Forget Plain Vanilla: You'll Never See The World's Favorite Flavor the Same Way Again

Today, 'vanilla' often means boring, and yet the edible seedpod of this Central American orchid is one of the most expensive spices in the world, not to mention one of the most popular flavors globally. So how did this coveted bean get such a ho-hum reputation? Listen in this episode as Gastropod travels to vanilla's homeland in the highlands of Veracruz, Mexico, to investigate. It's a tale of botanical piracy, beaver butts, and ice-cream barges, in which an ingenious enslaved tween and the product of pulp paper waste combine to transform vanilla from a complex and sophisticated elite treat into the single-note synonym for dull. Plus, we meet the thrilling alternative vanillas we're all missing out on, and serve up the recipe for a vanilla tasting party that's guaranteed to make you fall back in love with the world's favorite flavor. You'll never see vanilla as plain again! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Speaker 00

  I like vanilla and boring. I like very plain things. Vanilla's perfect.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Your life isn't that simple, Andre. And maybe that's what you couldn't handle. Maybe that's why you ran off to someone so basic. She makes vanilla seem spicy. You think vanilla is dull?

• 0:16Speaker 00

  I think vanilla's playing a little bit safe. You know that I love you.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 0:22Speaker 00

  I know that you love me too.

• 0:26Speaker 00

  But we both know that our marriage has gotten a little... vanilla.

• 0:33Cynthia Graber?

  Vanilla just can't get a break, huh? Anything boring, or bland, or basic. It's all just plain vanilla.

• 0:39Nicola Twilley?

  And yet, vanilla is one of the most popular flavors in the world. It's the most popular flavor for ice cream. It's clearly beloved. So what gives?

• 0:49Cynthia Graber?

  That's just what we're going to find out this episode. This is indeed Gastropod, the podcast that looks at food through the lens of science and history. I'm Cynthia Graber.

• 0:56Nicola Twilley?

  And I'm Nicola Twilley. And this episode, we've got the story of how one of the world's most expensive and rare spices became utterly ubiquitous.

• 1:06Cynthia Graber?

  And how we might be missing out on some of vanilla's most exciting flavors as a result. This episode was supported in part by the Alfred Peace Loan Foundation for the Public Understanding of Science, Technology, and Economics. Gastropod is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network in partnership with Eater.

• 1:23Speaker 04

  Support for the show comes from Google Gemini. You know that moment when curiosity strikes? You're exploring a new city with the family, and a sculpture catches your daughter's eye. What is that? Who made it? With Gemini, you can snap a picture and get a fully interactive breakdown of its history, architecture, and even hidden secrets. Gemini is built for moments like that. Whether you're learning something new, solving a problem, or looking for your next favorite thing, Google Gemini is here to help. Download Gemini, Google's AI app, or visit gemini.google.com to learn more.

• 2:03Speaker 05

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• 2:37Speaker 06

  So vanilla, is it a spice? It's actually a very good question. I say yes.

• 2:42Cynthia Graber?

  Eric Jennings is a historian at the University of Toronto and is the author of the book Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean.

• 2:48Nicola Twilley?

  It's weird. When I add cinnamon or cardamom to something I'm baking, I do think of them as spices. But when I add a few drops of vanilla extract, I don't think of it as a spice. And I certainly don't think of it as a rare and precious thing.

• 3:02Speaker 06

  One way of defining it that I think is sort of interesting is that it's probably the most expensive spice along with saffron and probably the most expensive crop to produce per gram. But it's not just a food. It's also a perfume, a fragrance. So it's many things wrapped in one.

• 3:20Cynthia Graber?

  Vanilla is also a flower, and not just any flower. It's in the same family as some of the most finicky and expensive flowers around.

• 3:27Speaker 07

  It's an orchid. It's an orchid. And it's the most commercially important orchid.

• 3:32Nicola Twilley?

  Miguel Angel Lozano Rodriguez is a researcher at the University of Veracruz in Mexico. His family also owns a farm in the region, mostly growing coffee and sugarcane and lemons. But he took us to visit where he grows vanilla as part of a research institute at the university.

