We explore current practices that point to a future new wave of body technology and altered perceptions of birth.

The human placenta

Eat and be happy

Our first photo-documentary explores the consumption of the body as technology. We meet Laura who is preparing the placenta of a new mother. We follow her process of cleaning the organ, cooking the meat, and creating the final product for the mother to consume.

Redefining our appetite for humans

Our insight into Laura’s craft reveals a resurgence of eating and creating products from the placenta. This goes beyond any connection with cannibalism and encompasses a wider way to use products from the body. In particular the placenta reveals a way for a mother to harness her body to self-heal; the body creates it’s own medicine.

Birth of the product

In the case of the placenta, its benefits include a rich source of hormones to ease post-natal depression, and properties that might help the physical recovery of the body. From a moral point of view, the consumption of the human placenta is acceptable. After all this is a product created out of the wondrous act of birth.

You are techno

Beyond the placenta, new types of future products made from the human body could redefine us as technology. These may include scientific advances ranging from human stem cells to biofuel cells, and artificial muscle power generators which produce energy from the body.

In the accompanying articles and works, we explore what the capabilities of the body as technology could be, and the mind shifts we could make with new understanding on birth and the placenta. In Friends of Flesh we explore the hormonal and opioid products of the body to strengthen social contracts. Blackbox Organ delves into the world of the body to see it as a manifestation and record of time. A new organisation is born in The Bureau of Coevolution - join us to consider if our freewill to give birth may be controlled from an unlikely origin. New Economies of the Body shows ways to cultivate the body as an investment portfolio. And in our final article, we investigate new revelations in science that offer ways to design our future descendents - welcome to the world of The Trust.