First, there was news that “Baby Gaga,” a specialty ice cream made from mothers’ breast milk, was selling like, if you’ll pardon the expression, hot cakes, at The Icecreamist store in London. And now, according to “The Placenta Cookbook,” an article in this week’s New York magazine, “For a growing number of new mothers, there’s no better nutritional snack after childbirth than the fruit of their own labor.”
One woman is quoted thus: “When I was pregnant, I just craved organs. I’d go to Diner (a Williamsburg restaurant) and order beef hearts, marrow…so the placenta just made sense. After I gave birth, I threw a chunk of placenta in the Vitamix with coconut water and a banana. It gave me the wildest rush.”
When is cannibalism not cannibalism? Also, one wonders, what next? Tossed salads garnished not with bacon bits but with crispy foreskins from routine circumcisions? Pate made from stomach lint? Energy drinks flavored with salt from one’s own sweat? Some dogs have been known to eat their own fecal matter. Perhaps we can learn something from Man’s Best Friend. Waste not, want not.
Donna Haraway has a bit to say about eating placenta in her “When Species Meet.” A meat lover myself, placenta would probably taste too much like fish for my palate.
I have heard that the mother is typically the one to eat the placenta in order to replenish the nutrients lost during childbirth. But i happen to know a father who thought that he could benefit from those nutrients, so he cut it up on a cutting board and cooked it for dinner! There was no chance to make bacon bits out of foreskin, alas, for the baby was not circumcised. But what a great idea, Paul! 😉
Some people on Craigslist claim that they “swallow.” I’m not sure exactly what it is they’re swallowing. Perhaps some kind of protein shake?