“With my eighth child I was severely anemic, both while pregnant and postpartum.” She recounted that her hemoglobin counts were low (6 gm/dL), and that rather than taking the iron pills typically described by doctors, she took her placenta pills instead (which she claimed were “packed with iron and all sorts of amazing things”). She also pointed out that she prepared her pills from raw placenta, “so that you’re not losing so many of the nutrients” from the cooking process. “By two weeks postpartum, my hemoglobin was just below 10 [gm/dL].” Normal values for an adult woman are 12 to 16. “So not only did I experience the energy and mood stabilization, but I knew that the claims I’d read about, promoting placenta as an iron supplement, were true.”
Next, I asked Claire if there was any evidence for the positive benefits she’d spoken about. She immediately brought up Mark Kristal’s papers. “Granted,” she said, “his research is mostly with mice [rats, actually]. There is, you know, no professional, scientific research in humans right now. Not truly scientific research.44 What I’m doing [gathering information on placentophagy] isn’t scientific. I’m interviewing and getting feedback from moms. Plus I have my own experiences. Then there’s what I hear from midwives who have been practicing for years and years.”
In Claire’s view, this list was certainly an acceptable alternative to the evidence a more formal scientific study might provide. “To tell you the truth,” she went on, “I wasn’t completely sold on it [the benefits of consuming placentas] until I actually tried it myself.”
I followed up. “Given that some dangerous material has been identified in placental tissue, do you really think it’s safe to eat?”
At this point, Claire’s description of the placenta as “a filter but not in the sense of a coffee filter” strayed a bit from what I’d learned about the organ. And although the placenta clearly wasn’t a coffee filter, she seemed surprised to learn that researchers had determined that it did retain some of the toxic substances and pathogens that it filtered. I told her that I had read about studies in which placental tissue from infected moms also contained hepatitis-, herpes-, and AIDS-infected cells. In response, she agreed that under certain circumstances, consuming the placenta was not a good idea. She told me that to avoid coming into contact with pathogens her contract had a clause stating that clients were unaware of having any bloodborne diseases.
I posed the same question to Claire as I had to Mark Kristal. Why did she think there was currently so much interest in placentophagy?
“It just starts with one person trying it,” she said. “They see it helps and then they tell another person and so on.” She also attributes it to a rise in the popularity of home births, which she said, “have increased dramatically over the past several years.”
“People try it and it works for them. Then they tell their friends. It’s just spreading like a virus.” Given the local current events, I’m sure I winced at the comparison.
In short order, William and his son Andrew returned with the supplies, and so we headed inside and into the kitchen. Team Placenta quickly split their organ-related duties—he dicing veggies near the stove, she disinfecting the sink-side counter before covering the surfaces and adjacent floor with the aforementioned diaper changing pads. Once the place had been sanitized and covered in absorbent blue, Claire carried over a medium-sized Tupperware container. Prying off the lid, she revealed a roughly Frisbee-shaped organ that was perhaps seven inches across and half an inch thick. (It was smaller than what I was expecting.)
“You won’t be eating this one,” Claire told me, since it belonged to a client. She gestured to a bed of ice in the sink that held up a small baggie containing what looked to be several small strips of calves’ liver. “That’s mine,” she said.
“And I’ll be cooking it up for you,” William chimed in happily. Now clad in an embroidered chef’s apron, he was chopping away at carrots and tomatoes. “All organic,” he assured me (and thank goodness for that).
Wearing disposable gloves, Claire placed her client’s placenta on a pad, unfolded it a bit, and allowed me to move in for a peek. The surface was irregularly shaped and reminded me more of scrambled eggs than an organ (albeit liver-colored scrambled eggs holding clots of bluish blood).
“This side faced the wall of the uterus,” Claire told me as she de-clotted the irregular surface. She spent several more minutes examining the placenta carefully (seemingly looking for defects) before gently flipping it over like a large bloody pancake. This side was smooth, dark blue, and glistening. A fan of large blood vessels ran from the periphery, converging on a 12-inch section of umbilical cord and winding around it like the stripes on a barber’s pole.
I turned my attention to William, who was sweating vegetables in a sauté pan. He added a little beef stock, allowing the flavors of the tomatoes, garlic, and onions to mingle as the veggies softened. A minute or two later he retrieved the baggie containing his wife’s placenta from its ice bath and emptied the bloody slivers onto a paper plate. As I watched (it still looked like liver), the chef scraped the meat into the pan. Within seconds the kitchen was filled with an aroma that reminded me of beef.
The thin strips coiled up during the cooking process, now looking a bit like larger versions of the bacon chunks in a can of pork and beans, but without the fat. William added about a quarter cup of the Amarone—the steam rising up as the placenta simmered.