What The Michelin Star Chef Taught Me About Birth

Having spent this particular Saturday morning hosting the most beautiful family of four for breakfast, we decided to have a lazy afternoon.  

It had been a while since we enjoyed such young visitors. The baby boy was three months old and his little sister will be two this summer. 

I was reminded of all the coffee dates that I shared with friends when my own daughter was a baby and then a toddler and of the obstacles that pose themselves to a little person who is outgrowing the ability to run under tables without  banging their heads.

As her little brother was glued to his mum’s boob our little visitor went in between the adults getting handed bits of bread, cheese, egg, fruit and cake until she knocked herself flat on our kitchen table. Her father tended to her so lovingly leaving his wife in charge of the baby.

Parents of young children look superhuman to me now at the dawning of my Crone years. 

Did I once own this same amount of energy?

Gerald and I absolutely loved hosting this young family.

It occurred to me that this man and woman are closer in age to Lena, our daughter, than they are to us and I remembered the people in our lives outside of our family who witnessed us in navigating early parenthood. Knowing how much stamina was required to navigate life with young children, Gerald and I enjoyed giving this mum and dad a few hours of being tended to whilst listening to what life was holding in store for them in the next few months.

They are building their future and it felt as though it hadn't been all that long ago that we were on that very same path.

We understood.

Having experienced those major life events that our young friends are currently navigating we were excited for them and we were left reflecting on the last twenty-five years together.

Is this the circle of life?

There was some home-made cake left over. So after we had stacked the dishwasher, tidied the kitchen,  loaded the washing machine and did some general Saturday housework we made a cup of coffee and retired to the living room with (yet another) slice of cake and cream. 

I got the couch in the bay window and Gerald was stretching out on the other one. He went through his Saturday ritual of checking out some of his favourite YouTube channels and then he dozed off with the remote in hand and so YouTube started to select clips randomly, showing us what the algorithm thinks we like to see. 

After a while Marco Pierre White’s Oxford Union address started to play. I had been fully engrossed in some admin, got clients booked, scheduled social media posts, read up on what’s new in the birth world and did some writing.

Have you ever been so immersed in a task that you don’t hear or see anything outside of what you are focused on? 

I hadn’t been paying attention to the tele at all but this man’s storytelling  drew me in.

It’s interesting how the brain works, isn’t it?

What had simply been background sound became defined as my brain caught the words that this celebrity chef was directing at his audience. 

It was the story of his career told with the wisdom and thoughtfulness earned through years of experience. People at the top of their game, regardless of their field of expertise, share the commitment to work hard every day at refining their understanding of each component that can impact the quality of their work. An affinity towards a craft combined with curiosity, creativity, a willingness to learn from your mistakes, humility and endless dedication of time, energy and grit will turn you into a leader in your industry.

This man’s  life had been dedicated to cooking from the heart.

Marco Pierre White comes from a working class family and he spoke of the self-esteem and pride that was present in his neighbourhood. People were proud of their position in society and Marco was “brought up to better [himself]”. He had a job from the age of thirteen, he helped the milkman before school. 

Marco’s story tells of long hours, unquestioning obedience (“yes chef” is the only acceptable answer in a restaurant kitchen) and an insatiable appetite for doing  better. He talks to his audience about dreaming, setting goals and about not stopping until you get there. In 1995, at 33 years of age, he became the first chef to receive three Michelin Stars in the UK and at the time he was the youngest chef in the world to achieve this. By the time he was 37 he had added five red forks and knives to his three stars, one of two chefs in the world at the time to have done so. In 1999 White cooked his final paid meal, gave back his stars and knives and forks and retired from the kitchen.

When asked how he followed his own advice of keeping it simple whilst also producing  amazing dishes he answered this:

“ [...] Keep it simple, allow Mother Nature to be the true artist. Allow her to do the work,  you're just the cook and when you accept that in life then life changes.”

It was evident that this wisdom was found outside the kitchen as much as inside of it.

To me, this sounds like it is about more than just his cooking. It's about seeing opportunity and taking it, its about falling and getting up again, it's about allowing yourself to be guided by forces you don't understand and to be true to yourself. 

You're just the cook, and when you accept that in life then life changes!

Those words resonated with me the most.

They hold in them power and humility in equal measure. 

They speak of surrender and trust.

The same sentiment ripples through most of what I do. 

It underpins my approach to birth preparation. 

I do a lot of work with couples on the idea of acceptance.

Regardless of your birth setting, you have to accept those things you can't control. 

I encourage couples to specifically think about the absolute opposite end of the spectrum of their birth plan. 

You want an elective section?

What if your baby arrives quickly at home with nobody present?

You are planning a freebirth?

