Please Pass The Placenta!

So I guess it's been a thing for a long time. Some new mothers eat their placentas. See, I didn't know that. I know my mother didn't eat her placenta even though I never asked her. As a Norwegian, she enjoyed a number of menu items that don't appeal to normal people, and placenta might conceivably have fit the bill as long as the butter held out, except that it's not beige. It's not remotely beige, in fact. A placenta looks like a massive blood clot in flapjack form.

Anyway I'm basing my conjecture on the fact that when I asked her (in the flush of my all-knowing teen years, at the dawn of the hippie era) why she didn't have a natural childbirth, she said "I stayed awake just as long as I wanted to." She didn't say it so much as she snapped it off, with emphasis. My thought is that when the medical personnel brought her back to consciousness and handed her a neatly wrapped baby, she didn't think to ask if she could eat the placenta. Even though she was a very tidy person.

Animals routinely eat placentas for a number of reasons and tidiness may be one of them. Dogs eat them because it's a good source of iron, it's important to tidy up so as not to attract wolverines, and oh who are we kidding? Dogs will eat anything, hork it up, and eat it all over again.

Modern humans don't deal with wolverines as much as they used to and we are a little fussier about what we eat, for the most part. But hormones can make a person pretty peckish. Still, the eating of the placenta is usually done for a variety of reasons that may or may not hold water. It's considered to be good for the child, for lactation, or for the mood of the mother. It does sound sort of ancestrally legit. But on the other hand, if we were meant to eat the things our body has already expelled for some reason, we'd be eating babies too, wouldn't we?

I never gave birth but I'm not liable to have jumped on that bandwagon. I can't even deal with oysters. I'm pretty sure my first reaction to seeing my placenta would be "Thanks, I'm done with that." Fortunately most of the women who eat their own placentas these days have them sent to a company that dehydrates them and puts them in capsule form. Then it's just a matter of popping pills. That's how fecal transplants are done too. And if it ever turns out that pus, bile, or barf becomes a cure for anything, the capsule industry should be seeing boom times.

But don't pills seem like cheating, somehow? I'm pretty sure it would strike one of my family members as being over-delicate. She tried using one of those nasal syringes on  her infant when he got snotty and very shortly decided it was inefficient, and she channeled the spirit of her own foremothers and planted her mouth on the baby's face and shnorked all the shnot out of his nose and spit it out and it worked splendidly, just as it had for her tribe from day one. I think it's one of those things that isn't gross after you've done it once, much like another thing I can think of.

The very day I first heard about placenta-eating, I mentioned it to a man and woman who joined us for beer-thirty, and scored a hit right away. It was the man who had eaten the placenta. It wasn't his wife's, either. It was at some sort of hippie community event. Sauteed placenta canapes with toothpicks in them, or something. He explained that he ate the placenta because he was polite. "You don't get offered someone's placenta and say 'yuck,'" he said. "That would be rude."

I'm glad I wasn't at that soiree. To this day I'd be trying to keep straight in my mind who still thinks I'm a vegetarian.

Giving A Shit For Science

I'm always looking for a way to advance science, and three recent articles pointed out some possibilities. Unfortunately, I'm too afraid of the water to become a dolphin snot collector, and although I would be only too happy to harvest semen from a snot otter, that involves travel. So that leaves poop donation.

It has only been recently that dolphin snot has hit the news. The promise for research breakthroughs seemed endless. Could we one day cure the heartbreak of plankton-induced asthma? Develop a new marine adhesive from porpoise boogers? Sadly, none of this is on the horizon. Dolphin scientists are excited about snot collection only because it is a good source of dolphin DNA, which has proved invaluable in the study of, uh, dolphins. Previous attempts to scavenge DNA from a dolphin involved remote techniques using a crossbow or a long pole. This worked well, as far as  it went, but only allowed researchers to study irritable dolphins, with no controls for amiability. With the new snot collection discovery, they now need only use a bucket and a boat and locate a pod of dolphins with kelp allergies, and it's DNA city.

Rush

Snot otter semen is, to my mind, even more valuable. "Snot otter" is the perfectly adorable term of endearment for the hellbender, a species of salamander that used to be common in streams in the eastern United States. The hellbender is to a regular salamander as Rush Limbaugh is to Johnny Depp, but we love them anyway. There is no higher use for snot otter ejaculate than the creation of more snot otters, and that is precisely what is being proposed. I'm certain I'm qualified. I love salamanders very much, even the rare massively ugly ones, and I think that would come across. And there are aspects of snot otter fondling that are very similar to activities I might have already perfected over the years, if I do say so myself. Snot otters are currently in steep decline, and it isn't because they finally got a good look at each other. It's no doubt due to something stupid we did, so I'd love to help. Maybe next time I'm back east I'll check on craigslist for people who want their snot otters stroked. I'll probably find some, too.

Johnny

But my contribution to science is most likely to be in the field of fecal transplants. There is a need out there for good healthy shit, and I am really full of it. I've already updated my driver's license to reflect my donor status, and in the event of a serious accident, collection should be a snap: I probably will have donated before impact. The transplant recipients are people with difficult infections, colitis, and other intractable intestinal woes. Evidently someone has discovered that if their intestines are scrubbed clean and re-injected with healthy crap, everything clears right up. I'd be tickled to give some of mine away. I can always make more. And TurboTax already has a calculator for charitable contributions to tell you what your shit is worth.