June 15, 2021 • 41 mins
Pregnancy is amazing — and scary, and beautiful, and a thousand other things. The modern world has stereotypes and tropes aplenty about pregnancy, especially including the phenomena known as pregnancy cravings. But how far back does this go? In the first part of this series, Ben and Noel explore the history of cravings, along with beliefs about how too much — or too little — of a given food was believed to affect children later in life.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. As always, thank you
so much for tuning in. We've got our super producer
Max Williams in the house, live and direct on the zoom.
I'm Ben Boland And who is this other handsome guy
on the zoom looks like he just got a haircut?
Oh my god, bad Are you talking about me? Are
(00:48):
you talking about me? Yes? You are only I'm the
only other person I did get a haircut. I don't
know why I was so over excited about that. I
think I was maybe doing a bit. It didn't really land,
but I did get a haircut. Ben, Um, you've got
a haircut too. We joked that we got haircuts side
by side while holding hands, holding holding hands, But that
didn't really happen. But you can. I leave it to
(01:11):
the imagination of the listening public. Yes, please picture our
fresh haircuts the entire time you are listening to this
week's two part episode, Max Noll and I are tackling
something that is going to doubtlessly be familiar to a
lot of folks listening to the show today. For anybody
(01:32):
in the audience who has ever been a part of
a pregnancy or has been expecting a child. You know
that it can bring some well it can it can
bring some big changes into your life. And one of
the funniest changes that pregnancy can bring is a change
(01:53):
in cravings. Right, this is an ancient idea, Like Max Noll,
you've you probably we have some stories in your family
about odd cravings. Maybe your mother's had some like very
specific cravings while you were on the way to Earth. Like,
do you guys have any uh anecdotes about you know,
(02:15):
your mom all of a sudden saying I can only
eat pickled flavored ice cream? Do they make pickle flavored
ice cream? Because that sounds like an absolute culinary travesty.
I guess if they did, it would probably be for
this reason. But I know that ice cream flavors are
getting all kinds of weird these days. I don't know.
I don't really talk to my mom about that kind
of stuff. We have sort of weird relationship, Max, I
refer to you. You seem to have a very friendly
(02:36):
and open relationship with your family. Did your mom tell
you about weird craving she had when you or your
brother were in the womb? So she definitely has told
me I cannot off the top of my head. Remember,
but my mom had so my brother's only eighteen months
older than me, so it's like rapid concessions. So she's like, yeah,
I was pretty much pregnant. I had like a few
days off and being pregnant. Then I was pregnant again.
(02:57):
It was like a three It was like a three
year period. I was pretty much pregnant, and then I decided,
you know, I'm just gonna have two kids. I thought
about having four or five or six now after you Max, especially,
I was the larger of the two still to this day,
the larger the two. And she's like, after you, Max,
you were enough of a pain that I decided two
(03:18):
kids is good. Two kids is good, and you've continued
being a pain to this day. No, I'm kidding, he's exactly.
I don't know. It's like I I, yeah, I'm a dad,
and I went through a lot of this stuff with
my daughter's mom um, who I've mentioned before. We're not married,
but we're very, very close, and I it was such
(03:38):
a kind of traumatic, intense time that I almost think
I've like blocked a lot of it out of my memory,
not not because it was like bad. It was just
very intense and there's a lot going on, and also
the first like year or so of like all the
late night feedings and all that stuff. But I definitely
remember she was into like spicy food. She's always been
in a spicy food. But I would cook care a
(04:00):
lot of like thaipe food, and we would order a
lot of like really spicy Indians. I think that's a
pretty common one for sure. Yeah. Yeah, this is fascinating
because you know, we are lucky enough to have some
expecting parents in the audience today, and while some of
our fellow ridiculous historians are listening to this week's series,
(04:22):
you may be experiencing cravings of your own. You may
be waking up at three in the morning saying I
need French fries and gummy bears stat sending and sending
your partner out to pick those up for you. There's
there's a lot of um cultural commentary that comes into
(04:44):
the idea of pregnancy cravings. And if you go online today,
if you go to forums like what to Expect all
one word, then you will find no shortage of very
specific pregnancy cravings, old food related and you'll find a
lot of um speculation about this too, from biologists to psychologists. Right, yeah,
(05:09):
you sure well. And it's not it's not like a
new thing. It really has been around as long as
we've been documenting on a on a bit more high level.
I don't know that we have like chromagnet cravings or
anything like that, but as far back as like the
sixteenth century, we as a culture have been very much
aware of this idea of these very specific cravings and
urges that hit women when they're you know, with child Right,
(05:34):
and that form you mentioned too in it kind of
did a round up of some of the more popular
weird ones, and there were things like sour gummy worms,
French fries, fried chicken, watermelon, Mexican food and water and
salad bend. What is that? Is that like a dish
or is it literally just like glasses of water and
like plates of greens? I believe it is a salad
(05:58):
and a class of water. But let me hop on
this hobby horse. Real quick salad just means a mixture,
uh salad. The I think here in the US, a
lot of people imagine, you know, like a nice Caesar
salad with some graded Palmer song maybe a couple of
fancy crutons when they think of salad. But in other
(06:19):
parts of the world there are things like milk salad.
I'm not making that up. Folks, google milk salad. It's
a real thing. It's weird. I'll give that one a pass.
But the thing has been to your point, the there
is somewhat of a rhyme and reason to it. The
idea of you know, pregnancy being divided into the tri masters, right,
the three tri masters, and each one kind of having
(06:40):
an escalating sort of vibe of these cravings, I believe
typically the first one is much more savory type of stuff,
the second one is sweet, and the third one is salty. Again,
mileage may vary. Um, people are different. But that is
somewhat of the conventional knowledge behind it in terms of
the modern, you know, study of this phenomenon. Yes, so
(07:02):
today we are going to dive into the storied history
of pregnancy food cravings. And before we do, we have
to point out that, no, I like the phrase you used,
your mileage may vary. This is not a culturally universal experience.
There are cultures where pregnancy food cravings as a concept
(07:28):
don't really exist or they're not really reported. And if
you go from culture to culture, you will find that
where these cravings do exist, they are often wildly different.
For instance, in Japan, when expecting mothers are reporting a craving,
they're usually craving rice other than you know, water and salad.
(07:51):
It's right, and you know, I just want to double
back ever so slightly when I said that the kind
of conventional scientific understanding is this, you know, division of
the three trimesters of the different kind of flavor profiles.
That's really just an observation kind of of like you know,
typical cycle of these types of craving. But the actual
scientific explanation as to why, you know, physiologically these happen
(08:15):
still somewhat up in the air. What we do know universally,
and it makes sense for rice as well, is that
women um tend to crave calorically dense things, things that
have that pack a lot of calories and carbohydrates for
example into you know, a small package, things like animal proteins, pizza. Again,
(08:38):
these calorically dense things, the kinds of things that new
tells you to avoid, like the plague if anyone is
aware of that. That is, like the lesson that I
learned in my week on noon, my failed week on noon.
You're not supposed to eat calorically dense things, which would
be things like steak or you know, heavy carbs. Um.
But peanut butter is a great, great example. But outside
(08:59):
of that is it's kind of anyone's guests And you're right.
Then women in Japan reported liking more rice, which is
a staple food of that culture, obviously because it is
plentiful and packs a lot of nutrients and calories into
a pretty small package. To say, what want more of that? Yep, yep,
And shout out to the psychologist who came to some
(09:21):
of these conclusions, Natalia see Orlof and Julia M. Horns.
They wrote that researchers need to consider culture in looking
at what women crave while pregnant, and they make a
great point when they say, there is a complex ecosystem
of pre existing ideas about pregnancy, pre existing ideas about food,
(09:46):
and of course pre existing ideas about what it means
to be a woman in general. And it makes sense
when you think about it, that your body is in
an extraordinary situation and your body is making additional demands.
