Post by Jim JoycePost by Harry S RobinsThere is the classic example of real vanilla versus the fake stuff, where
if you use a drop in a bowl containing many other ingredients, it doesn't
matter nearly as much (according to Consumer Reports anyway) than if you
are using it with extremely few other ingredients.
Any discussion of vanilla takes me back to the day when I learned that someone
had expressed (squeezed) a beaver's anal gland, releasing a sweet sticky
substance that would later be named castoreum and would be used to provide a
vanilla-like flavor to multiple food products.
"You gonna eat that?"
"Yep! Watch me!"
"Hmm, tastes like vanilla!"
I was ready to call BS on that one.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/bittersweet-story-vanilla-180962757/
Long before Europeans took to vanilla's taste, the creeping vine grew
wild in tropical forests throughout Mesoamerica. While the Totonac
people of modern-day Veracruz, Mexico, are credited as the earliest
growers of vanilla, the oldest reports of vanilla usage come from the
pre-Columbian Maya. The Maya used vanilla in a beverage made with cacao
and other spices. After conquering the Totonacan empire, the Aztecs
followed suit, adding vanilla to a beverage consumed by nobility and
known as chocolatl.
The Spanish conquest of the Aztecs in 1519 brought the fragrant
flower—and its companion, cacao—to Europe. Vanilla was cultivated in
botanical gardens in France and England, but never offered up its
glorious seeds. Growers couldn’t understand why until centuries later
when, in 1836, Belgian horticulturist Charles Morren reported that
vanilla’s natural pollinator was the Melipona bee, an insect that didn’t
live in Europe. (A recent study, however, suggests that Euglossine bees
may actually be the orchid’s primary pollinator.)
Five years later, on the island of Réunion, a 39-mile long volcanic
hotspot in the Indian Ocean, everything changed. In 1841, an enslaved
boy on the island named Edmond Albius developed the painstaking yet
effective hand-pollination method for vanilla that is still in use
today, which involves exposing and mating the flower’s male and female
parts. His technique spread from Réunion to Madagascar and other
neighboring islands, and eventually worked its way back to Mexico as a
way to augment the vanilla harvest pollinated by bees.
This proliferation helped whet the world’s appetite for vanilla. The
spice quickly found its way into cakes and ice cream, perfumes and
medicines, and was valued for its intoxicating flavor and aroma. But
despite growing demand and a robust crop, the tremendous amount of time
and energy that went into cultivation and processing affected farmers’
ability to supply the market—and continues to do so today. Nearly all of
the vanilla produced commercially today is hand-pollinated.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/does-vanilla-flavoring-actually-come-from-beaver-butts-180983288/
If you’ve been on the internet in recent years, you might have seen the
claim that artificial vanilla flavoring found in cookies or ice cream
comes from goo secreted out of beaver behinds. Every few years, posts go
viral on social media warning consumers that this substance—called
castoreum—may be disguised as “natural flavoring” on the ingredient list
of your favorite sweet treats.
While this statement is not entirely false—beavers do excrete
sweet-smelling (and edible) castoreum from sacs near their
anuses—experts say you probably can’t find this goo on the shelves of
your nearest grocery store.
“It turns out that the stuff is incredibly expensive, because it’s
rare,” Michelle Francl, a chemist at Bryn Mawr College who studies the
science of food, tells National Geographic’s Jessica Taylor Price.
“There’s no way it’s in your ice cream.”
In the early 20th century, castoreum began appearing in some foods to
add a vanilla-raspberry flavor. But its use had fallen by 1987, when the
U.S. consumed about 250 pounds of castoreum per year, according to Vice.
Since then, its use has “decreased significantly,” as the Flavor Extract
Manufacturers’ Association told the publication. Perhaps the final
strike against popular use of castoreum was that products using it as
flavoring could not be certified as kosher.
Now, the substance is mostly found in niche foods such as a Swedish
liquor. Instead, about 99 percent of the world’s vanilla comes from
synthetic sources such as vanillin, a cheaper and less labor-intensive
alternative to harvesting vanilla beans or castoreum.
So, while the Food and Drug Administration does list castoreum as safe
to eat, it’s unlikely you’ll ever have to worry about ingesting beaver
butt goo by accident.
And then...