• 3:49Cynthia Graber?

  Veracruz is on the east coast of Mexico, on the Gulf of Mexico. It's an incredibly lush tropical region. It's super green and also very mountainous with long winding roads pitted with giant potholes. It was unsurprisingly hot and humid when we visited, and we did also get caught in the occasional downpour. All of that makes it perfect for growing vanilla. And in fact, the region is the center of Mexico's vanilla production.

• 4:11Nicola Twilley?

  Heat, humidity, and extremely dubious roads aside, we were excited because as normcore as vanilla seems, neither of us had ever seen a vanilla plant in real life. I truly didn't know what to expect. A fragrant forest?

• 4:27Cynthia Graber?

  A field of creamy flowers? All was about to be revealed.

• 4:35Speaker 07

  Here, we can see what the vanilla plant looks like. The vanilla plant is a climbing plant. It's a vine.

• 4:41Cynthia Graber?

  We touched the vine to see what it feels like. It's thick and tough and kind of rubbery, and it can grow up to about 100 feet long. In the wild, they climb and attach themselves to trees like palm and cacao using aerial roots. At Miguel's farm, they're trained onto a wooden trellis. He told us he grows two different species.

• 5:00Speaker 07

  There's vanilla all over the world, but only the vanilla species that grows in the Americas produce aromatic fruits.

• 5:07Cynthia Graber?

  All orchids, all 26,000 different species of orchids in the world, they all produce seeds, mostly in seed pods. There are 120 different species of vanilla orchids, and they all produce pods, too. The name vanilla actually comes from the Spanish for little sheath or pod. As Miguel said, those aromatic seed pod-producing vanilla orchids are all originally from the Americas, from southern Mexico, Central America, and the northern part of South America. For most of human history, if you wanted to taste vanilla, that's where you had to go. And that's why we went there, to go back to vanilla's origins. Miguel told us there are 30 American vanilla orchids that produce aromatic fruits or pods, but only three of them produce the aromatic pods

• 5:50Cynthia Graber?

  that we think of and use as vanilla today. And these days, those three species are grown all over the world.

• 5:56Speaker 08

  La principal especie de cultivo es Vanilla planifolia. The main species is Vanilla planifolia. That's the species that's widespread throughout the world. It's in the Indian Ocean, it's in Asia, it's all over. From Mexico to South America to Brazil, there is Vanilla planifolia. It's the most important.

• 6:17Speaker 07

  Yes, the main cultivated species is Vanilla planifolia. The second is Vanilla pompona. There is a third one called Vanilla tahitensis, but that's a hybrid. It's a hybrid of two Mexican species.

• 6:29Nicola Twilley?

  That first voice, that's Miguel's colleague, Aracely Perez Silva. She's a professor at the National Technological Institute of Mexico and Oaxaca, and she's also a vanilla researcher.

• 6:40Cynthia Graber?

  If you buy a pod in the grocery store or if you buy vanilla extract, it's basically all made from planifolia. Pompona originally grew further south in Central and South America, and it's used in food and also perfume. And tahitensis, nobody knows exactly what wild vanilla orchids it came from originally, but it's mostly grown in the Pacific today, and it's mostly used in perfume.

• 6:59Nicola Twilley?

  Each of these species is recognizably vanilla, but they are different. For one, their flowers smell really different.

• 7:07Cynthia Graber?

  We saw those flowers at Miguel's farm, and one of the most noticeable things about them is that they don't smell anything like vanilla.

• 7:18Speaker 07

  In the case of vanilla planifolia, the aroma is different. We say that the aroma smells like grass, like a plant, like green. And that's the scent that attracts the natural pollinator.

• 7:28Nicola Twilley?

  Miguel showed us a flower growing on one of the planifolia vines. It was not super spectacular, if I'm being honest. Just a little creamy green-colored orchid flower. But we sniffed. Planifolia doesn't smell. It's like a peppery green or a...

