“So why is placenta-eating becoming more popular in the U.S.?” I asked Kristal, mentioning the flurry of recent articles, including the subtle classic, “I Ate My Wife’s Placenta Raw in a Smoothie and Cooked in a Taco.”
“There were two trends,” he told me, “one in the sixties and seventies, and one now. The first had a lot to do with a kind of back-to-nature-hippie-commune philosophy. You’d hear these media reports based on anecdotal evidence that at some commune, when one of the members gave birth, they took the placenta and cooked it up in a stew and everybody partook of it. It wasn’t linked to medical benefits, really.”
Kristal continued. “What’s happening now with this fad is that midwives and doulas are responsible for spreading the word that ingesting placenta after delivery has positive female health benefits. The evidence, when you try to track it down, is anecdotal, spread by [these people] and by their journals.” Significantly, Kristal mentioned that there hadn’t been a single double-blind, placebo-controlled study on the reputed benefits to humans of placentophagy.
To learn why people were currently eating their own placentas, I contacted Claire Rembis, the owner/founder of Your Placenta, a one-stop center for all of your placenta-related needs. Based out of her home in Plano, Texas, Rembis not only offers the standard placenta encapsulation services but will also prepare placenta skin salves, placenta-infused oils, and placenta tinctures, which she described as “organic alcohol” in which a mom’s placenta has been soaked for six to seven weeks. Additionally, there’s placenta artwork, in which a client’s placenta can be used to make an impression print (balloons and flowers seem popular, with the umbilical cord standing in quite nicely for the balloon string or flower stem). During the impression-making process, vegetable-and fruit-based paints are dabbed on to the placenta, which is then pressed between a clean surface (like a diaper changing pad) and a piece of heavy art-stock paper. Immediately after its modeling gig, the placenta is rinsed off and undergoes further preparation in order to assume its rightful place within a gel capsule. For those moms who want to keep their placenta closer to their heart, Claire also makes necklaces—tiny, stoppered bottles, full of “placenta beads” (a secret formula) and available with or without gemstones.
Soon after an introductory email, Claire invited me down to Dallas. I thanked her but declined, explaining that I’d just begun a new school year at LIU.
“Well, if you’re ever in Texas, I’d be happy to prepare one for you,” she responded. “I browsed your website and think you might enjoy it.”
Wait a minute, I thought as I read her email. Was she inviting me down to Texas to eat placenta?
I followed up.
She was.
“I’ve got some of my daughter’s placenta in the freezer right now,” Claire said. She mentioned that her husband, William, was a chef and loved coming up with new placenta-based recipes. “A few months ago I worked with a mom who wasn’t keen on swallowing pills,” Claire told me. “So, we made her placenta tea and chocolate placenta truffles.”
With an offer like that on the table, what else could I do but book a flight to Dallas?
Two nights before my trip to Texas, I received an email from Claire. “We have a bit of an adventure heading our way this Friday,” she wrote. Apparently her babysitter had cancelled at the last minute, “and so our sweet little angels will be here for the placenta fun.”
No problem, I thought and kept reading. I soon learned that not only were her kids “amazing,” they were homeschooled, and there were ten of them.
“Well, this is definitely going to make things more interesting,” I wrote back.
As I flew into Dallas the evening before our meeting, the pilot of our 737 skirted an enormous weather front, providing me with a spectacular view of the light show unfolding within the towering wall of clouds. We landed less than an hour after 85-mile-per-hour, straight-line winds had strafed the Big D and its suburbs, doing a serious number on the electrical grid and (as I would learn) temporarily knocking out the power in Claire’s house. There was definitely an unsettling vibe in Dallas and it wasn’t just the weather. Two days earlier, America’s first Ebola patient, a Liberian named Thomas Duncan, had fallen ill at an apartment complex not far from the hotel where I was staying, and now over a hundred people who’d come into contact with the sick man were being alerted—some of them quarantined.42