Food, blood, nutrients: on eating placenta & the limits of edibility

ABSTRACT

This article examines the recent influx of post-partum placenta encapsulation, especially in a US context. I analyze placental reuse, and its biomedical risk narratives, through an interwoven exploration of the curative and toxic aspects of human placenta, to understand increased cultural value placed upon this organ as an object of nutritional interest and tension. Placenta consumption as vitamin source pushes the socio-cultural boundaries of disgust through its discard (re)commodification. I argue that attempts to market and eat otherwise wasted material as functional food source raise important feminist questions about the vitality of this discarded matter and the paucity of research on one of the most crucial mediators of early human nutrition.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical nutrition studies
• gender studies
• discard studies
• placentophagy
• bio-economy
• vitamins
• functional foods

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to the UCLA Luskin Endowment for Thought Leadership. Thank you to Kyla Wazana Tompkins for her scholarship and her critical insights on early drafts of this project. Thank you to Rachel Lee and the fabulous CSW staff. Thank you to my gracious colleague and co-conspirator in Food Studies, metabolic imagining, and donut & coffee connoisseurship to boot, Sarah Tracy. I am honored to work and write beside you. Thanks to editor extraordinaire Amy Bentley and the FCS editorial staff for their guidance and labor. To the Adriatic Sea, whose waters and bounty kept my mind and body nourished while I wrote this. Thanks to Ale for listening, reading and pushing me ever onward. Thanks to Hannah Landecker and Hi’ilei Hobart for their thoughtful suggestions on early drafts; and to Michelle Rensel for commentary, cheerleading, and life-sustaining snacks. Profound thanks to the generous anonymous reviewers whose careful insights helped me to refine this work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. By feminist here I intend critical, interdisciplinary and intersectional inquiry of scientific knowledge-making and the bodies affected/constructed by that knowledge production.

2. Encapsulation, tincture & preparation training service prices ranged from circa $200–300 for encapsulation; tinctures <$100; preparation trainings $200-$400. See founder of Brooklyn Placenta Services Jennifer Leigh Mayer’s blog for “Ancient Remedies for the Modern Mother;” a phrase referenced by numerous midwifery services.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rachel Vaughn

Rachel Vaughn is Lecturer in the UCLA Institute for Society & Genetics, and Oral Historian in Residence at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women. Vaughn holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Kansas. Her research engages the intersections of Food and Discard Studies, Feminist Science & Technology Studies. She is the author of “Choosing Wisely”: Paralleling Food Sovereignty and Reproductive Justice” (Frontiers); and is author of the forthcoming book Talking Food, Talking Trash: Oral Histories of Food Precarity from the Margins of a Dumpster (University of Nebraska Press).