• 7:46Cynthia Graber?

  I actually think it's lovely. It's very light, but it's more than just the leaves. Like, it has a very lovely, light, slightly floral scent. But yes, green.

• 7:58Speaker 07

  Although for us, that aroma isn't as perceptible as the aroma of a rose or a jasmine. For bees, the flowers have fragrances and aromatic compounds that attract them. These serve as a signal for them to identify a flower.

• 8:11Cynthia Graber?

  The pompona orchid flower is significantly larger and a little yellower, a little more trumpet-shaped, and a lot stronger smelling.

• 8:19Nicola Twilley?

  Oh, my gosh, it smells like gum. It smells exactly like chewing gum. It's like it's spearmint chewing gum. This was so, so weird. Sniffing a vanilla orchid and having it smell of spearmint instead of vanilla. But of course, the vanilla flavor is all in the pod.

• 8:39Cynthia Graber?

  And the pods have different flavors, too. A pompona pod does not taste exactly like a planifolia pod. Planifolia is the most common today because it tends to have the highest percentage of the chemical that makes vanilla particularly vanelly.

• 8:52Nicola Twilley?

  Typically, vanilla titensis and vanilla pompona have a little less of that pure vanilla note and a little more of other flavors and aromas.

• 9:01Speaker 08

  Titensis and vanilla pompona. Titensis and vanilla pompona are characterized by the presence of anise compounds. That's what dominates in the species.

• 9:10Cynthia Graber?

  But actually, the amount of vanilla or anise compounds, or even the percentage of the other hundreds of aromatic compounds in a vanilla bean, this all changes depending on how and where the bean is grown and treated.

• 9:23Speaker 08

  The terroir has a lot to do with the aromatic potential. Climatic conditions, agricultural management, it all has a super important effect on the final aroma of the product.

• 9:34Speaker 07

  It's like wine. If the producer processes it in a certain way, the aroma changes. If it's from a certain region, it can also change. So everyone has their own vanilla aroma.

• 9:45Cynthia Graber?

  This question of terroir is why you sometimes get a choice between vanilla from Madagascar or Sumatra, or even Papua New Guinea in the store. They're the same species, planifolia, just grown in different places. According to vanilla connoisseurs, the Madagascan beans are very traditionally vanilla flavored. The Sumatran are typically more woody and smoky, and the Papua New Guinea ones are sweeter and more floral. But like Miguel and Aracely say, that also depends on how the beans are grown and processed.

• 10:10Nicola Twilley?

  Mexican vanilla is known for being a little more complex, a little spicier, and more sophisticated than the Madagascan beans, which I guess is as it should be because that's obviously the OG vanilla.

• 10:23Cynthia Graber?

  Mesoamerica is where the story of vanilla begins.

• 10:29Speaker 07

  It's been used since pre-Hispanic times, not only in Mexico, but in all the cultures of the American continent. They each have their own vanilla varieties and have used them to send their clothes, to make necklaces.

• 10:41Nicola Twilley?

  In what's now Veracruz, the Totinac people are considered to be the first to really intentionally cultivate vanilla, going back at least as far as the 1100s. But earlier cultures had already been enjoying it for centuries.

• 10:53Cynthia Graber?

  The Mayans, for example, traditionally used it to flavor their chocolate drink. That's something the Aztecs copied.

• 10:58Speaker 09

  So that important was vanilla back then. That, you know, Moctezuma, the great leader in Mexico City, let's call it Mexico City, back then was Tenochtitlan. He used to claim vanilla as a tribute. You know, back then they used to make chocolate, you know, cacao, vanilla and corn into a drink that only the warriors and the high leaders used to drink only.

• 11:23Cynthia Graber?

  Luis Mara is a vanilla farmer in Veracruz, and he's incredibly proud of the long history of vanilla in the region.

• 11:29Nicola Twilley?