You know what, I mean, like, listen to your body
when it tells you what it was. One study of
(10:09):
Tanzanian women in a rural environment found that they were
reporting desires for, like you said, animal proteins, staples, grains, fruits,
and vegetables, and the psychologist found that there was a
a social significance cultural significance to providing these foods for
(10:33):
expecting mothers, like if you're if you're the husband, or
you're the husband's family or the male partners family, then
it's not only expected for you to provide those foods,
but you get a bit of social cash in doing so.
So around the world and throughout history, it turns out
that people have some unifying factors were not all that different.
(10:58):
But this being a history show, we are going to
dive into some history on pregnancy cravings. Like you said, Noel,
I think we can go back as far as the
sixteen hundreds, right, correct, Yeah, I mean that's definitely when
(11:22):
you know there's started to be more of an emphasis
on measurement and more of an emphasis on um the
idea of kind of getting to the root of what
makes us tick. And this was one of the goals
of Nicolas Culpepper, who was a very popular medical writer
at the time. Again, we know that a lot of
these ideas are not gonna pan out, you know, over time,
(11:43):
and suddenly the some of us, they're gonna sound absolutely ridiculous.
But that is kind of one of the words in
the name of the show. So I think we're good there. Um.
But this dude, Nicholas Culpepper, he kind of had a
theory on what these cravings were. He described them as
one of the chiefest signs of conception. So I guess
he's using that as a marker of like, Okay, you
are in fact pregnant, because you know, again it was
(12:06):
kind of a they didn't have pregnancy tests back then.
You really had to this kind of like hope for
the best and then wait for the signs, right, And
this would have been one of the early indicators according
to Culpepper. Um, And he said, what would then follow?
According to another writer, historian, I believe of this era,
John Sadler, would be then the quote longing desire for
(12:29):
And I love this term strange meats strange meats uh yeah,
And I think again some language differences in the usage
of words like this, But back then, I think the
term meats would have just been a word to describe
food in general. Like if you think if you hear
people talk about sweet meats, that literally just means like candy,
(12:51):
you know, So meats would have been a kind of
a generalized term for food stuffs. Bring me an ortalan
I'm only exactly. Yeah, this is interesting. So the very
first known pregnancy test as we would understand it today,
comes from ancient Egypt, where women would check to see
(13:15):
whether they were pregnant by urinating on barley or wheat seeds,
and if the seeds sprouted quickly, then they would say,
this means I am pregnant. That sounds kind of crazy, right,
that sounds relatively unscientific, but turns out that was a
pretty good predictor of pregnancy. Yeah, it was right about
(13:37):
seventy of the time. But still, you know what, what's
that old say? A mother knows, right, So you know
what your body is telling you, and if your body
is like I need these strange meats, then you know
you know that you know that something has changed. And
(13:57):
we we also know that by late sixteen hundreds, this
was a very common conversation in Europe, Like people people
knew about pregnancy cravings. People joked about them. In six
two there was the satirical piece think of it like
(14:18):
an onion headline, folks, when you hear the title the
Ten Pleasures of Marriage, and in the Ten Pleasures of Marriage,
the authors suggests that cravings are so common that quote, oh,
women when they are with child do fall commonly from
one loading to another. And then the guy the author
(14:39):
here he complains about this is so like classic stand up.
He's complaining about his wife, right, and he's like, they're gonna,
you know, one day they'll crave oranges from China. The
civil lemons, whatever those are s I V I L L.
Is this some kind of a alien lemon, like a
(15:01):
lemon cello or something like that. It's lowercase in our notes,
so I'm not sure. I think it's spelled the same
as now. It's not now I'm wrong, But anyway, let
us listeners. But you know, we know that fruits have
changed over time and in various different strains that have
become more prominent or maybe the civil lemon was huge
at the time. But speaking of things that were huge
(15:22):
at the time, another one that is in this list
is something known as the largest asparagus. I can only
assume this is a very large asparagus that probably makes
your pea smell really bad. It's not large enough. We
need the largest one. You're on this Max, stop the recording.
We need the largest asparagus that's got Yeah, yeah, thanks,
(15:44):
But uh, this sounds decadent. I'm kind of into this.
Strawberries with wine and sugar and cherries of all sorts,
and I like the pause and ellipses, plums, plums. It's
It's interesting because at the time that this was written,
these fruits, along with wine and sugar were extravagant. They
(16:05):
were they were premium items, you know what I mean.
The average person living in Europe at this time would
have considered orange is pretty fancy. They were not. They
were not on the crazy level of opulence that a
pineapple was, which was a whole other deal. But they were,
you know, they would be considered a premium food. And
(16:30):
and this guy who's writing this piece is saying he's
complaining about the same thing like a stand up comedian
would complain about in the nineteen eighties. He's like, now
I've got a trot out way after dark, because all
of a sudden it's three am. And uh and my
gal once strawberries with wine and sugar. So and the
(16:56):
largest asparagus. Max, you came back, Do you have it? Uh?
Still working on it. I had like the third and
the fifth largest one, but I'm still working out again
the largest. Okay, we need the biggest one. Though. This
is the results driven producer right here. I appreciate that, Max.
But the thing is, I think what a lot of
you out there are thinking right now is like, but
what about like regular people they got pregnant too. They
(17:20):
couldn't have access to civil lemons and China oranges and
the largest asparagus and strawberries and wine. I imagine they
were probably eating whatever they could get their hands on,
which would have been, you know, just staple foods. And
also we know that pregnancy is often uh in these
days before the intervention of you know, much more effective
(17:43):
medical science didn't go well, you know for people in
the lower class. I'm so glad you brought this up. Yeah,
because this is something this is something that I think
stays with the species today, and it's an incredibly important point.
So cravings can only exist in a society or culture
(18:07):
that has a variety of food or an access to
varieties of foods. And there are many places in the
world historically and as we record today that do not
have the privilege of that access, do not have the
privilege of that variety. You know what I mean, Like
(18:27):
when whenever you see a show about cuisine and uh,
you see very fancy, elaborate preparations of things. That is
very much a luxury. And when we are exploring this story,
we want to make sure that we acknowledge that. So
I really appreciate that point, Noel. We know that there
(18:48):
were some stereotypes in Europe about pregnancy cravings. One of
them was apricots. People like it became kind of a
a trope in fiction of the sixteen hundreds, Like John
Webster had a play called The Duchess of Malfi, And
in The Duchess of Malfie there's this scene where one
(19:11):
of the characters tries to figure out whether the Duchess
is pregnant, and this is how he does it. He
just walks up to her with a bowl of apricots.
Because at the time people are like, you know what,
pregnant people love apricots, bro And that was like so
common and so understood that if you were watching this play,
(19:33):
you would know what the scene was about. If you
just walked into the room while that scene was happening,
you would see a guy, he'd have some apricots, he'd
be in front of this lady, and you'd be like, uh,
somebody's expecting Sure, sure that was a thing in like Shakespeare,
for example, like all kinds of stock characters, and you know,
these little in jokes that that only people of the
(19:55):
time would have fully been aware of, and when you
read them disconnected, it feels very very dated. Obviously, so
much of that work is very universal, but things like
apricots being very specifically tied to pregnancy would not read
into a modern audience unless you listen to this episode,
in which case, congratulations for being in on the historical joke.
