When pregnant with me, my allegedly vegetarian mother once ate an entire salami, string and all, before she’d even reached the till (apparently toxoplasmosis didn’t exist in 1984).

Now it is my turn to thicken my baby waist with love and longing. And, in keeping with the family tradition, I have found myself eating pork pies and sausage rolls like the last two decades of near-vegetarianism never happened.

Talking to other pregnant friends, the common thread that runs through our growing wombs like a velvet rope of desire is a return to the nursery. For the first time in years, I found myself remembering with dewy-eyed nostalgia my grandmother’s fridge. The small Portmeirion plate, topped with a scotch egg; slices of cucumber and iceberg lettuce; the dollop of salad cream. I wanted cold, white food of the sort I once ate off a pale blue Formica table wearing dungarees and a homecut fringe. I wanted school dinners, I wanted childhood picnics, I wanted to be wrapped in a puffed wheat crisp of memory and left to sleep. I wanted pastry, I wanted starch, I wanted flour, but, by God, most of all, I wanted meat.

I now discover that during that first queasy trimester, as I listed about the house like a captain on the high seas, my body was producing nearly 50% extra blood. No wonder I went plasma crazy – I was building a lymphatic engine in there. At least I didn’t fall off the wagon like one legendary friend of my parents who, apparently, ate a small block of coal during her pregnancy.

Of course, what we each ate in our childhoods is different. According to a 2009 study of more than 200 pregnant women in Tanzania, the most common cravings were meat (23.3%), mangoes (22.7%), yoghurt (20.0%), oranges (20.0%), plantain (15.3%) and soft drinks (13.3%). One of my friends, brought up in the macrobiotic world of early 1970s Bristol, longed for miso soup and brown rice; another, brought up on a farm in the north of Scotland, admitted that, at 10 weeks in, she found herself buying a single frozen chicken pie of the sort she hadn’t even seen for about 25 years.

While the science behind this is, for the moment, lost on me, I can only assume that during pregnancy our palates return to the hypersensitivity we knew as children. The release of certain hormones creates such a sensitivity to smell and taste that perhaps we retreat to the “safe” sweet and starchy food of our youth, when calories and growth were the name of the game.

The apparent gluttony of gestation is also made a little more complicated, of course, by nausea. We’re not so much eating this stuff because it’s delicious, we’re eating it because pretty much everything else will turn our stomach. Almost anything can make you feel sick at the beginning of a pregnancy. One friend spent about 15 weeks pulling “noxious” lettuce out of her sandwiches. Another found the smell of water “like petrol”. On one particularly bad day, I threw up after nothing more than a glass of water, so I have some sympathy. Vegetables, fruit and salad – the very cornerstones of my heart – became little more than inconveniences. As one of my editors put it in an email during her first trimester: “I almost burst into tears yesterday because all I wanted to eat for dinner was sausage and mash and none of the FOUR supermarkets I tried had beef sausages. In the end, I ate the healthiest dinner … then one hour later, was begging my partner repeatedly to bring home fish and chips.”

We may well go into this life-changing period of life-building with high expectations, but, for many of us, the truth is a little more prosaic, a little more fried, a little … well, more beige. As a woman on Twitter put it to me yesterday: “I wanted to eat every two hours like a bodybuilder. I was going to eat porridge and quinoa and be an earth mum, but it’s all just turned into a shit show of fast food and mayonnaise.” She can be in my gang. She is, after all, already in the club.

If you are reading this through a churning quease, a maternal mix of car sickness, hunger and fatigue, then I can show only sympathy. Of course, in truth, we shouldn’t eat more than an extra 300 calories a day during pregnancy, and gestational diabetes is no laughing matter. But try not to berate yourself for something that is, in a large part, entirely beyond your control. Read the NHS guidelines, stay away from anything that might make you sick and try to get through. Being a parent is, from what I can tell, largely a question of doing what you can and ignoring what you can’t. If that means eating half a pork pie in the car park of the Pease Pottage service station before lunch … well, there are worst things you could do.