  That's the same feeling that motivated Rebecca Alicia Manchaca Garcia, who directs the vanilla research at the University of Veracruz to devote her entire 30-year career to this particular orchid and its flavorful fruit. She grew up in the region, and she remembers vanilla-flavored shaved ice as a huge treat. A mi me conquistó.

• 11:51Speaker 10

  I was won over, so I started asking, what is that? What are those pots? And I started to get interested.

• 11:59Cynthia Graber?

  There aren't a lot of written records of how vanilla was used in the region, and the beans themselves didn't leave many traces at archaeological sites. The earliest written account of vanilla was in a catalog of herbal remedies. It was written in 1552 by an indigenous Nahuatl who had converted to Catholicism and translated Nahuatl knowledge into Latin.

• 12:16Speaker 10

  Está reportado. It's reported in the Vadiano Codex that it was used as a medical plant for travelers, for headaches, to heal infected wounds, to speed up childbirth.

• 12:28Nicola Twilley?

  The Codex was, of course, written after the Spanish conquistadors arrived, and unlike, say, the tomato, which, as regular listeners will know, took a while to catch on in Europe. Vanilla was an instant hit with Europeans, at least among those who were lucky enough to get a hold of it.

• 12:46Speaker 06

  By the 18th century, it is known as an elite fragrance and flavor used by the nobility and the rising middle class in port cities, for instance.

• 12:56Cynthia Graber?

  The first Europeans who were wealthy enough to try vanilla, they copied the Aztec rulers and elites.

• 13:01Speaker 06

  It would have involved at first a cold drink, really resembling the Aztec chocolatier, and then gradually over time it gets warmed.

• 13:09Nicola Twilley?

  Like the Totonacs and Mayans, wealthy Europeans also used vanilla as a scent. Marie Antoinette apparently perfumed her garments with vanilla at Versailles. And it was so valuable that a Spanish king presented the pope at the time with a special gift of vanilla pods in a gold casket.

• 13:27Cynthia Graber?

  Clearly vanilla was incredibly expensive. And also, imagine a vanilla pod. It's so small and light. It was pretty easy to steal.

• 13:34Speaker 06

  So it's the ideal thing to smuggle and not declare it customs. It's not just piracy, though. There's also all sorts of other skullduggery, right? There's, there's fraud. There's, there's theft at the point of harvest, which has been the bane of vanilla producers for centuries, right? And this is true for all groups. Totonoc people complain about it. Malagasi cultivators complain about it. It is still true today.

• 13:56Nicola Twilley?

  Given how valuable vanilla was, it's not surprising that Europeans wanted to go beyond just importing vanilla and instead get control at the source.

• 14:06Speaker 06

  People in various empires describing how this is a luxury crop and it can be very lucrative. And wouldn't it be great if we could produce it just like the Spaniards do in New Spain?

• 14:16Cynthia Graber?

  But there were some problems. In theory, people could just get some seeds from the pod and plant them. That'd be logical. But it turns out that's really, really difficult to do, in part because the seeds are so tiny.

• 14:28Speaker 10

  The seeds are microscopic. They are called seed powder.

• 14:33Nicola Twilley?

  They are among the smallest seeds that exist. Fortunately, you can also get vanilla to grow from cuttings. You take a piece of an existing vanilla vine and you can grow a whole other plant that's a clone of the original.

• 14:46Speaker 06

  But the problem is that they never bear fruit. They'll even, you know, grow and thrive seemingly. They'll flower, but nothing ever happens after that.

• 14:54Cynthia Graber?

  And the reason for that is that the different species of vanilla orchids in the Americas each depended on their own particular local pollinator. With most plants, when they're taken out of their native habitat, some other local bee or bug would fill the pollination gap. But in vanilla's case, when they moved overseas, that never happened. Nothing filled the niche. And so while Europeans were able to plant vanilla orchid vines all over the world, the flowers basically never produced any fruit.

• 15:19Nicola Twilley?

  Which was extremely frustrating. And so things remained in the vanilla-verse for quite a while, until a botanically-minded tween living on a far-flung island in the Indian Ocean came up with a solution. We've got that story next after a quick break.

