First foods, for mums
North West Tasmania is home to a very special new not-for-profit postpartum food service that ensures new mums get the delicious and nutritious postpartum food they need as well as connection during a time of isolation.
When Isabel Sykes welcomed her first child three years ago, one thing she didn’t expect was how difficult it would be to get the nutrition she needed as a new mum. Such a simple task seemed impossible to this professional chef and restaurateur. And so, the idea of a nourishing food service for new mums was born.
“I couldn’t believe how hard it was just to get good food into my body in those days, weeks and months after birth,” she recalls. “It was really just a choice between what is the most convenient thing I can do, rather than what is the most nutritious thing I can do. And the isolation was challenging as well.”
Cut to today and First Foods is currently part-way through its first-year trial on the North West Coast. First Foods offers care in a box, delivering healthy and hearty ready-made meals and snacks specifically designed to support mums in recovery after childbirth. Each meal is easy to digest, nutritionally balanced and formulated to help with a new mum’s physical healing. But it’s much more than that. As the tagline says: “When everyone wants to hold the baby, First Foods will hold the mother.”
Isabel says it’s the first of its kind in Australia but mirrors something familiar from our past and a way of caring for mothers that exists in other countries. “It’s the oldest thing in the book; it’s like the casserole on the doorstep that used to exist when communities were tighter and more family-oriented. And it’s something that exists pretty much everywhere else in the world, where women will be taken very good care of in early postpartum. It’s something that we really lack in Australia.”
Credit: Tash Clark-Monks
It’s such a simple idea, but such a big operation. First Foods is being run with Big hART, a national arts and social change organisation with a base in Wynyard, and includes a research project by the University of Tasmania. Isabel heads it up in the north and state director Lily Kirkland is based in the south. Twenty local women are included in the pilot year and Isabel says the feedback so far has been very positive, particularly when it comes to the women’s mental health and anxiety levels.
“Our focus is on nutrition, but the bigger idea is that the food is used as a seed to create a community around new mothers. There is no starting point for community-based postpartum care in Australia; it’s a pretty barren landscape that we’re building something in.
“We’re building the evidence around the benefits of the service to mothers in the regions of maternal mental health and food security, which are both quite topical things at the moment.”
Credit: Jess Oakenfull
Many Tasmanians will remember Isabel fondly from her time running the iconic Red Velvet Lounge cafe in Cygnet, which accidentally turned into a point of connection and community for local mothers under Isabel’s watch. Looking back, it’s easy to see how the two roles at opposite ends of the state are linked.
“I wasn’t a mother when I had that cafe, but something that became really apparent to me was how mothers used cafes,” she says.
“I didn’t really expect new mums were going to be our main demographic but having a large space indoors with a kids’ play area, cheap kids’ snacks and free babyccinos on the menu meant that our cafe was so full of mothers all the time,” she remembers fondly. “Sometimes I would cut up their toast for them if they were breastfeeding and refill their cup of chai. I just really felt like I wanted to take care of them.”
For more information, visit firstfoodspostpartum.com