Warning: If you're eating your lunch, you might want to click on the Food channel and come back when you're done.
Apparently, eating your baby's placenta is a thing, according to "The Placenta Cookbook" in this week's New York. Some new moms swallow it down in pill form (you can buy encapsulation kits), while others turn it into jerky or toss bits in a smoothie.
I can sort of, kind of, get my head around why people might think this is a good idea. Many animals eat their afterbirth -- growing up, I watched my cat Muffit gobble hers up after having her litter. The placenta, which nourishes a baby during pregnancy, is chock full of iron and B vitamins and some folks speculate that eating it might reduce postpartum depression or help boost milk supply.
But even if it does all that and more, it's gross. And I say this as someone who had my own placenta in the freezer for about a year. My homebirth midwife put it there after delivery and I enjoyed not only the photos that I took of it, but showing visitors my Zip-locked placenta nestled in between the ice cubes and ground turkey.
But I never had any plans to eat it. Consuming a human organ is a little too close to cannibalism for me. My husband and I briefly talked about how some people bury it for luck -- and if we had a backyard (we live in an apartment), we might have done that. When it was time to move, I did briefly contemplate leaving it there as a "gift" to my jackass landlord, but decided just to triple bag the thing and toss it in the trash.
