On tonight’s menu: Placenta

Thu, 24 Jun 2010 00:24:00 +0000

Before getting pregnant, the idea of eating my placenta had never occurred to me. My hippie aunt had buried hers under a tree. That sounded nice. But a month before my son was born, my doula (a birth assistant I hired to coach me during labor) asked, "Do you know what you want to do with your placenta? I have a great recipe."

My husband, who had been hesitant to hire what sounded like a New Age-y junior doctor, shot me a skeptical look across our kitchen table. I knew he was thinking, "Of course the doula has a great placenta recipe." But after a year's immersion in the halls of modern medicine, I was ready to absorb all the earthy wisdom I could. The world of science no longer held the answers it had promised, so I was open to a new perspective. Trying to conceive had been an anxiously deliberate process, involving ovulation thermometers, injections, surgery and a scheduled date with a test tube; in vitro fertilization loomed on the horizon. Our doctor told us we had a .0001 percent chance of getting pregnant on our own, so we had almost -- almost -- given up trying.

Salon.com > Holly Kretschmar

On tonight’s menu: Placenta