• 15:35Speaker 11

  Are you tired of hearing about business, tech, and finance from the bros? We are the Tiger Sisters, a top business podcast with the Vox Media Podcast Network. Tiger Sisters releases every Monday, and we decode money, power, and love. And who doesn't love all those things? We are the internet's Wall Street and Silicon Valley big sisters. Tune in every Monday for late-night sister talk meets boardroom strategy. Check out Tiger Sisters on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Tiger fam.

• 16:07Speaker 12

  Hey, y'all. It's Ested from [email protected]. We know that you have big questions about the world, and so do we. At Vox, we focus on covering the things that matter in your life and the things that make you curious, whether that's the big politics questions of the day, climate solutions that might actually work, or hopeful news in cancer or Alzheimer's research. We believe that journalism made for the everyday curious person can make a difference in making a better world. And if that sounds like something you want to be a part of, Vox now has a brand-new app, and it brings all of our journalism together in one place. Go to vox.com/app to download today.

• 16:49Speaker 12

  We're just days away from the midterm elections, which means I only really have one question.

• 16:56Speaker 13

  Hi, it's Jessica.

• 16:58Speaker 12

  Yeah, and I'm Al. We're from the Culinary Union. How are the issues that we've been tracking all year actually playing out on the ground?

• 17:06Speaker 13

  The reason why we're out here, we're actually out here canvassing for Aaron Ford and Mr. Horstberg. I'm not sure if you've heard of them. Oh, yeah, I'm voting for them. Amen.

• 17:15Speaker 12

  A few weeks ago, I headed west to Nevada, where the entire midterms can basically be summed up in just three words: the Trump slump.

• 17:25Speaker 14

  Even with our great union jobs that we had, we struggled. That never happened before. And it's because of these politicians what they're doing to us. The Trump slump.

• 17:38Speaker 12

  This week on America Actually, midterms canvassing with the Las Vegas Culinary Union.

• 17:43Speaker 13

  How many more days until Election Day?

• 17:46Speaker 12

  Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 17:51Cynthia Graber?

  The tale of how people figured out how to get a pod from their vanilla orchids without the right bee starts with a man named Charles Moret. He was a botanist living in Belgium in the early 1800s.

• 18:01Speaker 06

  But he's actually a typical man of science of his era, which is to say he's really touched on just about every discipline, right? He's worked on the reproduction of plants, but he's also interested in fossils. He's interested in maps. He's interested in just about every dimension of science.

• 18:15Cynthia Graber?

  At the time, Europe was in the grip of Orchid Fever, and so Charles turned his attention to them.

• 18:20Speaker 06

  As far as we can tell, he was able to achieve manual pollination of other kinds of orchids.

• 18:25Cynthia Graber?

  Charles then got a hold of a cutting of a vanilla vine from a botanical garden in Antwerp, and he started growing it in a greenhouse in Liège. He experimented on it. He tried out the techniques he'd been able to apply to non-vanilla orchids.

• 18:37Speaker 06

  And lo and behold, nine months later, because, yes, just like humans, vanilla takes nine months to grow and mature, nine months later, he has the same number of fruit as he did flowers. And so the method was a success.

• 18:50Cynthia Graber?

  Now, you might be thinking, wait a minute. Charles Moret does not sound like a tween, and Liège is not in the Indian Ocean. And you're right.

• 18:59Nicola Twilley?

  Charles does not get the credit for figuring out how to hand pollinate vanilla, even though he did it.

• 19:05Cynthia Graber?

  There's a few reasons for that.

• 19:06Speaker 06

  There's many problems, one of which is he's achieved this in sort of laboratory conditions in a greenhouse. The other is that he's extremely mysterious about what he did. We don't actually, to this day, know exactly what Charles Morehin's method was.

• 19:19Nicola Twilley?

  He wrote down some very vague descriptions about orchid lady parts and what should be done to them.

• 19:24Speaker 06

  They're really quite disturbing in a way. But anyway, it doesn't bring us any closer to knowing what he actually did to the orchids.