But these there was some superstition behind these types of
(20:19):
cravings too, Ben. This wasn't you know, it was almost
considered a heresy or somehow challenging the gods. You know,
because again, and we know even in the upper class,
pregnancies would often go awry because there just wasn't the
kind of medical intervention that we have today, and they
did things pretty weirdly and incorrectly sometimes. Um, although we know,
(20:41):
you know, it is possible for a mother to just
give birth on our own with no doctor. We see it,
you know, every now and then it happens in like
movies where someone is left to their own devices or
gives birth in captivity or something like that, and they
don't usually die, but there can be complications, significant complications,
and all Fentimes folks would blame things like that on
(21:03):
superstitious or supernatural factors, right, yeah, yeah, because you know,
the separation of science and spirituality is a relatively new
thing for this species. If you look at if you
look at the narrative arc of humanity, so back in
the day, science and what we would recognize as religion
(21:25):
or spiritual belief systems, they were inextricably intertwined. So if
you are a midwife or a lay healer at this time,
you don't really have an established like medical academy. You
don't go to university. You learn on the job. And
(21:46):
if you are referring to text rather than oral traditions,
right or experiential learning, then you are looking at some
very old works. You're looking at Aristotle, right, and and
things of that nature, and then you're you're also treating
superstitions the same way you would treat scientific research. So this,
(22:12):
as you can imagine, leads to some weird conclusions. Like
early writers of what we would consider the modern era
spent tons tons of time and and oceans of ink
speculating on what pregnancy cravings could mean, and these incorporated
superstition and science together. People believed that you could sort
(22:37):
of tell what a child's personality was going to be
like based on the cravings of the mother while that
child was in And I love the way you pronounced
it earlier, all the whim, yes, the hum. Indeed, what
do you think the giant asparagus child is gonna grow
up to be? Like? Ben? Well, there's giant exparagus and
then there's the largest asparagus. You're gonna, you know, ridiculously,
(22:59):
Come on, men, is what I assume ridiculous history. We're
doing to three men in a baby thing. So that's
what we're doing. Now, we're gonna we're gonna raise this
kid with a max is so done with this. We're
gonna we're gonna raise this kid and I mean Ted Danson, Yeah,
of course if you want, But I think it's cool
(23:20):
when you're you bro. Well, but we're doing the okay,
so we can just do our own three men in
a baby scenario. We don't have to Who else was
it who's doing a mustache? Tom? Tom's selling tom Selle
three in a baby, Maybe there's another baby. There's the
third man? Who's the third man? Sorry, this is an
(23:41):
important tangent. YEA, let's just really quick right here. Steve
Goudenberg dance Steve Gudenberg. Nobody remember Steve Guttenberg. I will
take the director credit because it was directed by Mr
spock Letter. I didn't at least know that's that's seem
(24:03):
to remember that. Leonard Nimoy, Max with the Facts, Max
with the Facts in the Largest Desparagus. Also shout out
to Leonard Nimoy's musical career. I don't know if anybody's
ever listened to his music. But it's not what you're expecting,
and it's a fun right. I like Leonard Nimoy a
lot um. But it's true, Ben, we're talking about superstition.
(24:27):
We're talking about things like humors and bodily fluids and
you know, like having too much bile that has to
be drained or whatever, and blood letting in the and
the like. So I mean this is very rudimentary, uh,
stuff based on this idea of the balance of these
bodily fluids and if if you have too much of one,
then you have to balance it out with the other
(24:47):
or else you're gonna, you know, be colicky or something.
But with pregnancy, you're right, then a lot of of
of emphasis was placed on things like the maternal imagination,
which I love, the theory of the maternal imagination, which
was the notion that experiences experienced by the mother could
(25:07):
actually affect the baby, you know, in utero. Yeah, and
and and have experiences to be kind of transmitted from
the mother to the fetus, and those could be carried
with the child into adulthood for good or for ill.
An extreme version of this comes to us from Joseph Merrick,
whom history remembers as the elephant Man. Merrik famously explained
(25:33):
his condition by saying his mother was startled by an
elephant while she was carrying him. So people did believe
that this is interesting, we should spend just a little
bit of time on this. People for a long time
believed that the experiences all the sensory input and all
(25:54):
the nutrition that went into an expecting mother affected the
child that they would produce. And it turns out, oddly enough,
as as superstitious as this sounds, it turns out that
humanity was not entirely wrong about this. The study of
(26:20):
epigenetics teaches us that what happens to a person their
life experiences can influence the expressions of genes that their
descendants will bear. Like it's it is true, but people
understood this way before they had any concept of gene
theory or epigenetics. But they knew something was up and
(26:42):
they were trying to figure out what was going on.
One of the old school beliefs that is hopefully enjoyable
and not scary in the modern day is this, if
you were in the Middle Ages, then you would have known,
according to medieval lore and word on the street, that
(27:03):
the foods and expecting mother eats will influence the appearance
of her child, the way the kid looks. So, for instance,
if you eat rabbit's heads while you're pregnant, then you're
gonna end up with a kid that has a split
lip or a hair lip, or a cleft palate. And
(27:23):
if you eat fish heads. Then you get I love
this phrase. Then you're gonna end up with a kid
who has something called a trout pout. Have you guys
heard of this? Yeah, it's like the It's like the
historical version of duck lips. I think, right, I have
no ideas like your I guess right now, I guess
your mouth is turned down like a fish. Like nobody
(27:47):
can see this because we're an audio podcast, or you're like,
I can see that. What does a Google image search
get us for the trout pouts? It's yeah, you know what,
hell boy, uh got it all over the place. Um.
(28:07):
Some of these images do appear to be uh, plastic
surgeries that have not gone particularly well. Um, so that
wouldn't have been in play. But yeah, it is pretty
much kind of just a thick, full lip that is
maybe not particularly malleable, let's say, sort of stuck in place,
you know, kind of like blue steel. Remember that look
(28:27):
that Zoolander would do. Yeah, you have to turn That's
what I'm thinking if I recalled Zoolander. Yeah, and then
there's another thing, like the idea of eating soft cheese.
Expectant mothers were sometimes told, hey, watch out for that
soft cheese because if you eat too much soft cheese
then your son will have small genitalia. Okay, well that
(28:51):
you know, uh what would they have put stock in
the size of genitalia back in those days? Ben? Would
that have been an important feat? Sure? Do you think? Well,
it was, at least in Europe at the time. It
was an important enough concern that that people were people
were associated with soft cheese and pregnancy. Uh. Seriously, though,
(29:15):
while while we are joking a little bit, most modern
doctors will tell you that if you are expecting, you
should air on the side of caution when it comes
to soft and unpasteurized cheese. Not because it will affect
your kids Australia, but because there is a link between
cheese and listeria, right, and also things like on like
(29:38):
raw milk. You know that would be a big now now,
And what's the deal with raw milk? Man? And it's
it's technically illegal in some places like uh, well, I
mean yeah, yeah, it's it's illegal because it hasn't been
pasteurized and the process of pasteurization will kill harmful bacteria.
(30:00):
But people in the US and abroad I swear by
raw milk. They think it's top notch. So we've talked
about the idea of superstition being wrapped up in these cravings,
the idea of using them to kind of read the
tea leaves of what you know your boy's penis is
going to look like, or what kind of personality your
your daughter is going to have, or whether there will
(30:21):
be some kind of birth defect. Right, this is all things.
Are all things that a lot of stock was put
in by these or they called ben wise women, sort
of the like next step up from the midwife. You
had the midwife, and then you had these wise women
who are not medically trained, and we're using a lot
of kind of you know, mysticism in this practice. Correct.
(30:41):
I would argue that, well, we know that wise women,
as they were called, did a lot of things that
we would associate with first aid, being a first responder
in your community, also being a midwife or a doula.
And I gotta say, I would argue that if you
are living in this time, your odds of success, if
(31:04):
you're seeking medical treatment, are going to be better with
a midwife than with the barber surgeons of the day.
