Permissable waste (!)

So I have decided that it is a good idea to live in California, which, according to Erin's parents, is the "Land of Fruits and Nuts." Now, keep in mind that I am rather a Golden-State-transplant, moving from less awesome and perhaps less liberal parts of the country. I do love California. And while I consider myself curious, adventurous, resourceful, "green," open-minded, and pretty moderate in most viewpoints, I am definitely on the very conservative end of at least one thing.

An attitude towards placenta-eating.

The occurrence of this practice came up recently in a discussion with another resident. I was shocked in learning what he/his wife were going to do with their placenta from the delivery of the baby that they are expecting later in the year. I was thinking to myself, "gosh, Tara, you are both quite ignorant, and being pretty judgmental" as I heard (staring, with a likely gaping open mouth) about the multitude of benefits that placental consumption can confer, including staving off postpartum depression and increasing milk production. I seem to recall that I've heard that other animals do eat their "afterbirth." But us humans? Eat the product of the third stage of labor?! (this makes Nigerian goat head look like a bland piece of toast or something!). I wondered why, if it was such a delicacy and extreme health-booster, I hadn't been taught in medical school at the WFMC about all the benefits of placenta-eating. Or heard about it more on Labor and Delivery, where I have passed a good many of the past 24 months of residency. Did you know that placenta makes a pretty good/mean spaghetti sauce (or, as I learned today, a pretty hearty, wholesome smoothie) ?

Fittingly, just today, I came across an article by Joel Stein in TIME magazine. And so I felt obligated to post again in what might be my most productive week of blogging YET in residency (yay for being an R3).

Please enjoy the following article by Joel Stein entitled "Afterbirth: It's what's for dinner."

"There is so much you can't know about your spouse when you get married, like that one day she will want to eat her placenta. But there are two things you don't argue about with a pregnant woman: what she eats and that being full of life indeed looks sexy. So when Cassandra told me that for $275, a woman would come to our house, cook Cassandra's placenta, freeze-dry it and turn it into capsules to help ward off postpartum depression and increase milk supply, I said, "$275 is a bargain compared with the $20,000 I'll have to spend to tear out our kitchen immediately afterward."

Most mammals, Cassandra explained, eat their placentas, to which I countered that most dogs eat their poop. I stopped arguing there, figuring that like many of Cassandra's hippie ideas — the compost bin, rubbing lemon on her underarms instead of deodorant — she'd give up on this in a few weeks. Even as the due date approached and she was still set on eating her placenta, I couldn't imagine that she'd remember to request it from the doctor after the most physically draining experience of her life. This is a woman who, 9 times out of 10, forgets the bag of leftovers at the restaurant.

Though I am exceedingly squeamish, when my son was born, I was shocked that I saw only the beauty of childbirth. Until the placenta came out. There are many normal human reactions to seeing a placenta, ranging from screaming to vomiting to warding it off with a cross. For those of you who have never seen one, the placenta is to the baby what Stephen Baldwin is to Alec Baldwin. It's what your liver would look like if it got into an accident on the autobahn with one of those aliens from Mars Attacks! and their bloody carcasses threw jellyfish at each other.

When the placenta did come out, Cassandra, dazed from 21 hours of labor, somehow made sure the nurses delivered it to us in a flat plastic container, which I put into an ice-filled Monsters vs Aliens cooler I brought. When I asked if I could keep the placenta overnight in the refrigerator out in the hall, the nurses looked at me like I was crazy. When you gross out people who work at a hospital, you have accomplished something.

In a fog, I drove the placenta home, where I wrapped the container in a bag and wrapped that bag in a bag and wrapped that bag in every remaining bag we had in the house. I slept at the hospital that night, grateful that my son will never remember what his parents just did.

The next day I drove back to the house to meet the placenta lady, Sara Pereira. To my surprise, Sara did not look unkempt, frumpy, heavy or in any way like a Wiccan. She got into placenta-cooking after taking a Chinese-medicine course and has already prepared more than two dozen placentas this year — and orders are picking up rapidly. When I asked Sara if her parents were embarrassed by what she does, she told me that her father sells bull semen.

By law, Sara has to cook the placenta at the placenta owner's home. But to my great relief, she brought her own equipment, gloves, sponges and even more detergent than I'd hoped, scrubbing constantly as she worked. If I ever kill a man in my own home, I am totally calling the placenta lady.

As she steamed the placenta with some herbs, the kitchen got that ironlike smell of cooked organ meat, with vague undertones of a consciousness-raising group and a Betty Friedan rally. Sara said Cassandra had a particularly robust placenta, and she hoped to get 120 pills out of it. As she sliced the cooked organ and put it on parchment paper in a dehydrator, she told me that some people drink the placenta raw as a smoothie. "I do this for a living, and I couldn't do that," she said. The pills, she explained, were superior, since Cassandra could stretch their hormone-rich benefits much further, perhaps even freezing some for menopause. Sara did not understand that when Cassandra's looks fade in her 50s, there's no way I'm putting up with this crap.

I drove back to the hospital where, thanks to my experiences, the food looked good. When we got home the following day, Sara gave us a truly beautiful placentapill presentation: a pretty glass jar, a card, a CD of lullabies and a satin pouch. In which was part of my son's umbilical cord, fashioned into a heart. When I asked Sara what the hell I was supposed to do with that, she said people often use it to keep a baby's first tooth and lock of hair. That's when I realized that placenta-eating is really just the beginning of how gross we humans are. And I went to change my first diaper."


So please comment and let me know your thoughts.

Hans/Rach-- what are your placenta plans when baby Josie arrives in a few short weeks?

There are not too many things that I will not eat, or at least try. But placentas???? I do not see placenta-consumption in my future. If I am blessed to someday have children, I think I am comfortable letting my placenta go to "waste" (if standard biohazard disposal of bodily tissue is considered true waste). And I think I am okay (are you with me, Les?) with others' (i.e. my patients') placentas being wasted as well.