• 19:31Cynthia Graber?

  Charles was deliberately cagey about his process because he wanted to monetize it. He applied to the Belgian government, but academics had to get special permission to monetize their work, and the government didn't seem too interested. He mailed us pods around the world, trying to drum up excitement, but that didn't work either.

• 19:47Nicola Twilley?

  His big dream was to set up vanilla production at scale in greenhouses across Belgium. And honestly, even with his pollination breakthrough, that would not have worked out. Growing vanilla in greenhouses in northern Europe is not a viable business model even today.

• 20:02Cynthia Graber?

  Charles seems to have moved on to other projects and let his vanilla successes slide. Meanwhile, thousands of miles away, on a small island at the time called Bourbon, off the coast of Madagascar, off the coast of Africa, a 12-year-old enslaved African named Edmund was making discoveries of his own.

• 20:18Speaker 06

  What do we know about this enslaved 12-year-old? We know what we do because others have written about him. He was non-literate.

• 20:26Cynthia Graber?

  That in itself isn't super surprising. He was an enslaved child living on a plantation on an island.

• 20:31Nicola Twilley?

  At the time, Bourbon, which is a mountainous, lush, tropical island, was a French colony. It's still part of France today, although it's been renamed Réunion. And in the 1830s and 40s, it was still being run as a plantation economy. Wealthy Frenchmen owned large plantations, growing tropical crops like cacao and sugarcane.

• 20:52Nicola Twilley?

  With enslaved Africans doing the hard labor in the fields.

• 20:55Cynthia Graber?

  Some of those enslaved Africans were what was called specialized slaves. They might have been skilled in areas like baking or fishing, or they might have acted as translators for visiting missionaries. Edmund seems to have been a specialist in plants.

• 21:07Speaker 06

  Bélier Beaumont, who is his de facto owner, describes him as an expert botanist who knew the Latin names for plants.

• 21:15Nicola Twilley?

  Edmund clearly knew a lot about plants, including how to pollinate them.

• 21:21Speaker 06

  And so, a lot like Charles Moret, he was able to apply that knowledge gleaned from other examples onto vanilla.

• 21:28Cynthia Graber?

  In 1841, the way the story goes, Fariaul Bélier Beaumont went out for a walk in his garden, and he apparently found a pod on one of his vanilla plants.

• 21:36Speaker 06

  And he asked Edmund, "Well, how did this come about?"

• 21:39Nicola Twilley?

  Was this some kind of miraculous, spontaneous vanilla reproduction?

• 21:44Speaker 06

  And Edmund said, "No, no, I did this. I pollinated this some months ago." And Bélier Beaumont didn't believe him. And then the next morning, he sees another, and he asks him again. And that is when, when asked, Edmund was able to reproduce the method, show him exactly how he did it. With this little twig, he was able to push back the membrane that separates the male and the female part of the orchid, putting them into dialogue. So with just the right deft touch, he put the two parts together, and lo and behold, a pod later appeared.

• 22:11Cynthia Graber?

  It's actually quite hard to do this, to get the male and female parts of the vanilla orchid flower to join up. We should know because we watched Miguel doing just this on his family farm in Mexico.

• 22:20Nicola Twilley?

  Miguel had armed himself with a special pollination wand, aka the thorn from an agave. It was a couple of inches long, like a thin, pointy toothpick.

• 22:30Cynthia Graber?

  To get at the orchid's male and female parts, the first thing Miguel had to do was kind of peel away most of the orchid's petals and leave just one of them. It's a little thicker than the others, and at the top of it, it has a little, almost tube that's covered with a tiny piece of the flower, like a veil.

• 22:47Speaker 07

  In order to carry out artificial pollination, what we have to do is remove this veil to expose the reproductive structures. So what I'm going to do is break the veil to expose the reproductive structures that are in here.

• 23:01Nicola Twilley?