That's a fact, in case you haven't heard it before, Folks,
back in Europe, for a long time people assumed that
if you were qualified to cut hair, you were also
qualified to pull teeth, to draw blood and to cut
(31:26):
off people's limbs, right, which is, if I'm not mistaken,
where that curly comer red and white barber pole comes from,
the red being for blood letting. They were the ones
who would give you a little snip snip and a
little drip drip, and then send you on your merry way,
and you know, theoretically you'd be all cure. But Ben,
I love that point you make about midwifes being much
more suited to deal with pregnant women because they were
(31:48):
women and they knew their bodies. Therefore, they could at
least translate feelings and experiences that they'd had, most likely
many of them had given birth before to the women
they were helping. So we're not trying to nag in
any way midwives, because it's still today very much a
valuable and valid profession. I've known many women who have
chosen to go with a midwife or do LA rather
(32:11):
than um, you know, have have their baby in the hospital.
But we are talking about these superstitious associations with cravings
and One of them was that if you didn't appease
these cravings, almost as if it was some sort of
offering to the gods, bad things could happen. Oh yes, yeah,
if you didn't appease these cravings, there would the belief
(32:36):
wind be negative consequences for your unborn child. So they
are high stakes here, you know what I mean. You're
an expecting mother and you've got this list of these
dudes and dolts. You know, watch out for strawberries or cherries.
They may give your kid birth marks. But you can't eat.
(32:56):
You can't not eat the stuff you want to eat
because if you don't listen to your body, your kid
may come out with some sort of medical condition or malady.
And you would hear contradicting information, which still happens today.
I mean, look, expecting parents out there in the crowd today,
(33:17):
we've got your back. I know that the forums are
full of contradictory information. It was the same thing in
the sixteen hundreds. You'd have one person saying, look, if
you eat strawberries or if you get them thrown on
your face, and you're an expectant mother, then your baby's
gonna have birthmarks. And then someone else would be like,
(33:38):
oh no, wait, the thing is if you don't eat
the strawberries, then your kid's gonna get birthmarks. They were
referring to a real thing something we would now probably
call strawberry nevis because it was people believed it, that's right,
and then they still referred to off in a strawberry birthmarks.
Billy Corgan from The Smashing punk Is actually has one
(34:01):
on his hand that you often don't see because I
think he's his makeup to cover it up, as does
the absolutely twisted and incredible British comedian Chris Morris, who
has a really seriously kind of almost like proto Tim
and Eric Um comedy series called Jam and he also
played the boss on the first few seasons of The
(34:23):
I T. Crowd. But he has one of these birth
marks on his entire face and you almost never see
him without some kind of cover up makeup on um,
but but you will. You can't find some images of
it and see what it looks like, and it is
very much this kind of like uh, freckled, red, splotchy
kind of like thing that spreads, you know, all all
over the face and and it can be elsewhere on
(34:43):
the body. But you're right then, um that at the
time would have been attributed to lack of or over
abundance of strawberries during pregnancy. And we have some accounts,
some historical counts from a particularly well known midwife who
wrote a book called A Complete Practice of Midwiffery, which
I love the word midwiffery. Um. I don't know if
(35:05):
it's so much of a book, as this was a
collection of her notes, but she, you know, went through
countless births. Her name was Sarah Stone in the eighteenth century,
and she worked in the United Kingdom in the areas
of Taunton and Bristol. And she in those notes once
described a woman who was eight months pregnant and started
having significant bleeding, loss of blood, and she referred to
(35:28):
it as a great flooding. And she fully believed that
this was the direct result of some kind of unfulfilled
craving or longing that her patient had, even if she
didn't know what it was, and and Sarah didn't know
what it was, the patient claimed to not know what
it is, what it was, the patient said that she
wasn't wanting for anything. So Stone really kind of started
(35:51):
putting on her midwife detective hat Um and started to
really dig in as to what she might have possibly
been lacking that could cause this complication. And finally the
mother was like, well, I mean, there was this one
time I saw a young boy hold a peapod up
to the sun and I thought it looked beautiful and
(36:11):
strangely delicious. So I want to step back here as
we're as we're getting closer to the end of the
first part of this two part series and give a
shout out to, uh, the king of birth marks, one
of the most famous birthmark havers, Mikhail Gorbachev. You guys
remember Gorbachev Max, maybe a little before this guy takes
(36:35):
it to the paint with his not an intentional pun
with his birthmark. You know, I respect him for having
that kind of pork colored archipelago of a birthmark on
his forehead. And he never he never wore makeup to
cover it. He also played, you know, a huge role
in geopolitics. But now I'm wondering what, you know, what
(36:59):
is its diet was like when they were expecting, did
someone throw strawberries at his mom? As the old saying goes, uh,
what the old saying of throwing strawberries I don't know,
this is old saying. Well, I was saying earlier the
idea that throwing strawberries at an expectant mother could result
in birth marks for the child, but then also not
(37:19):
eating strawberries or cherries or wine could give the kid birthmarks.
I mean, that's that's the thing. Because it was unscientific,
Just like the peapod belief, people were experiencing a bit
of confirmation bias, right. There wasn't really enough research there
to prove or disprove these beliefs, so people went with
(37:40):
what seemed plausible. And that's something that kind of continues today.
It does. And and uh, to that point been in
terms of the research, I mean, this midwife, you know,
really was being pretty methodical with her documenting of all
of these cases, and in her notes, this was the
only documented case of she she did get the peepod,
(38:01):
by the way, so like the she she held them,
she sees she realized, okay, I'm creating this peopod. The
midwife had a local farmer bring in some peapods and
she ate them and then immediately felt better. But in
her notes she said that it was the only example
like this where the one time talking about confirmation bias,
where feeding her the thing that she supposedly lacked, completely
(38:22):
got rid of the you know, the dangerous um complication.
But yet she says in her notes collected as the
complete practice of Midwiffery, that she was confident that quote
such things as these frequently happen without like any evidence whatsoever,
except for the one that's like the very definition of
confirmation bias, except he usually requires a couple of instances.
(38:44):
I would think, right, well, there's there's something else to
play here, of course, which is the unfortunate rate of
infant mortality at the time. So the harsh truth of
it is that you know, a lot of times people
did not have a successful birth, or people had a
child who had, you know, a very very serious medical condition,
(39:09):
and just like parents today, they were searching for answers
as to why this could have happened, you know what
I mean, and hoping to arm themselves with knowledge so
that they could avoid these calamities in the future. And
you might be listening now, and you might be expecting,
if so, congratulations, uh, and you might be thinking, dang,
(39:32):
this whole thing really makes me want a weird flavor
of ice cream. Let's see, we started with pickled ice cream.
So someone saying I want ice cream that also tastes
like pickles, Well, now is your chance to go find
that ice cream if it exists. Because Noel, Max and
I are going to pause, chase down our own food
(39:53):
cravings and return with part two of this two part
series and spoil or alert fellow ridiculous Historian's next part
gets weird? When't you say no? Next part? I think,
is it's fair to say it gets weird? Yeah, if
you think cannibalism is weird, it gets a little weird. Um.
But until then, we hope you all stay weird and
(40:16):
huge thanks to you super producer Max Williams. The largest asparagus,
The largest asparagus? What's the deal with that? We'll wait,
we'll get an updated in episode two. But he's, you know,
one of the weirdest people we know in the best
possible way. I always use that word and as as
a compliment. Huge thanks to Max's bro Alex Williams, who
composed this theme. Big Big thanks to Jonathan Strickland's a
(40:38):
k a. The Whister. Big thanks to our research associate Gabelusier.
Shout out to our super producer Casey Pegram and well,
you know what I would say, Shout out to all
the expecting parents out there. You know it's a tough time,
but it's an exciting time and uh, I'm wishing you
the best, folks. I indeed, we'll see you next time, folks.
