I think even humans are living in captivity,” Munchrath said. “We are bound by
oceans, if not finances. We are bound by
the limits of technology. We cannot really
leave this Earth and most of us cannot
leave our own country. How big should a
cage be before the inhabitants are not considered to be captive?”
Afterbirth, It’s
What’s for Dinner
BY LOU BENDRICK
Eating your own afterbirth isn’t unnatural—many mammals do it. But unless a
Western human is really hungry (in which
FLY on the waLL
when a fly enters a chamber in David Bowen’s fly drawing device, sensors detect
its movement and convey the information to a microcontroller, which activates a
drawing arm. the result is a sketch based on the fly’s movements in real time.
once a fly is no longer detected, the drawing is complete; the paper unscrolls and
a new drawing begins with a new fly.
case a burger will likely su;ce), or trying
to cover her scent from predators (a pack
of hyenas in the delivery room is generally considered unlikely), the burgeoning
motivation among some mothers-to-be
to engage in placentophagy (“feeding on
placenta”) is di;cult to understand. Let’s
face it: it takes a lot of motivation to consume something falling under a vaguely
cannibalistic taboo that looks like a bio-hazard and tastes like God-knows-what.
Today’s woman, though, can avoid the
ick factor by hiring a “placenta encapsulation specialist” (certified specialists follow
OSHA rules) who will transform (read:
cook) an afterbirth into a benign jar of capsules. Encapsulation specialists say that
ingesting your hormone-rich afterbirth can
give mom a happier postpartum experience
by enhancing breast milk supply, increasing energy, and balancing hormones. And
while this practice might not be a bona fide
trend outside of the home-birthing community, public awareness about it is growing. In 2006, during an interview with GQ
magazine, Tom Cruise joked about eating
his wife’s placenta and caused a media uproar. This year, Los Angeles Times columnist
Joel Stein wrote about his wife’s placental
encapsulation for mainstream audiences
in Time. (Stein, who paid $275 for this
service, observed that “placenta-eating is
really just the beginning of how gross we
humans are.”)
Unfortunately, the medical community
seems largely to agree that there are few
benefits to placenta consumption, and no
compelling studies, at least in Homo sapiens, show that these pills do much good.
But that doesn’t mean we should throw
the placenta out with the birth water. Perhaps placentophagy is natural in a modern
sense—one that embraces environmentalism. Eating your baby’s amniotic sac is
not only an exemplary form of recycling,
but also about as “local” as you can get
(food miles = zero). And because no creature was harmed (hey, one was even cre-
