“Have a spicy salad,”

Paula: Um…there’s gotta be some midwife’s tales, right? Um…like, uh, have a spicy salad. Or something. If- if you look that up, you’ll find that’s something that midwives used to tell women.

Me: …Tell pregnant women to have a spicy salad?

Paula: …to have the baby come.

My mother wasn’t entirely sure where she heard this from, but in my own research on the topic, it seems this saying was born from a local restaurant in LA. At this restaurant, they serve a certain spicy salad that is believed to help induce labor in pregnant women, and they have a chalkboard dedicated to all the women who went into labor shortly after eating this salad. Its a really interesting piece of folklore to me because of how, as my mother said, it seems like something a midwife would say to an expectant mother, but it was ultimately born from an entirely different place out of, most likely, sheer circumstance.