Strange Food Cravings While Pregnant

Since this involves food, I’ll put it here.

A staple of sitcoms is to have the expecting woman have weird food cravings, such as fish and ice cream or such.

My question to the ladies, who’ve been pregnant is, did you have crave weird combinations of food?

I’ve known some women who when pregnant craved food they normally wouldn’t but they were normal foods, not odd combinations of food

My mom would crave a lemon malted – a malted shake made with lemon ice cream – when she was pregnant with me.

Although as a family we are fans of malted milk and chocolate-malt shakes, I think she would agree in her non-preggo state that the combination of lemon and malt sounds – and is – unspeakably vile.

Domino’s pizza. Never before or after pregnancy can I coax even a sliver of that that psuedo-pizza passed my lips. When I was pregnant I wanted it every day-- two times a day if I could convince my husband. I was walking distance from Gargiulo’s and all I wanted was Domino’s. If that ain’t strange, I don’t know what is.

Vienna sausages. Those anemic, pink, packed in a gelatinous liquid in a can sausages. I ate at least a can a day while pregnant. With a strawberry milkshake from McDonalds. Apparently I craved artificial pink coloring!

It’s not food, but my mom literally craved dirt when she was pregnant with my baby sister.
This was 50 years ago.

Pregnancy 1: any tomato-based foods, such as pizza with extra sauce, chili, tomato soup

Pregnancy 2: cheap, gummy strawberry ice cream, the obligatory pickles

Pregnancy 3: green olives and ham salad (salt?)

I am currently pregnant and have been craving onion and pineapple pizza. My husband is very patient :slight_smile:

My cravings when I was pregnant, was lemon Slush Puppies and Cheddar Cheese Pretzel Combos.

Do the foods actually taste different to you? Or is it just that a taste you previously disliked tastes good?

Or is it more of a compulsion–it still doesn’t really taste good, but you want it anyways?

This time, my partner thinks I’m nuts for eating Weetbix spread with margarine instead of soaked in milk, but I maintain that’s a perfectly normal craving for a childhood snack and not a pregnancy-induced craving of a freaky-weird combination. I also craved chips (fries), but one day I was specifically craving the soggy oven fries that were served at my high school half my lifetime ago.

Last time, I don’t remember any odd combinations but I couldn’t get enough lemon. I was ordering mineral water with a shot of lemon cordial because lemon-flavored mineral water was too sweet. One shot of lemon cordial in a glass of plain mineral water gave me the lemon I was craving without the sweetness.
ETA: I love lemons when I’m not pregnant and I eat them like other people eat oranges, so this wasn’t all that weird for me.

Missed the edit window for a second addition, but I just remembered this from my first pregnancy.

I craved something I don’t normally really care for or eat a lot of: fish. However, I put this down as being another manifestation of my excessive need for lemons because when I do eat fish, I typically drown it in lemon juice.

I craved Chef Boyardee Beef Ravioli–the kind with the orange sauce with the fake meat in it. And donuts.

Boy one - watermelon and milk.
Boy two - fried potatoes. They were the only thing that stopped me throwing up. Odd, because normally if you are feeling sick, the last thing you need is anything greasy.

I had to have Subway BMTs during two of my pregnancies. The whole ones, footlongs! I’d eat them like they were bonbons. I was so ashamed of myself! All those nitrates in the lunchmeat. I don’t know if this was weird or that I was just so HUNGRY. Building children is hard work. :smiley:

I love prunes but they’re a bit, um, overzealous on the digestive system. Constipation was always one of my pregnancy symptoms so, hey! Eat prunes, girl. That I did. Yummers. But even then I had to limit them to about four a day.

Some foods did taste very different to me, but they were the ones that suddenly tasted horrible. (Coffee, closely followed by chocolate, anything with sugar in it, and even-one-sip-at-Christmas of alcohol. The kid had healthy tastes.) They had a specific nauseating taste that I can’t describe, but if I ever taste it again I’ll be pretty sure I’m up the duff.

Foods that didn’t turn horrible tasted pretty much like they always have - both ones that I normally like and ones that I don’t. I went through a phase of eating clementines like popcorn, but I’ve always liked them - I just wanted more of them. I also sucked on almonds pretty much 24/7 for a couple of months, but that was because they stopped me feeling sick rather than because I particularly wanted to eat them. The kid is over a year and a half old and I’ve just about stopped finding stashes of almonds in odd pockets.

My cravings were actually divided by trimester. Two of them were just normal foods but in vast quantities, the other created some weird combinations.

1st trimester: Coneys. Everyday. Must. have. coneys. I was like a coney zombie.

2nd trimester: Italian dressing on everything. EVERYTHING. Well, except my cereal. This is what got some weird combinations.

3rd trimester: Potato salad. I’d go to the grocery store and buy a 10-pound bag of potatoes and make 10 pounds of potato salad and eat NOTHING but potato salad until it was gone. Repeat.

Oddly, I only gained 17 pounds! Perhaps not so odd: My kid won’t eat a potato ever. Had enough of 'em, I guess! :smiley:

Helena

Tasted different? No, not particularly. The pizza was still the same cardboard and cheap cheese it always was. I just really, really wanted to eat it.

I don’t know if onions and pineapple pizza tastes different. I have never tried it when I wasn’t pregnant. I just know that I want it and it tastes good to me right now.

I only craved ice-cubes.

At the time I lived in a shared house and had one tiny shelf of the freezer to myself; I kept this shelf entirely stocked with ice-cube trays stacked one atop the other. The ice-cubes were at their perfect state when the outsides were frozen but the inside not; cracking that with my teeth was like biting into the most decadent chocolate liquer.

I’d stand next to the freezer waiting for the ice-cubes to freeze just enough, having to hold myself back every minute. My flatmates would come in to cook or something and I’d have to pretend to wash the dishes or tidy up because I couldn’t really tell them I was waiting for my ice-cubes to reach the perfect chocolate liquer state. Sometimes they’d stand and chat with me for ages, and inwardly I’d be cursing them because the ice-cubes were calling to me. As soon as they left, I’d grab the top tray and savour the ice-cubes there and then because I couldn’t last the twenty foot walk to my bedroom.

One of my flatmates was very particular about the kitchen light being left on at night, because the light would leak into his room, so sometimes I didn’t turn the light on. So now and then my other flatmates would come in and switch on the light to find me, in the dark, standing next to the freezer, eating ice-cubes with an expression of carnal pleasure similar to a zombie finally getting hold of some brains.

So no, no bizarre cravings really.

When I was pregnant with my first, the office had a lunch with a deli platter and a chocolate cake. The deli platter included some pickles and olives. As I was eating my slice of cake, it occurred to me that there would be absolutely nothing better than black olives on that cake. It would be a culinary revolution! Delicious! However, I figured my co-workers would never stop making fun of me, so I wasn’t brave enough to do it.

There are things that I normally like - eggs, for example - that I have a hard time stomaching during pregnancy. They just taste gross, and feel gross in my mouth. It’s hard to explain.