Food is Medicine & Magic, Neither & Both
how to feed people in convalescence, grief, and general
In the teaching of prenatal and postpartum yoga for the past decade, I have heard a grievance or two about the hilarious hiccups associated with the giving and receiving of meals in the early postpartum era. As I have recently received such kindness post-surgery, this topic has come up again and several have requested this primer in my adorable and hilarious style.
I’m rarely this directive, so enjoy it!
FIRST - how NOT to help:
Bring food items in beloved containers that you value and wish to have returned - a family heirloom is best, preferably if it is not microwavable or dishwasher friendly. Do you have porcelain? If not, wood or crystal will do.
Expect the recipient to eat it now, in front of you - whether it is mealtime or not, you’ve invested the time and effort to prepare the meal, it is your god-given right to see it ingested. Bonus points for asking probing questions about their convalescence during this time.
Put something into the oven that the person cannot extract themselves - ever tried to get a hot dish out of an oven while holding a baby on oxygen after a Cesarean birth? I hear they’re adding it to the next Summer Games.
Substitute something they have explicitly mentioned is off limits, particularly if it is a family favorite - you know what is healing, you’ve healed! They may feel confident that they are ‘allergic’ to shrimp, but you know of the healing powers of the gumbo and you trust them to just get over it. Plus food allergies are usually a myth.
Try a brand new recipe you have never made before - a really ideal time to try out something that you’ve never made, and also not sample it! Better they learn that you doubled the salt before you do…
And the DO list:
Deliver meals in disposable or gifted containers when possible. I save glass pasta sauce jars and large yogurt containers with lids, wash them well, and fill them with cooled soups, cookies, or other toppings. You might like to purchase take-out containers, or even inexpensive gift-ables. Have you ever tried to unload the dishwasher after hip, knee, or abdominal surgery? Rinse and recycle is a religion.
(PS: if someone delivers food in containers that need to be returned, take a picture)
Deliver the meal you said you would bring in the window you said you would bring it, without expectation to come in/see the baby/person convalescing or hang out. Even if you are invited in, you don’t have to accept that offer. In everyone’s ideal world there is a labeled receptacle on the porch. In my world the price of entry includes reviewing images of my surgery with me.
Revere requests and restrictions. You might categorically disagree with what the requester has listed, because you know that cinnamon makes the recipe better, or hear that ghee is superior to coconut oil, or not believe that your recipient is really gluten intolerant because you witnessed them devouring a bagel back in the day. You might actually, empirically know something and yet. Their wholeness matters. Their requests matter. I’m not asking you to cook meat if it betrays your moral or religious code, but I am painstakingly reminding you that trust is easy to lose and hard to restore.
Make or bring something you’ve made before. There are zero bonus points for creativity. If you’re great at lasagna or chicken soup or kitchari, do that. The most basic, routine thing you make is the most valuable for everyone. If you have never cooked, take-out!
All-star bonus:
Bring a little extra something. Maybe it’s a box of tea, a bag of coffee beans, a four pack of toilet paper, some individually wrapped sweets. Think of pantry items that you know the person values, and if you don’t know them well, anything goes. In the past two weeks I have destroyed a pound of peppermint tea and jar of marmalade that makes a quasi-tea beverage with no shame. I never would have purchased these things and they have been life-giving.
If you are invited in, do one thing. Offer to take the trash or recycling out with you. Load or unload the dishwasher. Take the dog for a loop around the block. Totally not necessary and also unbelievably valuable. It can be hard for people to ask for the help that they need, so these are three that are easy to offer if you have time, space, and capacity.
Emotional support bananas - If you are in direct contact with the person, you can text them on your way and say something like “I’m leaving in thirty minutes and stopping by the store on my way to you. Please let me know if there is anything in particular I can pick up for you on the way.” I for one love to have bananas in the house, and they aren’t worth a pick up or delivery order, but also they are so meaningful.
Food is and is not medicine. Both are true, and we as Americans (particularly those with access to abundance) are so messed up on these facts. We imbue food with omnipotent power, as though ingesting a certain grammage of protein per day were the holy grail of immortality, and also give it less credit than it deserves to soothe the unfixable soul wounding of grief or surgical excision.
