lifestyle

Yes, you read that right: Woman makes yoghurt with her vagina.

And today in Cooking With Your Body Secretions news comes this: A student at the University of Wisconsin has made yoghurt with her vagina.

Yes, you did read that correctly and no, we’re not having you on.

Cecilia Westbrook is a PhD student and scientist who was fed up with the fact that there are whole cookbooks of semen-based recipes out there, yet none where the main ingredient is, well, the natural flora that exist in the vagina.

So Cecilia took matters into her own hands and decided to figure out a way to create yoghurt with her own vagina secretions.

Motherboard reports that the process involved a spoon and that it was “uncomfortable”:

“The ‘collection method’ was done with a wooden spoon. She set up a positive control (made with actual yogurt as the starter culture) and a negative control (plain milk with nothing added), and combined her own homemade ingredient to the third batch of yogurt. Left overnight, the magic of biology created a respectably-sized bowl.”

Cecilia figured that, if women take probiotics to ensure they have healthy vaginas, yoghurt made from the bacteria of a healthy vagina would surely work in the same way.

Obviously, Cecilia carried through her experiment right to the end, reporting that her batch of yoghurt was edible, albeit “sour, tangy, and almost tingly on the tongue”.

Apparently it tasted like Indian yoghurt, and she ate it with a side of blueberries.

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While we admire Cecilia for her, er, resourcefulness, maybe don’t give up on your store bought yoghurt just yet.

Larry Forney, a microbiologist at the University of Idaho, told Motherboard that cultivating your own vagina yoghurt probably won’t have the health benefits you’d like it to.

“When you take vaginal secretions, you’re not just taking the lactobacilli. You’re taking everything,” he explained.

“What you’re using in your yogurt is no longer dominated by lactobacilli but other bacteria, some of which could be pathogenic. It’s a bad idea in general but there is an element of it that has some appeal: she’s using bacteria from her own vagina.”

Yeah, it might make your stomach feel a little churny, but we have to hand it to Cecilia for her creative culinary skills.

“In a way, it’s so obvious. Like, of course you can make yogurt out of your natural flora. But who would think to do it?” she said.

“And of course the feminist in me wants to say something about how there’s a beauty in connecting your body to your food and exploring the power that your vagina has. Part of that is kind of a mystical hippie thing, but part of it is also just getting comfortable with your own body, especially in a culture that is so uncomfortable with women’s bodies.”

Oh, and in case you wanted to know what her second batch of yoghurt tasted like, it was reminiscent of slightly spoiled milk.

Would you eat yoghurt made in your own vagina?