(41:00):
M For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the
I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History is a production of I Heart Radio. Welcome
(00:27):
back to the show Ridiculous Historians. As always, thank you
so much for tuning in. We've got our super producer
Max Williams in the house, live and direct on the zoom.
I'm Ben Boland And who is this other handsome guy
on the zoom looks like he just got a haircut?
Oh my god, bad Are you talking about me? Are
(00:48):
you talking about me? Yes? You are only I'm the
only other person I did get a haircut. I don't
know why I was so over excited about that. I
think I was maybe doing a bit. It didn't really land,
but I did get a haircut. Ben, Um, you've got
a haircut too. We joked that we got haircuts side
by side while holding hands, holding holding hands, But that
didn't really happen. But you can. I leave it to
(01:11):
the imagination of the listening public. Yes, please picture our
fresh haircuts the entire time you are listening to this
week's two part episode, Max Noll and I are tackling
something that is going to doubtlessly be familiar to a
lot of folks listening to the show today. For anybody
(01:32):
in the audience who has ever been a part of
a pregnancy or has been expecting a child. You know
that it can bring some well it can it can
bring some big changes into your life. And one of
the funniest changes that pregnancy can bring is a change
(01:53):
in cravings. Right, this is an ancient idea, Like Max Noll,
you've you probably we have some stories in your family
about odd cravings. Maybe your mother's had some like very
specific cravings while you were on the way to Earth. Like,
do you guys have any uh anecdotes about you know,
(02:15):
your mom all of a sudden saying I can only
eat pickled flavored ice cream? Do they make pickle flavored
ice cream? Because that sounds like an absolute culinary travesty.
I guess if they did, it would probably be for
this reason. But I know that ice cream flavors are
getting all kinds of weird these days. I don't know.
I don't really talk to my mom about that kind
of stuff. We have sort of weird relationship, Max, I
refer to you. You seem to have a very friendly
(02:36):
and open relationship with your family. Did your mom tell
you about weird craving she had when you or your
brother were in the womb? So she definitely has told
me I cannot off the top of my head. Remember,
but my mom had so my brother's only eighteen months
older than me, so it's like rapid concessions. So she's like, yeah,
I was pretty much pregnant. I had like a few
days off and being pregnant. Then I was pregnant again.
(02:57):
It was like a three It was like a three
year period. I was pretty much pregnant, and then I decided,
you know, I'm just gonna have two kids. I thought
about having four or five or six now after you Max, especially,
I was the larger of the two still to this day,
the larger the two. And she's like, after you, Max,
you were enough of a pain that I decided two
(03:18):
kids is good. Two kids is good, and you've continued
being a pain to this day. No, I'm kidding, he's exactly.
I don't know. It's like I I, yeah, I'm a dad,
and I went through a lot of this stuff with
my daughter's mom um, who I've mentioned before. We're not married,
but we're very, very close, and I it was such
(03:38):
a kind of traumatic, intense time that I almost think
I've like blocked a lot of it out of my memory,
not not because it was like bad. It was just
very intense and there's a lot going on, and also
the first like year or so of like all the
late night feedings and all that stuff. But I definitely
remember she was into like spicy food. She's always been
in a spicy food. But I would cook care a
(04:00):
lot of like thaipe food, and we would order a
lot of like really spicy Indians. I think that's a
pretty common one for sure. Yeah. Yeah, this is fascinating
because you know, we are lucky enough to have some
expecting parents in the audience today, and while some of
our fellow ridiculous historians are listening to this week's series,
(04:22):
you may be experiencing cravings of your own. You may
be waking up at three in the morning saying I
need French fries and gummy bears stat sending and sending
your partner out to pick those up for you. There's
there's a lot of um cultural commentary that comes into
(04:44):
the idea of pregnancy cravings. And if you go online today,
if you go to forums like what to Expect all
one word, then you will find no shortage of very
specific pregnancy cravings, old food related and you'll find a
lot of um speculation about this too, from biologists to psychologists. Right, yeah,
(05:09):
you sure well. And it's not it's not like a
new thing. It really has been around as long as
we've been documenting on a on a bit more high level.
I don't know that we have like chromagnet cravings or
anything like that, but as far back as like the
sixteenth century, we as a culture have been very much
aware of this idea of these very specific cravings and
urges that hit women when they're you know, with child Right,
(05:34):
and that form you mentioned too in it kind of
did a round up of some of the more popular
weird ones, and there were things like sour gummy worms,
French fries, fried chicken, watermelon, Mexican food and water and
salad bend. What is that? Is that like a dish
or is it literally just like glasses of water and
like plates of greens? I believe it is a salad
(05:58):
and a class of water. But let me hop on
this hobby horse. Real quick salad just means a mixture,
uh salad. The I think here in the US, a
lot of people imagine, you know, like a nice Caesar
salad with some graded Palmer song maybe a couple of
fancy crutons when they think of salad. But in other
(06:19):
parts of the world there are things like milk salad.
I'm not making that up. Folks, google milk salad. It's
a real thing. It's weird. I'll give that one a pass.
But the thing has been to your point, the there
is somewhat of a rhyme and reason to it. The
idea of you know, pregnancy being divided into the tri masters, right,
the three tri masters, and each one kind of having
(06:40):
an escalating sort of vibe of these cravings, I believe
typically the first one is much more savory type of stuff,
the second one is sweet, and the third one is salty. Again,
mileage may vary. Um, people are different. But that is
somewhat of the conventional knowledge behind it in terms of
the modern, you know, study of this phenomenon. Yes, so
(07:02):
today we are going to dive into the storied history
of pregnancy food cravings. And before we do, we have
to point out that, no, I like the phrase you used,
your mileage may vary. This is not a culturally universal experience.
There are cultures where pregnancy food cravings as a concept
(07:28):
don't really exist or they're not really reported. And if
you go from culture to culture, you will find that
where these cravings do exist, they are often wildly different.
For instance, in Japan, when expecting mothers are reporting a craving,
they're usually craving rice other than you know, water and salad.
(07:51):
It's right, and you know, I just want to double
back ever so slightly when I said that the kind
of conventional scientific understanding is this, you know, division of
the three trimesters of the different kind of flavor profiles.
That's really just an observation kind of of like you know,
typical cycle of these types of craving. But the actual
scientific explanation as to why, you know, physiologically these happen
(08:15):
still somewhat up in the air. What we do know universally,
and it makes sense for rice as well, is that
women um tend to crave calorically dense things, things that
have that pack a lot of calories and carbohydrates for
example into you know, a small package, things like animal proteins, pizza. Again,
(08:38):
these calorically dense things, the kinds of things that new
tells you to avoid, like the plague if anyone is
aware of that. That is, like the lesson that I
learned in my week on noon, my failed week on noon.
You're not supposed to eat calorically dense things, which would
be things like steak or you know, heavy carbs. Um.
But peanut butter is a great, great example. But outside
(08:59):
of that is it's kind of anyone's guests And you're right.
Then women in Japan reported liking more rice, which is
a staple food of that culture, obviously because it is
plentiful and packs a lot of nutrients and calories into
a pretty small package. To say, what want more of that? Yep, yep,
And shout out to the psychologist who came to some
(09:21):
of these conclusions, Natalia see Orlof and Julia M. Horns.
They wrote that researchers need to consider culture in looking
at what women crave while pregnant, and they make a
great point when they say, there is a complex ecosystem
of pre existing ideas about pregnancy, pre existing ideas about food,
(09:46):
and of course pre existing ideas about what it means
to be a woman in general. And it makes sense
when you think about it, that your body is in
an extraordinary situation and your body is making additional demands.
