ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the culinary preparation and eating of the placenta and the umbilical cord. Eating the placenta is mostly advertised by celebrity women, and is almost exclusively practised by women rather than by men. The chapter attempts to answer the question of whether placentophagy as practised by figures of culinary authority should be read as a ritualistic attempt to restore declined paternal authority. It also aims to answer the question of whether it is better understood as an intervention consonant with neoliberal psychopolitical transitional demands, and structured according to the culinary metaphorics of the dominant culinary/food culture. A recurring central theoretical tenet in contemporary Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is that the Name-of-the-Father according to tradition has now been fractured, and devalued by the discourses of science and capitalism, resulting in the decline and collapse of the father figure as the corner-stone of the symbolic order.
