Street Food and Pregnancy

As we speak, there is a small alien life-form floating around inside me, having the hiccups. He will, in due course, become an actual human being with a wide range of interests that include crying, eating, sleeping and invoking nappy changes, but until then, we have the hiccups.

As this is uncharted territory for us, I’m guessing there are others out there who feel the same way. We (I) have been talking about babies for some time, but could not work out how street food and pregnancy might somehow fit together. If I might demonstrate: In the early days of pregnancy, when alien life-forms were still apparently sesame seed- to medium shrimp sized, the smell of food was enough to turn me a bit green and send me skittering out of the kitchen. I needed a nap every day, just to get me till dinner time, and got told off for doing the heavy lifting.

Skip forward to the second trimester and I was out in the van, running a restaurant and generally ignoring pregnancy completely. People did spend a lot of time staring at my stomach, but thankfully, only a few people felt it necessary to go for the Buddha-style belly rub (seriously, why?). I mostly stopped doing the heavy lifting, but then felt bad, and did it anyway.

It must be the flowers that attract them.

Here we are then. Third trimester. A few weeks away. I’m tired all the time, I eat as if my life depends upon it and I can pee on an International competition level. I’m not much good at the serving or making parts of street food, unless they can be done sitting down. Which they really can’t. Apart from maintaining a kick-ass blog on the subject, that’s pretty much all there is to street food.

So to try and make this post in some way useful, let me have a go at making a point.

Pregnant Street Food Problems

• Space is an issue. I don’t fit past Barny in the van any more. The bump gets in the way. It’s also surprisingly painful when you smack it into things. I wouldn’t recommend that. The van is just full of Things.
• People keep telling me to stop and put my feet up. They obviously don’t own their own business.
• That being said, after an hour standing up, I fall asleep.
• I’m suffering from some serious dribbly brain. Ideas happen six at a time, but none of them are sensible and all of them are gone before I can work out what they were. Forming a thought is like trying to catch fog with a shrimping net.
• No, I’m not going to name him after a toastie.
• We have chosen (or rather, life has chosen) the middle of the festival season as a good time to add to the human race. It means we’re going to miss the big August events, which are usually quite profitable.
• My emotional balance is non-existent. You know those gooey adverts for banks that have been on recently, to try and make us like banks again? Tears. Shameful.
• I’m still not allowed to lift anything.
• In summary, if I was going this alone, I would not be in a good place right now.

As a solo street food trader you have my undisputed, lifelong respect. Starting a business is tough. Starting a business on your own is extreme hard mode. I am thoroughly grateful that I don’t have to do it. A street food pregnancy is, for the record, not something you want to try unless you have someone who can pick up the slack, and is happy to do so.

As it is the Jabberwocky will have a short break at some point in the next month, during which we will try and understand how babies work. Normal service will be resumed as soon as we work out what normal is.