Is Sharing Placenta The Recipe For Sisterly Bonding?

After Chrissy Shilling gave birth over the weekend, she had her twin sister Kathy cook up her baby’s placenta. Now they’re sharing their thoughts on what a real family feast tastes like.

Previously, we learned that some people believe placentophagy, the practice of eating the the placenta, is a great way to cure post-partum depression. In a post on Mom Logic today, the Shilling sisters give a detailed account of how they prepared the placenta and critique the dish. They even posted pictures to their Facebook account.

Chrissy explains that she wanted to eat the organ because:

The placenta is such an amazing organ in all its done for my baby that it didn’t seem right to simply throw it away. My thought was “being the only organ that the human body makes that naturally exits the body, why not take advantage of it?”

By taking it in again, it was symbolic for me as a way to truly say “good-bye” to my 9-month pregnancy and “hello” to an exciting (albeit challenging) new chapter in my life.

Sister Kathy describes the meal as, “Just a simple dish with fresh tomatoes, sauce and spices.” She says the 6 pound placenta retains vitamins and hormones while it cooks. Just to be sure she saved all those nutrients, she put any blood that seeped out of the organ back into the sauce. Here’s how she prepared it:

The “recipe” was pretty simple, but preparation was very fun! First, I washed off any clots and snipped/tore away the membrane. Websites suggested this, and I imagine it’s because it’d be chewy. The umbilical cord required a pair of scissors to cut through and I had to marvel at how incredible tough that piece was! After it was pretty clean, I sliced it into bite-size chunks, and cooked it.

Apparently it tastes as good as it sounds! Kathy says:

The taste of the meat itself was surprisingly tasteful (I thought it’d be bland, but it absorbed the flavors of the ingredients very well). It wasn’t TOUGH, but not sloppy either. Just the right kind of texture that I like.

And adds:

The meat cooked similar to liver, but came out with the consistency of Filet
Mignon! Perhaps a little stringy.

The sisters both said they felt great after chowing down on placenta, but most commenters on Mom Logic didn’t find their afterbirth cookery very appetizing (Conan O’Brien knows how they feel). There were some who said people should be open-minded and even a few who said they’d eaten their own placenta, however, the majority said the photos made them nauseous… and compared placentophagy to cannibalism.