I have a vague recollection of this one TV series from 1989. It was called Alien Nation, and it was a police procedural show based on a buddy cop film of the same name. It follows the story of two cops, a human and an alien in the near future of the year 1990.

Look at those prosthetics. You're never going to see a primetime TV show like this again. That being said, I never actually watched it — I mean, I was a literal child, it wasn't for me.

But I did see one scene of it by accident. And what are the odds? It's probably the most infamous scene from show: The alien cop's alien wife is pregnant, and she takes the baby out of her, and then he puts it in his body to finish the pregnancy because that's how those kinda aliens work. In the middle of the baby trade-off, they take a piece off the gestating fetus and eat it.

Despite never really watching the show and only having a vague understanding of what's even going on when I saw it, that scene stuck with me for the rest of my life.

Then when I eventually learned that some women eat the placenta when they give birth, that was the first thing I thought of. In fact, when I hear about it, that's still the first thing I think of, which is why it's in this video.

Well, if If you were disturbed by that image, I got something even better for you, and this one's real.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the tale of the Afterbirth Jerky.

Eating the placenta is a practice that has a long history in certain parts of the world. Although there's debate among historians over how prevalent it actually was, there's incidents of it documented as far back as a few hundred years BC. Technically called placentophagy, which reminds me of the movie Antropophagus, where, they don't just eat the placenta, they eat the whole baby.

In the US, though, it first became a trend in the '70s, with people citing health benefits like: a restored hormone balance; better mood; increased milk production.

Critics, of course, say there's no evidence that any of this is true. Since during pregnancy, the placenta acts as a big filter to keep the baby safe from disease and whatnot, some people say you're basically eating a giant disease sponge.

There's been cases where people have gotten sick from it, most notably one where a newborn got strep on multiple occasions, and was eventually traced back to contamination in placenta pills that its mother was eating. Since then, the CDC has begun to advise against eating the placenta. Who really cares what the CDC thinks? People are going to eat it regardless. It's a trend that comes and goes throughout the years.

Most recently, it was getting popular in 2013 or so when celebrities like Kim Kardashian were doing it.

And, of course, when you've got a new, sort-of-gross trend in the early 2010s, you've also got, of course, some incredible posts. I mean, of course, us millennials, we love to be foodies. We love a good $20 burger on a square plate with a knife in it.

So you can't just eat the placenta straight up. You got people getting fancy with stir fry recipes and scrambled eggs and whatnot.

But a lot of times, having a placenta laying around at home doesn't go as planned.

You also had this one couple that kept their placenta, and they weren't planning to eat it. What they were going to do is they were going to dig a big hole in the yard, bury the placenta, and then plant a tree on top of it. Then the tree grows with the child. It's actually kind of a cute idea. But they're so busy with the newborn baby, they don't really have time to go dig a hole in the yard, so the placenta lays around for a bit.

Then one day, they get home and the placenta is missing.

They're looking around for it, and they find their dog sitting in the corner — he's really happy, and he's got a mysteriously placenta-shaped belly. That dog probably thinks about this feast every single day of its life — if he could tell his friends about it, they wouldn't believe him.

It's not just women and dogs hopping on this trend. You had a woman on Reddit whose husband wanted to eat it, thinking that the stem cells would help his injury.

But as much as I like to think that the reason why that Rey Mysterio Jr. is now moving around like he's in his 20's again is that he was sitting in a hospital in Mexico just snacking on placentas.

People in the comments were quick to note that stem cell therapy doesn't actually work like Christopher Reeves on South Park — although, you know, it's still not as outlandish of a theory as that Irish guy that injected cum into his arm to fix his back pain.

People also noted that whatever benefits may or may not exist for a woman eating the placenta, they definitely don't exist for the husband. In fact, some theorized, I don't know if this is true or not, but some theorized that eating the placenta as a man might actually be like taking a giant estrogen pill.

The dude's going to wind up like Ranma.

While you see a lot of people who are posting their best placenta and egg recipes, in general, the people who are really serious about the health benefits aren't doing meals.

What they do is they have their placenta dehydrated and put into capsules that they take over a period of 90 days or so. There's a lot of companies that provide this service, but there's also a lot of people that advise doing it yourself.