You know what, I mean, like, listen to your body
when it tells you what it was. One study of
(10:09):
Tanzanian women in a rural environment found that they were
reporting desires for, like you said, animal proteins, staples, grains, fruits,
and vegetables, and the psychologist found that there was a
a social significance cultural significance to providing these foods for
(10:33):
expecting mothers, like if you're if you're the husband, or
you're the husband's family or the male partners family, then
it's not only expected for you to provide those foods,
but you get a bit of social cash in doing so.
So around the world and throughout history, it turns out
that people have some unifying factors were not all that different.
(10:58):
But this being a history show, we are going to
dive into some history on pregnancy cravings. Like you said, Noel,
I think we can go back as far as the
sixteen hundreds, right, correct, Yeah, I mean that's definitely when
(11:22):
you know there's started to be more of an emphasis
on measurement and more of an emphasis on um the
idea of kind of getting to the root of what
makes us tick. And this was one of the goals
of Nicolas Culpepper, who was a very popular medical writer
at the time. Again, we know that a lot of
these ideas are not gonna pan out, you know, over time,
(11:43):
and suddenly the some of us, they're gonna sound absolutely ridiculous.
But that is kind of one of the words in
the name of the show. So I think we're good there. Um.
But this dude, Nicholas Culpepper, he kind of had a
theory on what these cravings were. He described them as
one of the chiefest signs of conception. So I guess
he's using that as a marker of like, Okay, you
are in fact pregnant, because you know, again it was
(12:06):
kind of a they didn't have pregnancy tests back then.
You really had to this kind of like hope for
the best and then wait for the signs, right, And
this would have been one of the early indicators according
to Culpepper. Um, And he said, what would then follow?
According to another writer, historian, I believe of this era,
John Sadler, would be then the quote longing desire for
(12:29):
And I love this term strange meats strange meats uh yeah,
And I think again some language differences in the usage
of words like this, But back then, I think the
term meats would have just been a word to describe
food in general. Like if you think if you hear
people talk about sweet meats, that literally just means like candy,
(12:51):
you know, So meats would have been a kind of
a generalized term for food stuffs. Bring me an ortalan
I'm only exactly. Yeah, this is interesting. So the very
first known pregnancy test as we would understand it today,
comes from ancient Egypt, where women would check to see
(13:15):
whether they were pregnant by urinating on barley or wheat seeds,
and if the seeds sprouted quickly, then they would say,
this means I am pregnant. That sounds kind of crazy, right,
that sounds relatively unscientific, but turns out that was a
pretty good predictor of pregnancy. Yeah, it was right about
(13:37):
seventy of the time. But still, you know what, what's
that old say? A mother knows, right, So you know
what your body is telling you, and if your body
is like I need these strange meats, then you know
you know that you know that something has changed. And
(13:57):
we we also know that by late sixteen hundreds, this
was a very common conversation in Europe, Like people people
knew about pregnancy cravings. People joked about them. In six
two there was the satirical piece think of it like
(14:18):
an onion headline, folks, when you hear the title the
Ten Pleasures of Marriage, and in the Ten Pleasures of Marriage,
the authors suggests that cravings are so common that quote, oh,
women when they are with child do fall commonly from
one loading to another. And then the guy the author
(14:39):
here he complains about this is so like classic stand up.
He's complaining about his wife, right, and he's like, they're gonna,
you know, one day they'll crave oranges from China. The
civil lemons, whatever those are s I V I L L.
Is this some kind of a alien lemon, like a
(15:01):
lemon cello or something like that. It's lowercase in our notes,
so I'm not sure. I think it's spelled the same
as now. It's not now I'm wrong, But anyway, let
us listeners. But you know, we know that fruits have
changed over time and in various different strains that have
become more prominent or maybe the civil lemon was huge
at the time. But speaking of things that were huge
(15:22):
at the time, another one that is in this list
is something known as the largest asparagus. I can only
assume this is a very large asparagus that probably makes
your pea smell really bad. It's not large enough. We
need the largest one. You're on this Max, stop the recording.
We need the largest asparagus that's got Yeah, yeah, thanks,
(15:44):
But uh, this sounds decadent. I'm kind of into this.
Strawberries with wine and sugar and cherries of all sorts,
and I like the pause and ellipses, plums, plums. It's
It's interesting because at the time that this was written,
these fruits, along with wine and sugar were extravagant. They
(16:05):
were they were premium items, you know what I mean.
The average person living in Europe at this time would
have considered orange is pretty fancy. They were not. They
were not on the crazy level of opulence that a
pineapple was, which was a whole other deal. But they were,
you know, they would be considered a premium food. And
(16:30):
and this guy who's writing this piece is saying he's
complaining about the same thing like a stand up comedian
would complain about in the nineteen eighties. He's like, now
I've got a trot out way after dark, because all
of a sudden it's three am. And uh and my
gal once strawberries with wine and sugar. So and the
(16:56):
largest asparagus. Max, you came back, Do you have it? Uh?
Still working on it. I had like the third and
the fifth largest one, but I'm still working out again
the largest. Okay, we need the biggest one. Though. This
is the results driven producer right here. I appreciate that, Max.
But the thing is, I think what a lot of
you out there are thinking right now is like, but
what about like regular people they got pregnant too. They
(17:20):
couldn't have access to civil lemons and China oranges and
the largest asparagus and strawberries and wine. I imagine they
were probably eating whatever they could get their hands on,
which would have been, you know, just staple foods. And
also we know that pregnancy is often uh in these
days before the intervention of you know, much more effective
(17:43):
medical science didn't go well, you know for people in
the lower class. I'm so glad you brought this up. Yeah,
because this is something this is something that I think
stays with the species today, and it's an incredibly important point.
So cravings can only exist in a society or culture
(18:07):
that has a variety of food or an access to
varieties of foods. And there are many places in the
world historically and as we record today that do not
have the privilege of that access, do not have the
privilege of that variety. You know what I mean, Like
(18:27):
when whenever you see a show about cuisine and uh,
you see very fancy, elaborate preparations of things. That is
very much a luxury. And when we are exploring this story,
we want to make sure that we acknowledge that. So
I really appreciate that point, Noel. We know that there
(18:48):
were some stereotypes in Europe about pregnancy cravings. One of
them was apricots. People like it became kind of a
a trope in fiction of the sixteen hundreds, Like John
Webster had a play called The Duchess of Malfi, And
in The Duchess of Malfie there's this scene where one
(19:11):
of the characters tries to figure out whether the Duchess
is pregnant, and this is how he does it. He
just walks up to her with a bowl of apricots.
Because at the time people are like, you know what,
pregnant people love apricots, bro And that was like so
common and so understood that if you were watching this play,
(19:33):
you would know what the scene was about. If you
just walked into the room while that scene was happening,
you would see a guy, he'd have some apricots, he'd
be in front of this lady, and you'd be like, uh,
somebody's expecting Sure, sure that was a thing in like Shakespeare,
for example, like all kinds of stock characters, and you know,
these little in jokes that that only people of the
(19:55):
time would have fully been aware of, and when you
read them disconnected, it feels very very dated. Obviously, so
much of that work is very universal, but things like
apricots being very specifically tied to pregnancy would not read
into a modern audience unless you listen to this episode,
in which case, congratulations for being in on the historical joke.
