In China, 10% of new mothers in the hospital maternity ward ask the nurse to wrap their placenta, the organ attached at the end of the umbilical cord, so they can take it home with them. They then turn it into a soup or fry it with some rice and Hoisin sauce, as if it was duck breast. Chinese take away with a twist.
According to an ancient medicinal text written during the Ming Dynasty, eating the placenta diminishes the risk of a postpartum depression, stimulates milk production, stabilises your hormones, raises your energy, and ensures longevity. (Those same medical texts also believe bear bile restores the eyesight of the blind. Perhaps they should be taken with a grain of salt.)
Eating the placenta is coined with the term placentopaghy, and those in favour of it argue that it is not an unfamiliar maternal behaviour in nature. All mammalians bite off the umbilical cord, but some might decide to have a little postpartum lunch. But then dogs also eat their own feces. Now there’s an animal behaviour I’d rather not imitate.
In fact I find the idea of eating any organ, whether mine or someone else’s, utterly repulsive, and completely counter-intuitive. Have you ever googled a placenta? It looks like a purple-reddish, meaty, bloody blini covered with thick, intermingled veins growing in a pattern that reminds of the kabbalistic Tree of Life. A wonderful thing – it supplies the growing embryo and subsequently, the foetus, with nutrients and oxygen. In exchange, the baby uses the placenta to send stem cells to the mother. The placenta is the centerpiece of a marvelous physiological symbiosis between mother and child.
But the placenta also filters out toxins and pathogens. From the moment the umbilical cord is cut off, it becomes dead, decaying tissue, and because of this, the blood is prone to bacterial overgrowth. Why would anyone want to slice it up to ingest a carpaccio of toxins, pathogens, and bad bacteria?
Thousands of western women disagree with me – hey, if Kim Kardashian ate her placenta, there must be something right about it – and are blending a raw placenta smoothie right now. And I’m pretty sure they couldn’t care less about what I think. To be honest, I’d rather have them eat their placenta than an abused, factory-raised, and brutally slaughterd animal.
So to them, I say:
請享用！