by Bill Schutt
I decided to interview Claire on her front lawn and she politely told her kids to remain inside, the older ones charged with keeping the little guys occupied with something other than their mom. They did so without complaint (or nearly so).
Once we were outside and talking one-on-one, Claire seemed to relax. Throughout the interview, she answered carefully, once or twice asking me to repeat or clarify a specific question.
“What was it that got you interested in consuming your own placenta?” I asked her.
“Hearing about the experiences of other moms from the homebirth midwives that I began working with when I had child number seven. My midwife, who’s been practicing since the seventies, explained to me that the placenta was one of things she uses to help moms with problems like post-birth hemorrhaging. Since [midwives] can’t prescribe medicines like a doctor, they can only use natural remedies to help moms when they have issues at home. So it was with her encouragement that I decided to try it myself.”
I then asked Claire what specific health benefits she thought she was getting from consuming placenta. She responded by first telling me that she’d initiated her own research study, to investigate just such questions. So far Claire had interviewed more than 200 moms, but chose to speak about only those benefits that she herself had experienced. She also said that because she hadn’t started consuming her placentas until after child number seven, she clearly felt that she’d established a baseline against which to compare her own placenta-related experiences. Claire explained that after each of her first six births she’d gone through “the baby blues,” which she attributed to the “hormonal drop” caused by the loss of her placenta.
“The first thing I noticed after taking placenta products [capsules] after baby number seven [not her real name] was the energy. I felt very energetic. The most significant thing, though, was not feeling like I was on an emotional yo-yo—one minute crying, the next minute happy. Any mom knows exactly what I’m talking about, and it was the thing I dreaded most about having children. Consuming my placenta made me feel a little bit more normal—like I did when I was pregnant, but before giving birth.”
Claire went on to tell me that what really convinced her that there were benefits was the fact that she’d get “emotional and out of sorts, and weepy and cranky, when it was time for another pill.” When she took one, she said, those emotions leveled out.
“With my eighth child I was severely anemic, both while pregnant and post-partum.” 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.
It smelled delicious.
Two or three minutes later, William plated my placenta osso buco and passed me the dish. Without hesitation, I took a forkful—making sure to skewer two of the four bite-sized
pieces. Placing Claire Rembis’s placenta into my mouth, I started chewing.
Before experiencing placentophagy firsthand, I had done some research into what human flesh might taste like. I was somewhat puzzled at the scarcity of credible reports, although a number of notable cannibal crazies had been perfectly happy to discuss the topic.
The term “long pig” has become the most popular reference point to describe the supposed porklike taste of human flesh. The oldest reference I could find comes from a letter written by Rev. John Watsford in 1847, describing the practice of ritual cannibalism practiced by the inhabitants of the Marquesas Islands, a group of approximately 15 Polynesian islands located around 850 miles northeast of Tahiti. But while the letter does represent the translation of a Polynesian term for the use of human flesh as food, there is no real mention of how it tasted.
The Somosomo people were fed with human flesh during their stay at Bau [a tiny Fijian islet], they being on a visit at that time; and some of the Chiefs of other towns, when bringing their food, carried a cooked human being on one shoulder, and a pig on the other; but they always preferred the “long pig,” as they call a man when baked.
More reliable support for the pork hypothesis came from the infamous cannibal Armin Meiwes, who is currently serving a life term for killing and devouring Bernd Brandes. The latter, a 42-year-old computer technician, answered Meiwes’s cannibalism chat room post in 2001. It was the perfect match, with Meiwes obsessed with cannibalism and Brandes fixated on being eaten. Shortly after entering Meiwes’s dilapidated house in Rotenburg, the new friends decided to sever Brandes’s penis, which they reportedly tried to eat raw. Finding it too tough and chewy, they set out to cook the schnitzel but overcooked it—Meiwes eventually feeding it to his dog. Brandes, nearly unconscious from a combination of blood loss and the pills and alcohol he’d swallowed, eventually died—helped along by the knife-wielding Meiwes. The Internet’s first cannibal killer then dismembered his suddenly former pal. He stored the body parts in a freezer and consumed them over the course of several months.
“I sautéed the steak of Bernd with salt, pepper, garlic, and nutmeg,” Meiwes told interviewer Günter Stampf. Reportedly Meiwes ate more than 40 pounds of Mr. Brandes during the months following the killing. “The flesh tastes like pork, a little more bitter,” he said, noting that that most people wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. “It tastes quite good.”
The pork comparison, however, was not shared by all.
Issei Sagawa, an unrepentant Japanese cannibal, who murdered and ate a female Dutch student in 1981 (and got away with it because of powerful family connections), compared his victim’s flesh to raw tuna.
While we’re on the topic of Meiwes and Sagawa (albeit briefly), some readers may be wondering why I’ve essentially steered clear of the criminal cannibalism typified by this pair and their ilk. One reason is that the topic has been covered in sensational (and often gory) detail in a number of previous books. More importantly, though, several of these psychopaths are still alive (or recently deceased) and out of respect for the families and loved ones of their victims, I have chosen not to provide these murderers with anything that could even vaguely be interpreted as acclaim.
In the 1920s, New York Times reporter William Seabrook set out to eat a chunk of human rump roast with some Guero tribesmen in West Africa. Upon returning home he began writing a book about his adventures. Depending on what source you believe, either Seabrook discovered that the tribesmen had tricked him into eating a piece of ape, or they had simply refused to share their meal with him. With the validity of his book in jeopardy, Seabrook set out to procure some real human flesh—this he claimed to have gotten from an orderly in a Paris hospital who had access to freshly dead patients. Seabrook says that he cooked the meat over a spit—seasoning it with salt and pepper and accompanying it with side of rice and a bottle of wine. It did not taste like pork, he said, “It was good, fully developed veal, not young, but not yet beef.”