But these there was some superstition behind these types of
(20:19):
cravings too, Ben. This wasn't you know, it was almost
considered a heresy or somehow challenging the gods. You know,
because again, and we know even in the upper class,
pregnancies would often go awry because there just wasn't the
kind of medical intervention that we have today, and they
did things pretty weirdly and incorrectly sometimes. Um, although we know,
(20:41):
you know, it is possible for a mother to just
give birth on our own with no doctor. We see it,
you know, every now and then it happens in like
movies where someone is left to their own devices or
gives birth in captivity or something like that, and they
don't usually die, but there can be complications, significant complications,
and all Fentimes folks would blame things like that on
(21:03):
superstitious or supernatural factors, right, yeah, yeah, because you know,
the separation of science and spirituality is a relatively new
thing for this species. If you look at if you
look at the narrative arc of humanity, so back in
the day, science and what we would recognize as religion
(21:25):
or spiritual belief systems, they were inextricably intertwined. So if
you are a midwife or a lay healer at this time,
you don't really have an established like medical academy. You
don't go to university. You learn on the job. And
(21:46):
if you are referring to text rather than oral traditions,
right or experiential learning, then you are looking at some
very old works. You're looking at Aristotle, right, and and
things of that nature, and then you're you're also treating
superstitions the same way you would treat scientific research. So this,
(22:12):
as you can imagine, leads to some weird conclusions. Like
early writers of what we would consider the modern era
spent tons tons of time and and oceans of ink
speculating on what pregnancy cravings could mean, and these incorporated
superstition and science together. People believed that you could sort
(22:37):
of tell what a child's personality was going to be
like based on the cravings of the mother while that
child was in And I love the way you pronounced
it earlier, all the whim, yes, the hum. Indeed, what
do you think the giant asparagus child is gonna grow
up to be? Like? Ben? Well, there's giant exparagus and
then there's the largest asparagus. You're gonna, you know, ridiculously,
(22:59):
Come on, men, is what I assume ridiculous history. We're
doing to three men in a baby thing. So that's
what we're doing. Now, we're gonna we're gonna raise this
kid with a max is so done with this. We're
gonna we're gonna raise this kid and I mean Ted Danson, Yeah,
of course if you want, But I think it's cool
(23:20):
when you're you bro. Well, but we're doing the okay,
so we can just do our own three men in
a baby scenario. We don't have to Who else was
it who's doing a mustache? Tom? Tom's selling tom Selle
three in a baby, Maybe there's another baby. There's the
third man? Who's the third man? Sorry, this is an
(23:41):
important tangent. YEA, let's just really quick right here. Steve
Goudenberg dance Steve Gudenberg. Nobody remember Steve Guttenberg. I will
take the director credit because it was directed by Mr
spock Letter. I didn't at least know that's that's seem
(24:03):
to remember that. Leonard Nimoy, Max with the Facts, Max
with the Facts in the Largest Desparagus. Also shout out
to Leonard Nimoy's musical career. I don't know if anybody's
ever listened to his music. But it's not what you're expecting,
and it's a fun right. I like Leonard Nimoy a
lot um. But it's true, Ben, we're talking about superstition.
(24:27):
We're talking about things like humors and bodily fluids and
you know, like having too much bile that has to
be drained or whatever, and blood letting in the and
the like. So I mean this is very rudimentary, uh,
stuff based on this idea of the balance of these
bodily fluids and if if you have too much of one,
then you have to balance it out with the other
(24:47):
or else you're gonna, you know, be colicky or something.
But with pregnancy, you're right, then a lot of of
of emphasis was placed on things like the maternal imagination,
which I love, the theory of the maternal imagination, which
was the notion that experiences experienced by the mother could
(25:07):
actually affect the baby, you know, in utero. Yeah, and
and and have experiences to be kind of transmitted from
the mother to the fetus, and those could be carried
with the child into adulthood for good or for ill.
An extreme version of this comes to us from Joseph Merrick,
whom history remembers as the elephant Man. Merrik famously explained
(25:33):
his condition by saying his mother was startled by an
elephant while she was carrying him. So people did believe
that this is interesting, we should spend just a little
bit of time on this. People for a long time
believed that the experiences all the sensory input and all
(25:54):
the nutrition that went into an expecting mother affected the
child that they would produce. And it turns out, oddly enough,
as as superstitious as this sounds, it turns out that
humanity was not entirely wrong about this. The study of
(26:20):
epigenetics teaches us that what happens to a person their
life experiences can influence the expressions of genes that their
descendants will bear. Like it's it is true, but people
understood this way before they had any concept of gene
theory or epigenetics. But they knew something was up and
(26:42):
they were trying to figure out what was going on.
One of the old school beliefs that is hopefully enjoyable
and not scary in the modern day is this, if
you were in the Middle Ages, then you would have known,
according to medieval lore and word on the street, that
(27:03):
the foods and expecting mother eats will influence the appearance
of her child, the way the kid looks. So, for instance,
if you eat rabbit's heads while you're pregnant, then you're
gonna end up with a kid that has a split
lip or a hair lip, or a cleft palate. And
(27:23):
if you eat fish heads. Then you get I love
this phrase. Then you're gonna end up with a kid
who has something called a trout pout. Have you guys
heard of this? Yeah, it's like the It's like the
historical version of duck lips. I think, right, I have
no ideas like your I guess right now, I guess
your mouth is turned down like a fish. Like nobody
(27:47):
can see this because we're an audio podcast, or you're like,
I can see that. What does a Google image search
get us for the trout pouts? It's yeah, you know what,
hell boy, uh got it all over the place. Um.
(28:07):
Some of these images do appear to be uh, plastic
surgeries that have not gone particularly well. Um, so that
wouldn't have been in play. But yeah, it is pretty
much kind of just a thick, full lip that is
maybe not particularly malleable, let's say, sort of stuck in place,
you know, kind of like blue steel. Remember that look
(28:27):
that Zoolander would do. Yeah, you have to turn That's
what I'm thinking if I recalled Zoolander. Yeah, and then
there's another thing, like the idea of eating soft cheese.
Expectant mothers were sometimes told, hey, watch out for that
soft cheese because if you eat too much soft cheese
then your son will have small genitalia. Okay, well that
(28:51):
you know, uh what would they have put stock in
the size of genitalia back in those days? Ben? Would
that have been an important feat? Sure? Do you think? Well,
it was, at least in Europe at the time. It
was an important enough concern that that people were people
were associated with soft cheese and pregnancy. Uh. Seriously, though,
(29:15):
while while we are joking a little bit, most modern
doctors will tell you that if you are expecting, you
should air on the side of caution when it comes
to soft and unpasteurized cheese. Not because it will affect
your kids Australia, but because there is a link between
cheese and listeria, right, and also things like on like
(29:38):
raw milk. You know that would be a big now now,
And what's the deal with raw milk? Man? And it's
it's technically illegal in some places like uh, well, I
mean yeah, yeah, it's it's illegal because it hasn't been
pasteurized and the process of pasteurization will kill harmful bacteria.
(30:00):
But people in the US and abroad I swear by
raw milk. They think it's top notch. So we've talked
about the idea of superstition being wrapped up in these cravings,
the idea of using them to kind of read the
tea leaves of what you know your boy's penis is
going to look like, or what kind of personality your
your daughter is going to have, or whether there will
(30:21):
be some kind of birth defect. Right, this is all things.
Are all things that a lot of stock was put
in by these or they called ben wise women, sort
of the like next step up from the midwife. You
had the midwife, and then you had these wise women
who are not medically trained, and we're using a lot
of kind of you know, mysticism in this practice. Correct.
(30:41):
I would argue that, well, we know that wise women,
as they were called, did a lot of things that
we would associate with first aid, being a first responder
in your community, also being a midwife or a doula.
And I gotta say, I would argue that if you
are living in this time, your odds of success, if
(31:04):
you're seeking medical treatment, are going to be better with
a midwife than with the barber surgeons of the day.
