Love Affair with Vanilla

Most commercial production of vanilla is in Madagascar, Mexico and Tahiti. As the world warms, cyclones and storms in these regions are growing stronger, toppling the orchid blossoms and vanilla beans before they get a chance to fully mature. In 2017 a Category 4 cyclone devastated an estimated 30% of the vanilla vines in Madagascar, which produces 80% of the vanilla used around the globe. As a result, the price of vanilla bean pods surged to nearly $300 a pound. The increasingly erratic weather, along with pressure to cut the forests that harbor the orchids, is particularly worrisome for farmers who rely on this crop and wait up to four years for a single orchid to blossom.

To understand how much we could lose if real vanilla disappears, you have to understand the history.  We wouldn’t have vanilla ice cream, perfumes or desserts without a 12-year-old named Edmond Albius. The man who enslaved him was a botanist who fussed and fumed over his vanilla orchids, which simply would not bloom. At the time, only bees were known to pollinate vanilla flowers.

In 1841 he developed the technique — flattening the anther sac and the stigma of the orchid blossom with his finger and thumb — that is still used all over the world to pollinate vanilla orchids manually and produce large quantities of the extract. This discovery made vanilla far easier to farm commercially and helped turn vanilla into the essential, pervasive spice it is today.

Farmers also figured out that when you bend vanilla vines, which grow about 30 to 50 feet tall, and keep them low, they produce more flowers. But the orchids’ bloom is brief: Morning sees them unfurl in wide display, but by noon, the flower closes, making the window for hand pollination very narrow.

Then for each pollinated blossom, it takes nearly a year to fully grow and dry the beans. When the pods shrivel and become supple, they turn dark brown and give off a rich aroma.

Farmers today grow about 4.4 million pounds of dried vanilla beans annually, and it takes about 300 hand-pollinated orchid blossoms to produce just one pound.  They don’t cultivate them indoors because of the extremely high costs of providing enough space, heat, indirect sunlight and humidity for the vines, which grow draped on trees and shrubs and extend to upwards of 100 feet, flourishing under the soft, dappled light that pokes through a tree canopy.

Because the production of real vanilla is so labor intensive, scientists have experimented with creating substitutes. But many of these substitutes are terrible for the environment, creating large amounts of wastewater.

One vanilla substitute is castoreum — a secretion from beavers that use it to stake their claims and mark their territory. Castoreum extract possesses a warm, sweet odor and may be used as a stand-in for vanilla extract in many dairy products and baked goods, but mostly now is used for perfumes and colognes.

When I cook or make gifts for friends using vanilla beans, my fingertips stay oiled with the scent of vanilla beans and the tiniest whiff of orchids for days. The scent creates a kind of nostalgia of having sweets cooked up for me at various family gatherings.

It would be a pity to lose these soothing, warm sensations to something chemically made and one-dimensional while the real deal gets relegated to the memory bins of an older generation.