartum care and nutrition. It needs to be peoplecentered, justicebased and adapted to our current society. “In the past, your community or village would cook traditional postpartum meals and take care of you,” Wong says. “In the U.S., we don’t have that. We’ve lost this cultural postpartum knowledge because of racism, sexism and profitbased health care.” She founded a volunteer organization called Mothers to Mothers or M2M, which studies and promotes crosscultural postpartum knowledge and justice, often through food.
Wong never got a chance to get the postpartum recipes from her mother before she passed. So it’s fitting that
M2M started as an undergraduate project for a class Wong taught Asian American Pacific Islander students at UC Berkeley in 2014, where they collected postpartum recipes from family. In 2017, they selfpublished a book called “From Mothers to Mothers: A Collection of Traditional Asian Postpartum Recipes.” Each recipe is printed in its native language and English, and they raised funds to donate copies to local clinics and nonprofits working with lowincome Asian American populations.
After a good reception, they took it further. “I didn’t want people to think that these recipes were just old wives’ tales,” Wong explains. “I wanted to show them the nutrition in it.” She partnered with UC Berkeley dietitians and their students to analyze recipes that were sent to them and from the cookbook, and put the recipes and results on their website.
“Each culture has a lactation ingredient and a healing ingredient,” Wong explains. In the ginger vinegar with pigs feet and eggs that she ate postpartum, the ginger heals by reducing inflammation, boosting the immune system with Vitamin C and making bowel movements easier with fiber. The protein in the egg also heals by repairing muscle and tissue. The pigs feet provide calories and calcium for milk production and recovery, and the black sweet vinegar helps retain energy and possibly reduces postpartum depression.
Food activist, chef and M2M team member Aileen Suzara experienced the benefits of having her community make her crosscultural postpartum foods when she
had her first child in 2019. Suzara, a Filipina, ate Filipino tinola, a chicken soup with green papaya (boosts milk supply, provides vitamins) and moringa leaves (boosts milk supply and calcium, is antiinflammatory and helps with blood clots); panjeri from her Punjabi mother inlaw, an Indian dessert with lots of nuts (protein) and fenugreek (boosts milk supply); rice porridge (carbs for energy), and sardines and cheese (foods she craved).
“When we care for postpartum families, there are mental and physical benefits,” Suzara says. “When we cultivate practices of care, it creates a ripple effect of care that permeates society.” M2M wants to modernize that community postpartum support with their latest project, Nourish. The first stage focuses on restaurants.
“I thought, how do people get food today? From restaurants, food delivery apps. Can we rally restaurants to be part of this community?” Wong says.
M2M has a team of dietitians and graduate students identifying dishes at restaurants in the Bay Area that help postpartum mothers, which they put up on their site. Friends and family can get new moms these dishes or gift certificates from the restaurants and help nourish them. Wong’s dream is to partner with food delivery apps that can put these dishes in a special section for new moms, making it even easier to access.
M2M launched the program two months early in March in response to the pandemic, with 15 restaurants and 32 dishes, and asked local and state governments to declare lowincome postpartum women as a vulnerable population so they can qualify for pandemic meal programs. Many of the Nourish dishes were already on restaurant menus, like the black bean soup at Cosecha in Oakland. Chef owner Dominica RiceCisneros says that it’s a flavor her family craves, and she loves how the beans provide new moms with iron and protein (and also fiber, says M2M dietitian Jing Liu).
At Radio Africa Kitchen in San Francisco, chef Eskender Aseged took a traditional Ethiopian postpartum dish, genfo (wheat porridge with niter kibbeh, a spiced clarified butter) and updated it using American ingredients. His alicha with corn and cracked quinoa ugali makes
“In the past, your community or village would cook traditional postpartum meals and take care of you. ... We’ve lost this cultural postpartum knowledge because of racism, sexism and profitbased health care.” Dr. Marilyn Wong, retired public health physician