Think about the possibility of a transfer and a caesarean section, what would be important to you then?

You are just the cook! 

Letting nature shine, to me, means accepting that there is a universal order to things, we can't control everything. Even with the most high tech equipment at hand we don't have the final say.

It also means that we need to find our way back to the basics and model ourselves on nature's design. 

The more I understand our primal blueprint for birth and life in general, the more I see that the various added extras are not always to our advantage when it comes to our optimal thriving as a species and even as individuals.

So, what ingredients do you have available to you in order to create your Michelin Star birth? 

How familiar are you with the basic ingredients for birth that nature has in store for you?

Are you going to allow them to shine?

Over the last year I have witnessed a small number of families who decided to only cook with the ingredients in nature's recipe kit for primal birth.

They curated their own pregnancy care and decided to leave out all the additives offered by mainstream maternity care.

Instead they went back to basics.

They enjoyed regular movement, tapped into the power of the breath and had regular body work sessions to foster a solid connection between the body mind and spirit.

They grew their self confidence and practiced humility, ate simple foods, drank clean water, paid attention to finding trace minerals in their diets.

They educated themselves about birth, possible emergencies in birth, made plans for what they would want to do if an emergency arose and engaged with the topic of radical self-responsibility.

They kept ownership of all of their decisions and they took full responsibility for their plans.

This purist, totally unmedicated, raw version of birth holds in it the full potential for our hormonal blueprint to unfold. The family of four we had over for breakfast was one of the families I had had the pleasure of witnessing in this and what I noticed is that early mothering seems to be intuitive after a birth like this in a way that I can't fully express and, so far, I haven't seen any major breastfeeding issues in the world of undisturbed birth.

There are other interesting considerations that may provide answers to some of the common symptoms experienced by mothers in today's society.

Dr Sara Buckley has written about the reward system in mammalian birth. Having a baby tends to make little sense for individual mammals in the wild, it makes female mammals more vulnerable; reproduction makes sense for the survival of the species but it puts the individual at a disadvantage. 

Dr Buckley explains that the hormonal blueprint of birth rewards their primal brain when they feed and care for their infants, without it, she suggests, wild animals who don't possess the capacity for logic thought, would be inclined to leave their offspring behind. 

Nature's solution to this dilemma is that caring for their babies feels good and the reason for that are the hormones that are released during labour and birth.

The same is true for humans and common interventions such as routine inductions of labour, injections for 'active management of third stage' or epidurals directly impact this beautifully designed mechanism. And although humans will parent even when suboptimal conditions at birth suppress this reward system because they know that they have to, they are more likely to experience postnatal depression when those interventions have been used. 

Having witnessed some entirely unmedicated births over the years, and many many medicated ones (including my own daughter's), I have come to understand that the impact of the medical paradigm of birth interferes with our primal blueprint to an extend that we don't fully appreciate as a society. 

Birth is our initiation into our embodiment. How we are born matters and I think we could have a much healthier population by heeding Marco Pierre White's advice of keeping it simple.

Although it is technically available to us all, freebirth is not everyone's idea of a Michelin Star birth, nor is it the best option for every mother, but I think we can learn from it by asking ourselves:

"How could we let nature's ingredients shine to the best of our ability in all settings?"

We must be humble and recognise where our ingredients are second best to nature's original.

Take our version of oxytocin for example.

"Syntocinon" or "Pitocin" is present in the induction drip and it is  routinely administered for placental birth. 

Though chemically equivalent to innate oxytocin, the synthetic oxytocin in the glass vile does not cross the blood-brain-barrier whilst also inhibiting us from releasing or own innate oxytocin. Our innate physiological oxytocin release is responsible for the sense of reward we get to experience with our newborn babies and we routinely bypass it by administering the lab created version of it.

To protect the wellbeing of our mothers, we must cut down drastically on routine use of synthetic oxytocin.

That means cutting down on inductions of labour.

It means supporting fully physiological placenta release after otherwise unmedicated births (that can take longer than the protocol says!) and it also means finding a way to support those families who want undisturbed physiological births within maternity institutions.

Arguably in certain circumstances the administration of synthetic oxytocin or other birth interventions are in a mother's best interest and so we must also ask ourselves how we can help mothers increase their innate oxytocin in the days following an induction of labour, epidural use or a caesarean section. 

By continuously reminding ourselves that we are just the cooks and by being willing to prioritise letting nature shine in whatever scenario we are finding ourselves in, we have the opportunity to strive to turn each birth into a Michelin Star experience. 

What do you think? Are you feeling inspired by Marco Pierre White's words of guideance? What are your ingredients for pregnancy, birth and everything in between? How do you allow nature shine in your life?

Let me know via email: [email protected]