Back in Plano, Texas, the Rembis family stood by waiting for my reaction, I took my time, chewing Claire’s placenta slowly. The first thing that came to mind wasn’t the taste—it was the texture. Firm but tender, it was easy to chew.
The consistency was like veal.
The taste, though, had none of the delicate, subtly beefy flavor of veal. Definitely dark meat—organ meat, I thought, but it wasn’t exactly like anything I’d ever eaten before. It had a strong but not overpowering flavor. I swallowed Claire’s placenta and picked up another forkful.
It tasted very much like the chicken gizzards we’d fried up as college students. “It’s very good,” I told the assembled Rembis clan and they responded with a chorus of moans, groans, and giggles.
A few minutes later, I had cleaned my plate.
As expected, the Rembis kids were full of questions.
“Can I hold your iPhone now?”
“Can we ask Siri a question?”
“Do you want one of my Pringles?”
I squatted down to kid height, pulled out my phone and got on with the important stuff, hoping to avoid one of the of the side effects of placenta eating I’d read about: unpleasant burps.
So is there any real benefit to the practice of placentophagy? If one were to gauge the benefits by the number of societies that engage in it, the answer would be a resounding “Nope.”
Maggie Blott, a spokeswoman for the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (UK), believes that there’s no medical justification for humans to consume their own placenta. “Animals eat their placenta to get nutrition—but when people are already well-nourished, there is no benefit; there is no reason to do it.’
But what about the alternative scenario—that consuming placentas could possibly have detrimental effects?
According to Mark Kristal, “The sharp distinction between the prevalence of placentophagy in non-human, non-aquatic mammals, and the total absence of it in human cultures, suggest that different mechanisms are involved. That either placentophagia became somehow disadvantageous to humans because of illness or sickness or negative side effects, or something more important has come along to replace it.”
Ultimately, though, the possibility of negative effects and the lack of evidence for beneficial effects doesn’t faze folks like Claire and William Rembis and, similarly, it didn’t prevent Oregon representative Alissa Keny-Guyer from sponsoring bill HB 2612, which was passed unanimously by the state Senate in 2013. The new law allows Oregon mothers who have just given birth to bring home a second, though slightly less joyous, bundle when they leave the hospital.
Except in rare cases, it appears that medicinal cannibalism is at worst a harmless placebo. But, if that’s true, then beyond our culturally imposed taboo, maybe there exists another reason why we don’t indulge in cannibalism on a more regular basis. Recalling that UNLV researchers found no mention of placentophagy in the 179 societies they examined, I wondered if perhaps these groups knew something that ritual cannibals, proponents of medicinal cannibalism, and modern placentophiles have missed.
* * *
36 In a 2013 study conducted by researchers at UNLV, 198 women who had “ingested their placentas after the birth of at least one child” were surveyed: 93 percent were white, 91 percent were from the U.S., 90 percent were married, and 58 percent reported a household income of more than $50,000 per year.
37 Currently, there are 5 species of monotremes (4 echidnas and the platypus) and 334 species of marsupials. The latter are commonly referred to as “pouched mammals,” although a pouch, or marsupium, is not a requirement for entry to the marsupial club. What all marsupials do share is a short gestation period, after which the fetuslike newborn takes a precarious trip from the vaginal opening to a teat (usually found within the marsupium). Upon finding one, the tiny creature latches on for dear life, and continues what is essentially the remainder of its fetal development for additional weeks or even months.
38 The word umbilical is Latin
for “navel” or “middle.” Blood from the umbilical cord is rich in stem cells and so it is sometimes collected and “banked,” to potentially be used down the road to treat a number of blood-related disorders, including leukemia and lymphoma.
39 I discounted unpublished reports that the male author of the voracious carnivore hypothesis was found choking on a disposable diaper.
40 Yes, rat babies are known as kittens (which should make dog lovers smile). The largest kitty litter I was able to uncover is 26—presumably a tough number for the 14 baby rats that couldn’t immediately latch on to a nipple.
41 A doula (from the Ancient Greek for “female servant”) is a non-medical person who assists the mother before, during, and after childbirth. After reportedly engaging in turf battles with medical personnel, some hospitals banned doulas while others started internal doula programs—presumably in an effort to reduce the number of birthing-room-related fistfights.
42 Mr. Duncan died about a week later, his case igniting a media-fanned fear fest reminiscent of the early days of the AIDS epidemic.
43 In May 2015, I learned that Claire had given birth to her 11th child (a son).
44 In a 1954 study, Czech researchers claimed that placenta consumption increased lactation in postpartum women having lactational difficulty (compared to a control group fed beef). According to Mark Kristal though, “This study does not conform to modern-day ideas about scientific methods or statistical analyses.” He noted that “the experiment was methodologically flawed” and that the hormones responsible for increased lactation would have been denatured in the preparation they described.
17: Cannibalism in the Pacific Islands
Nothing it seems to me is more difficult than to explain to a cannibal why he should give up human flesh. He immediately asks, “Why mustn’t I eat it?” And I have never yet been able to find an answer to that question beyond the somewhat unsatisfactory one, “Because you mustn’t.” However, though logically unconvincing, this reply, when backed by the presence of the police and by vague threats about the Government, is generally effective in a much shorter time than one could reasonably anticipate.
