19 Georgetown University Midwifery Students (Cohort 26)
Channel: Virtual Midwives
Date: 2020-06-17

VIDM 2019 :: Student Cafe: Eating for two: The intersection of food, culture, and childbearing         
Speakers: 8 midwife students – Jennifer Glorioso, Tristen Holloway, Heather Hass, Katie Etherington, Liliana Correa, Amy White, Blythe Eberle, Kristal Velazquez – and  Professor Jeanne Jacobwitz, CNM, MPH, MSN and Dr. Cindy Farley, CNM, PhD, FACNM
Facilitator: Lorraine Mockford
Eight students and two faculty in the Nurse-Midwifery/WHNP program at Georgetown University will present a brief summary of the culture they selected to explore, the dish they prepared, and their learning about the intersection of food, culture, and the childbearing year. Professor Jacobwitz will introduce this session and Dr. Cindy Farley will close; they will share the importance of experiential learning assignments that engage midwifery students and faculty in collaborative projects.
Food is an important aspect of culture, as unique to a culture as its language. In order to give nutritional advice that is sound and acceptable, students need to understand a woman’s dietary preferences, access to food, and ability to store and prepare food. Exploring cuisines and cooking techniques of various cultures can inform a provider’s dietary counseling with practical and palatable suggestions designed to nourish women’s bodies in the childbearing year when nutrition is critical to positive health outcomes. A learning activity, called “Celebrating Cultural Diversity in Childbearing”, included an experiential component. Students selected a specific cultural group, and described food prescriptions for childbearing women of this culture, identified a recipe related to this belief, cooked and photographed the finished dish, and contributed their recipe to a self-published cookbook.