That's a fact, in case you haven't heard it before, Folks,
back in Europe, for a long time people assumed that
if you were qualified to cut hair, you were also
qualified to pull teeth, to draw blood and to cut
(31:26):
off people's limbs, right, which is, if I'm not mistaken,
where that curly comer red and white barber pole comes from,
the red being for blood letting. They were the ones
who would give you a little snip snip and a
little drip drip, and then send you on your merry way,
and you know, theoretically you'd be all cure. But Ben,
I love that point you make about midwifes being much
more suited to deal with pregnant women because they were
(31:48):
women and they knew their bodies. Therefore, they could at
least translate feelings and experiences that they'd had, most likely
many of them had given birth before to the women
they were helping. So we're not trying to nag in
any way midwives, because it's still today very much a
valuable and valid profession. I've known many women who have
chosen to go with a midwife or do LA rather
(32:11):
than um, you know, have have their baby in the hospital.
But we are talking about these superstitious associations with cravings
and One of them was that if you didn't appease
these cravings, almost as if it was some sort of
offering to the gods, bad things could happen. Oh yes, yeah,
if you didn't appease these cravings, there would the belief
(32:36):
wind be negative consequences for your unborn child. So they
are high stakes here, you know what I mean. You're
an expecting mother and you've got this list of these
dudes and dolts. You know, watch out for strawberries or cherries.
They may give your kid birth marks. But you can't eat.
(32:56):
You can't not eat the stuff you want to eat
because if you don't listen to your body, your kid
may come out with some sort of medical condition or malady.
And you would hear contradicting information, which still happens today.
I mean, look, expecting parents out there in the crowd today,
(33:17):
we've got your back. I know that the forums are
full of contradictory information. It was the same thing in
the sixteen hundreds. You'd have one person saying, look, if
you eat strawberries or if you get them thrown on
your face, and you're an expectant mother, then your baby's
gonna have birthmarks. And then someone else would be like,
(33:38):
oh no, wait, the thing is if you don't eat
the strawberries, then your kid's gonna get birthmarks. They were
referring to a real thing something we would now probably
call strawberry nevis because it was people believed it, that's right,
and then they still referred to off in a strawberry birthmarks.
Billy Corgan from The Smashing punk Is actually has one
(34:01):
on his hand that you often don't see because I
think he's his makeup to cover it up, as does
the absolutely twisted and incredible British comedian Chris Morris, who
has a really seriously kind of almost like proto Tim
and Eric Um comedy series called Jam and he also
played the boss on the first few seasons of The
(34:23):
I T. Crowd. But he has one of these birth
marks on his entire face and you almost never see
him without some kind of cover up makeup on um,
but but you will. You can't find some images of
it and see what it looks like, and it is
very much this kind of like uh, freckled, red, splotchy
kind of like thing that spreads, you know, all all
over the face and and it can be elsewhere on
(34:43):
the body. But you're right then, um that at the
time would have been attributed to lack of or over
abundance of strawberries during pregnancy. And we have some accounts,
some historical counts from a particularly well known midwife who
wrote a book called A Complete Practice of Midwiffery, which
I love the word midwiffery. Um. I don't know if
(35:05):
it's so much of a book, as this was a
collection of her notes, but she, you know, went through
countless births. Her name was Sarah Stone in the eighteenth century,
and she worked in the United Kingdom in the areas
of Taunton and Bristol. And she in those notes once
described a woman who was eight months pregnant and started
having significant bleeding, loss of blood, and she referred to
(35:28):
it as a great flooding. And she fully believed that
this was the direct result of some kind of unfulfilled
craving or longing that her patient had, even if she
didn't know what it was, and and Sarah didn't know
what it was, the patient claimed to not know what
it is, what it was, the patient said that she
wasn't wanting for anything. So Stone really kind of started
(35:51):
putting on her midwife detective hat Um and started to
really dig in as to what she might have possibly
been lacking that could cause this complication. And finally the
mother was like, well, I mean, there was this one
time I saw a young boy hold a peapod up
to the sun and I thought it looked beautiful and
(36:11):
strangely delicious. So I want to step back here as
we're as we're getting closer to the end of the
first part of this two part series and give a
shout out to, uh, the king of birth marks, one
of the most famous birthmark havers, Mikhail Gorbachev. You guys
remember Gorbachev Max, maybe a little before this guy takes
(36:35):
it to the paint with his not an intentional pun
with his birthmark. You know, I respect him for having
that kind of pork colored archipelago of a birthmark on
his forehead. And he never he never wore makeup to
cover it. He also played, you know, a huge role
in geopolitics. But now I'm wondering what, you know, what
(36:59):
is its diet was like when they were expecting, did
someone throw strawberries at his mom? As the old saying goes, uh,
what the old saying of throwing strawberries I don't know,
this is old saying. Well, I was saying earlier the
idea that throwing strawberries at an expectant mother could result
in birth marks for the child, but then also not
(37:19):
eating strawberries or cherries or wine could give the kid birthmarks.
I mean, that's that's the thing. Because it was unscientific,
Just like the peapod belief, people were experiencing a bit
of confirmation bias, right. There wasn't really enough research there
to prove or disprove these beliefs, so people went with
(37:40):
what seemed plausible. And that's something that kind of continues today.
It does. And and uh, to that point been in
terms of the research, I mean, this midwife, you know,
really was being pretty methodical with her documenting of all
of these cases, and in her notes, this was the
only documented case of she she did get the peepod,
(38:01):
by the way, so like the she she held them,
she sees she realized, okay, I'm creating this peopod. The
midwife had a local farmer bring in some peapods and
she ate them and then immediately felt better. But in
her notes she said that it was the only example
like this where the one time talking about confirmation bias,
where feeding her the thing that she supposedly lacked, completely
(38:22):
got rid of the you know, the dangerous um complication.
But yet she says in her notes collected as the
complete practice of Midwiffery, that she was confident that quote
such things as these frequently happen without like any evidence whatsoever,
except for the one that's like the very definition of
confirmation bias, except he usually requires a couple of instances.
(38:44):
I would think, right, well, there's there's something else to
play here, of course, which is the unfortunate rate of
infant mortality at the time. So the harsh truth of
it is that you know, a lot of times people
did not have a successful birth, or people had a
child who had, you know, a very very serious medical condition,
(39:09):
and just like parents today, they were searching for answers
as to why this could have happened, you know what
I mean, and hoping to arm themselves with knowledge so
that they could avoid these calamities in the future. And
you might be listening now, and you might be expecting,
if so, congratulations, uh, and you might be thinking, dang,
(39:32):
this whole thing really makes me want a weird flavor
of ice cream. Let's see, we started with pickled ice cream.
So someone saying I want ice cream that also tastes
like pickles, Well, now is your chance to go find
that ice cream if it exists. Because Noel, Max and
I are going to pause, chase down our own food
(39:53):
cravings and return with part two of this two part
series and spoil or alert fellow ridiculous Historian's next part
gets weird? When't you say no? Next part? I think,
is it's fair to say it gets weird? Yeah, if
you think cannibalism is weird, it gets a little weird. Um.
But until then, we hope you all stay weird and
(40:16):
huge thanks to you super producer Max Williams. The largest asparagus,
The largest asparagus? What's the deal with that? We'll wait,
we'll get an updated in episode two. But he's, you know,
one of the weirdest people we know in the best
possible way. I always use that word and as as
a compliment. Huge thanks to Max's bro Alex Williams, who
composed this theme. Big Big thanks to Jonathan Strickland's a
(40:38):
k a. The Whister. Big thanks to our research associate Gabelusier.
Shout out to our super producer Casey Pegram and well,
you know what I would say, Shout out to all
the expecting parents out there. You know it's a tough time,
but it's an exciting time and uh, I'm wishing you
the best, folks. I indeed, we'll see you next time, folks.
(41:00):
M For more podcasts from My Heart Radio, visit the
I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Ridiculous History News
Hosts And Creators
Ben Bowlin
Noel Brown
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