Minichan

Last August, Cecilia Westbrook, an MD/PhD student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, decided to see if the stomach-churning idea was feasible, according to VICE.

Westbrook noted that the most common bacteria found in a healthy vagina was lactobacillus, the same bacteria commonly found in yogurt. She figured she could easily whip up a batch of yogurt just by extracting some of her vagina’s bacteria with a wooden spoon.

Homemade yogurt is traditionally made by mixing a small amount of a yogurt starter culture with some milk and heating it.

However, Westbrook discovered there was not much information on making yogurt with vaginal bacteria — or much information on vaginal bacteria at all, according to an interview she gave to Jezebel.

“I was actually surprised to know that we really don’t know a lot about vaginal flora, There’s really been only one or maybe two big studies and, interestingly, most of the information that we do know about is from white women, which suggests that there might be some indication that people from different ethnic backgrounds might have different flora. I was surprised about how much we didn’t know.”
To do the experiment, Westbrook used three bowls: One with yogurt made with a traditional starter culture, one with just plain milk, one with just milk and her own bodily contribution.

Westbrook left out the batches overnight and awoke to find a decent amount of yogurt in that third bowl, according to Westbrook’s friend, Janet Jay, who wrote the VICE article on the experiment.

British Blogger Zoe Stavri whipped the Internet up into a frothy bread mix frenzy earlier this week, after writing about a sourdough loaf she'd begun to make from scratch, leavened with yeast from a vaginal infection. She sourced the yeast with the help of a dildo, as if baking weren't fun enough already.

Her first tweets on the subject chronicled her yeast making her dough rise — "IT'S ALIVE"! she wrote, in an acceptable use of all caps — and a blog post also documented the criticism she'd received on social media in response. Noting much of the hate came from apparently grossed-out men, Stavri argues that "the vast majority of the utter horror about my sourdough isn't anything to do with ignorance on food hygiene, but more to do with a general mistrust and horror at vag."

In a follow-up post Wednesday, Stavri chronicled the baking and eating of her special sourdough — it's worth noting that the baking process would have killed off any bacteria present in the yeast (and Stavri also says her infection cleared up also, FYI). The bread smelled great while in the oven, she noted, but did worry she had overbaked the loaves a little:


"It tasted like a pretty damn nice sourdough bread. Not the tangiest sourdough I've ever eaten, but solidly tasty...I really, really liked it," Stavri wrote. "After having a little bite, I ate a slice with butter. The bread was still slightly warm and the butter soaked in and it was absolutely heavenly." While acknowledging its very possible the sourdough rose and baked of its own volition (i.e. without her vaginal yeast, of which she only had a very small quantity in the mix) Stavri says she plans to bake more moving forward using her leftover starter, with pizza and/or bagels maybe coming up next. Read more from Stavri's recipe, and related commentary, at her blog, Another Angry Woman; Cosmopolitan.com has also reached out for further comment on the experiment and what her favorite vagina yeast sourdough sandwich fillings are.