One redditor named PutaGatito documented the whole process.

The way she worded it, I pictured the placenta sitting on her counter, and she occasionally takes a few bites of it. Attached [to the Reddit post] is an Imgur album that goes into a lot more detail — and there's the placenta right there.

Actually, it looks like Squidward if he was in pain.

Four months into her pregnancy, she decided she wanted to eat the placenta. But she wasn't really interested in the health benefits, she was just curious about what it would taste like. Only after looking into it did she find that there actually may be some health benefits.

But still, as you can see from her Snapchat post, she's still having fun with it.

At first, she was considering going to one of the pill companies that I mentioned before, but like a lot of people, she found that it was just more than she wanted to pay. She was also kinda grossed out by the idea that her placenta was going to go on machinery that all these other placentas went on — like the lab techs are just stacking them up.

A lot of people in the comment section were like, "Wait, that's the thing that grossed you out?"

So if you're going to make placenta pills, first you gotta dehydrate the placenta. She decides she's going to borrow her mother's food dehydrator — although I imagine after this, her mother will just let her keep it.

Now that she has the equipment, she quickly realizes that she has no idea what she's doing, but that placenta ain't getting any fresher. There's no turning back now.

You can't just plop the whole placenta down on the food dehydrator — it's not going to work. First, you gotta gut it like a Thanksgiving turkey. She removes the umbilical cord and cuts it open. It kinda looks like a watermelon.

And that caption she put: "Eat me, eat me"

I can't help but think of 1988's The Abomination.

But those watermelon seeds you got there, those are actually blood clots. She removes the seeds and notes that it smells like a mix of raw pork and, of course, a lot of blood. She's not quite sure what to do next, so she decides to just cut them into little strips like she would if she was making fajitas. Which actually, according to the DIY guide I found, is what you're supposed to do. The guide I found also recommended adding lemon and ginger — it's probably nice.

She begins dehydrating the pieces, and they start to look exactly like Chinese boneless ribs. But as they're dehydrating, she realizes that the pieces she cut are too thick to fully dehydrate, so she cuts them in half, and then she manages to fit everything.

With her placental mise en place is now complete, she decides to move it.

The whole process took four and a half hours. When it was complete, she noted that it was very rubbery, even more so than beef jerky. She then cleans the dehydrator and puts it back in the cabinet for future use, and she notes that it was easier to fully clean than she expected. But I feel like no matter how good you clean that, it's got to still impart some kind of flavor.

I just think of that guy that was like, "Wow, why does everything I cook in my slow cooker taste amazing?" Then he opens it up and finds a bunch of dead lizards inside the heating element.

In any case, we're done with the food dehydrator now — time to grab the coffee grinder. She quickly discovers that grinding up the placenta bits makes it smell even worse. Because of that smell and the rubbery texture, she was worried that eating this would make her sick. She decides to go full Andersons Smoke Show mode and wraps a baking sheet in foil and bakes the afterbirth grinds.

But despite the smell and the burning, it actually turned out fine.

She says that she takes one a day and they work amazingly. Although people in the comments were like, "Work amazingly how? What does it do?" They weren't satisfied with any of the answers they got.

In general, the response was kinda varied.

You had other people that did think the benefits were real, but she ruined them by cooking the nutrients out.

Others were just grossed out:

God damn, I totally forgot Flying Spaghetti Monster was a thing.

Some people pointed out that this is actually relatively common.

People also noticed that, in this time period, she had posted to r/cooking asking for chicken liver recipes. And while, at first, you might think, "Oh, that's just some kind of a coincidence," when I was researching this video, I noticed so many people saying that the placenta takes like a chicken liver. So maybe she was trying to figure out how to cook it then.

More than anything, though, it seemed like people were mostly just disappointed that, even though her original intention was to just eat it out of curiosity, and despite it at one point looking like a succulent Chinese meal, she never actually ate the placenta chunks.

Wait, phubans? I know that guy. Actually, I'm going to shout out his game, UFO 50, because I was playing it last night, and it's really good.

So if that's where you're at right now [disappointed that the Redditor never ate the placenta], 2016 Jason Blaha has something for you:

Anyway, that's all for now. I'm out.