Probiotic yogurts have reached a whole new level with a batch of homemade yogurt made from one woman’s vaginal fluids.
Oh, did I forget to ask if you’d had breakfast yet?
VICE writer Janet Jay described how her friend Cecilia Westbrook, an MD/PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, collected lactobacillus bacteria — the “good bacteria” — from her own vagina with a wooden spoon. (Lactobacillus is the same bacteria we find in cheese, milk, and your run-of-the-mill Dannon yogurts.) Westbrook also made two other batches of non-vaginal fluid flavored yogurt as control groups.
The next day, she nommed her artisinal creation down with some blueberries, comparing its taste to the Indian yogurt called dahi. “Sour, tangy and almost tingly on the tongue,” according to VICE. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised: that’s how a vagina tastes regularly as a non-breakfast food. Westbrook liked it so much that she whipped up a second batch of yogurt made from her own vaginal fluids, which she described as “even more tart, like slightly-spoiled milk.”
Does this mean vaginal yogurt is the new frontier in DIY cuisine? Not unless you want to risk ingesting all the other things that come along with a vagina’s good bacteria. A U.S. Food and Drug Administration press officer and a microbiologist both warned VICE that the potential to pass along infections or disease makes homemade yogurt not a good idea. Oh, darn, because I was really about to go try it.
