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The Placenta Eaters to me are symptomatic of what I call New Age Imbecile Disease, the main symptom of which is a need to imbue even their most mundane functions with some deeper meaning. They're usually the same people who hang used tampons from their Solstice Tree and consider taking a dump an Act of Immaculate Excretion.
Oh, dear, interrobang. There is the brink of insanity and then there is the abyss, which those folks have obviously fallen into. I recall a similar MeFi thread involving semen recioies a few years ago. Sadly there was nothing for Cum Brulee.
Yes, and the placenta is genetically identical to the child -- the child, not the mother, grows the placenta, and the child uses placenta to, among other things, force the mother to provide more nutrience than is good for the mother's health.
It's a delicate balance in terms of evolutionary fitness: if the placenta is too successful, the mother dies and the fetus with her. If the mother isn't killed but her life is shortened, the fetus's manipulation may still be unfit, if in a species, such as primate species, that require length parental care of infants. The fetus is really competing with its potential siblings: if it can steal additional nutrience in such a way as to not kill the mother but prevent the mother from giving birth to later progeny, the manipulation may be Darwinistically "fit" if the additional fitness it confers on the possessor of the gene outweighs the decreased births the gene causes.
So it's a very delicate balance in terms of the fitness of the gene's possessor and in terms of the gene itself.
As puke & cry points out, it makes a great fertilizer. We kept the placenta when our son was born in August. Dug a hole for a tree and threw the placenta in first. The tree went on top and now, it's doing quite well. Really though, it's more a symbolic thing than a scientifically proven fertilizer (I think). It's kinda neat that Isaac has his own tree out there and that it's growing with a little help from his old friend.
Also, I'm pretty sure that placenta eating is most popular in traditional Chinese households. I read that somewhere, I swear. So it's not just new age imbeciles. As for us, her grandparents are native americans and they made the suggestion of planting the placenta with a tree. It's a traditional thing for some Ojibwe. We're both pretty hokey so we went with it.
The mother eating the placenta is very common in many different species, no? My understanding is that it is very nutritious at a time when the mother needs a nutritional boost.
This is the SNL skit George was referring to. (A friend of mine owned this book when we were in high school, and this skit just blew our little minds even in written form.)
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Back in '77, the "Saturday Night Live" folks published a book of annotated scripts and photos from the first couple seasons of the show. One short script that the NBC censors cut was a fake ad for Placenta Helper, written by Al Franken and Tom Davis.
Laraine Newman and Gilda Radner were to play two pregnant women who run into each other at their college reunion.
Laraine: "By the way, are you planning to eat the placenta?"
Gilda: "You're kidding! You mean the afterbirth?"
Laraine: "That's right. Many mammals eat their own placenta. It's nutritious, it's 100 percent natural, and now that you're going to have a family, you've got to watch your food budget more than ever. And there's no cheaper meat than placenta."
Gilda: But is there enough placenta to make a complete meal for my husband and myself?
Laraine: Not if your husband has a hearty appetite like mine. And that's why you need Placenta Helper.
Gilda: Placenta Helper?
Laraine: That's right. Placenta Helper lets you stretch your placenta into a tasty casserole. [Holds up a box of Placenta Helper.] Like Placenta Romanoff--a zesty blend of cheeses makes for the zingy sauce that Russian czars commanded at palace feasts. Or Placenta Oriental. An exotic mixture of oriental vegetables and exotic herbs and spices creates an exotic meal. Look, you can have placenta only once every nine months. Why not make a rare occasion, a rare occasion?
[CUT TO: Gilda's kitchen. John Belushi, as her husband, has just finished his placenta casserole.]
John: Ummm. That was great. Let's have Placenta Helper every night.
Cryptical Envelopment, that is true in some species (especially herbivores). In humans though, eating a placenta has no real nutritional value. I read somewhere that it helps fight postpartum depression but I doubt that there is anything to back that claim. Honestly, I'm sort of disappointed we didn't eat it now. Everything I'm reading indicates that it tastes pretty good.
Right, panoptican. And I can imagine some scenarios in humans when the placenta might actually be harmful given the concentration of crap that Mom has ingested. Maybe? I'm speculating.
Yes, I know someone who ate placentas. Rural and extremely impoverished Chinese setting. She was a nurse/midwife, saved and ate placentas.
I first met her when she was in her 90s - no wrinkles, very smooth face, didn't need reading glasses. No liverspots either and her hair was still full and mostly (naturally) black. Small lady, but extremely fit and in extraordinary health. It was a little spooky - she's still alive and is over 100 now and still wakes up at 4am to go do TaiChi before going for dimsum before doing the shopping for dinner, which she cooks herself, before going to play mahjong with her buddies.
My maternal grandmother (had 12 kids, all survived [!], almost sold her youngest son [my youngest uncle] to get by but didn't [he went on to get a PhD in relativistic physics, now teaches private HS physics for ~$8000 USD/month in HK) during the bad old days used to scavenge vegetable scraps from the market and removed the rotted pieces. Washed them in the toilets of public washrooms (most potable water available to her - after washing the toilet) before cooking it.
So, uh, partially - poverty has something to do with it, and partially because it was thought that placentas had very high nutritional (and perhaps extranutritional) value. Why waste good (nutritional) material?
I had a very buttoned down history teacher in high school who, after her son was born kept the placenta, froze it, and later had it with her husband in a soup she made. To say I was stunned was an understatement.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