Like all things, food has the power to heal and to harm with equal force and fortitude. The very same blackberry pie which can tame an aching broken heart can be weaponized by the fear that the blood sugar spike it elicits will end you. The chicken soup recipe inherited from your ancestors or those of your next door neighbor can nourish the post-surgical body and unlid the rabbit hole of ethics and sentience. And as with all manner of human relation, a thousand positive interactions are required to neutralize a negative dose. No singular recipe is curative, and outside of an allergy, medical condition, choking hazard or serious contamination, no food can harm.
But the food story sure can.
And story?
Story I can do.
Food is medicine when the body is malnourished as I have witnessed in the absolute miracle resurrection of my person post 35 day hospital stay and as I have recently been reminded in my adorable dysphagia. I believe this wholeheartedly and regularly send money and prayers in the direction of Project Angel Heart, who made and delivered medically-tailored meals when my person was reconstituting. They are the absolute embodiment of medicine + magic = healing, as they seem to toss a legitimate chef in with a credentialed RD into a boxing ring and have them duke it out in service of delicious, freezable meals for people with a range of historically unsurvivable things. In the early days, the RD spent hours on the phone with me, coaching me to add a gram of protein here and a calorie there.
In my recent hysterectomy, which I’ve documented with ridiculous detail here, I experienced a mild and common consequence of anesthesia called dysphagia. My 43 year old body just couldn’t swallow food. It would choke and reject unless it was a liquid or puree and I very quickly and unintentionally lost important body mass. For a few hours after each meal, I would cough and clear my throat because of the phantom sense that something was lodged there. My incredible community provided me broths, pureed squash, lentil, carrot, and green soups and delivered Ethiopian food to my door.
Food is medicine when the soul has shattered in response to loss, grief, desperation, which is bound to happen in this life. Malnourishment of another sort, I guess you could say. Not of the physical body, but the emotional body or spirit, which can only do its work inside of a physical vessel. Chipotle is my love language, but in times of steep grief I have experienced healing with homemade Zuppa Toscana and Pad Thai. There is no science behind this and may never be, but there is a rich history of human connection. An ancestral legacy of working with your hands and heart and offering your work (even if all it is is take out) in service of a broken soul.
Food is not magic, but gosh I wish it was (with the only exception being breast milk for infants… then wow). I wish that coconut oil or chia seeds or celery juice could cure what ails me. For decades I scrupulously followed prescriptive lists* from various wisdom traditions (black beans but not kidney beans - ghee but not butter) in an attempt to heal my ‘unexplained infertility’ and possibly maybe win the lottery of getting pregnant. I ate three avocados a day and a handful of raw walnuts, green powders and royal jelly while avoiding the dark side foods: soy, dairy, gluten, corn, peanuts because I believed them to be poison.
Food is not magic, even though I wholeheartedly love a latte with all of my might (so much so I named this publication after it). I lived for months at the ashram in adherence to their strict policy against consuming coffee on or off site and I was fine.
I believe equally in medicine and magic, and science is my love language. I understand the significance of standard deviations and outliers. Believe that chemical processes are highly predictable and take place in the context of so much other human soup. Ethics are so critical and also prevent us from knowing more - and that more is not worth compromising the ethics involved. I love science unequivocally because of its humility in offering hypotheses which stand only so long as they have not yet been replaced.
If you are a torn up by privilege and confusing mixed messages, I offer the following as a possible antidote. Food insecurity is a really real social determinant of health, and if your adorable mind easily fixates on this-not-that, or ruminates on ruminants, may I invite you to pour your dollars and efforts, your labor and social shares in service of improving access for those who are malnourished or unstable in nutritional access? Use that tenacity where it matters most. This is bigger than donating to food banks, although that’s a great hobby. Participate inside of an organization that feed people. Bring meals to your neighbors in caregiving, even if it seems like what they are doing is normal (like bringing a new person into the fam) or routine (like surgery).
If we - as a collective - can ensure that others are fed and nourished?
We can make food medicine and magic.
Thanks for reading,
K
PS: If you liked this one and are facing a surgery or new addition to the fam, please take a peek at How to Be Selfish.
PPS: Also published and not emailed today, my enormous and comprehensive post about my Happy Hysterectomy. It may not be for you specifically, but my guess is that you know someone personally who would really like to read it. Would you pass it along?
*Lists of food are remarkably problematic, not the traditions from which they originate. One of my most favorite aphorisms from Ayurveda is “Everything is medicine to someone, and nothing is medicine to everyone.” Wish I coulda squished it into this post, but we’re getting tome-ish at this point.