I’m a big fan of reading the Best of Craiglist because it is such a fascinating, hilarious and gross sampling of humanity’s highs and lows. It’s also fun trying to guess which of the posts are written sincerely and which ones are total fabrications that are purposely meant to be jaw-dropping. One such “Is this real or not?” Craigslist post a reader sent me was this one:
I am due in June. I have read a lot about how great for your health it is to eat your placenta (after all, most mammals, even vegetarians, do this). Unfortunately I don’t have a strong enough stomach to just eat it, so it was recommended to me that I dry it out in a food dehydrator, put it in a coffee grinder, and put it in capsules to take daily. Again, I just don’t have the stomach (and may not have the energy after birth to do this.) What I need is someone who is reliable…someone who has given birth or watched a birth, knows what a placenta looks/smells like/etc, who is 100% comfortable handling something like this. I have read that it can take up to 10 hours of work. Please e-mail me why you would be willing to do this and how much you would charge.
There’s something about this ad that is really beautiful (that mythical quality of ingesting the power of the placenta) and sweet (OMG, dude, after giving birth, you’re happy to eat just about ANYTHING that someone else has cooked for you). But there’s also something about it, too, that points to the growing list of things that perfect mothers are supposed to do. You can’t just squeeze the watermelon out from between your legs in a beautiful, orgasmic, fast-but-not-too-fast, doula and midwife-assisted home birth while wearing a white nightgown in a candlelit room (and that’s just the birth! Forget about actually raising the kid!). You’ve got to worry about processing the placenta into a palatable form; otherwise, you’re wasting the power of mother nature. Seriously, after living through birth, I’d had just about enough of mother nature, thankyouverymuch.
That’s why I’m wondering: does anyone actually know anyone who actually ate the placenta? Or does this exist strictly at the level of urban myth?