  Every single vanilla flower has both male and female parts in it. They're just kept separate by other plant parts, so it can't self-pollinate. The male part is at the top, and you kind of have to lift up a flap to get at it.

• 23:14Speaker 15

  Entonces aquí lo que voy a hacer de manera muy lenta es exponer todas estas partes.

• 23:19Speaker 07

  So, what I'm going to do here, very slowly, is expose all these parts. Here, at the top, is the vanilla pollen. And down here, this structure that looks like a small fold is called the rostelum. The rostelum is a layer of tissue that prevents the pollen from coming into contact with the female part. Now, I'm going to remove the pollen so you can see it.

• 23:41Nicola Twilley?

  After he touched the thorn to the flower part, you could see a tiny, little mustardy-yellow blob on the end of the agave thorn.

• 23:48Speaker 15

  Y aquí está. Ese es el pollen.

• 23:50Speaker 07

  And here it is. That's the pollen. Naturally, what would happen is that the bee would enter, and when it leaves, it picks up this pollen on its back and carries it with it until it visits another flower. So, let's pretend we are the bee visiting another flower.

• 24:06Nicola Twilley?

  We made the appropriate buzzing sounds and wandered over to another willing flower. Once again, Miguel peeled away the petals to expose that thicker, tube-like part with the reproductive organs on it. And then this time, he lifted a different flap, a little lower down the tube thing than the male part.

• 24:24Speaker 15

  Y aquí, no sé si logran apreciar, está este tejido.

• 24:27Speaker 07

  And here, I don't know if you can see this tissue. It's the rostelum. And below the rostelum is the stigma, which is the female part. So what I'm going to do is lift it with the same thorn and deposit the pollen. And that's it. It's pollinated.

• 24:44Nicola Twilley?

  I like how you give it a little stroke down.

• 24:47Speaker 07

  Sí. Yes, to ensure that the pollen is sealed with the rostelum.

• 24:51Nicola Twilley?

  Wow. It's pretty fiddly. It's delicate.

• 24:54Speaker 07

  Sí. Yes, of course, I'm doing it slowly so you can see. But the producers do this on the same flower, so it's very fast.

• 25:01Speaker 15

  Es muy rápido.

• 25:02Nicola Twilley?

  In nature, this is just what would happen with a little stingless bee taking the place of Miguel and the agave thorn. But in a commercial vanilla field, as Miguel said, growers pollinate each flower with its own pollen, human-assisted self-pollination. What Miguel was showing us is essentially Edmund's method, the way he described doing it nearly 200 years ago. It's still the way it's done today.

• 25:25Cynthia Graber?

  Of course, we wanted to have a go ourselves. Although, having seen Miguel do it, I was not confident that I had what it took to be a successful vanilla matchmaker.

• 25:40Speaker 07

  Pollination, especially at the beginning, is very much about practice. It's about practicing and practicing because it's not easy. Once people know how to pollinate, the success rate goes up to 90% to 100%. When we are learning, it may be around 50/50.

• 25:57Cynthia Graber?

  So our expectations weren't too high. Miguel headed over to another flower and handed Nikki the agave thorn.

• 26:02Nicola Twilley?

  I can see the structure, so I'm trying to pull this down. Yes?

• 26:06Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 26:07Nicola Twilley?

  OK.

• 26:08Speaker 07

  If you want, you can remove these petals.

• 26:10Nicola Twilley?

  I can see the pollen. Oh, my god.

• 26:14Nicola Twilley?

  OK, and now I want to grab the pollen.

• 26:16Speaker 07

  Exactly, just like that.

• 26:20Nicola Twilley?

  Excuse my French. I was doing so well.

• 26:22Cynthia Graber?

  I did eventually get the pollen on the thorn, which was very exciting.

• 26:27Nicola Twilley?

  And so now I'm going to try and pollinate. Wow, this is harder than it looks, Cynthia. OK, so now I need to lift this up.

• 26:35Speaker 07

  Exactly.

• 26:36Nicola Twilley?

  And tuck this under. OK, well, that was going great until it wasn't, basically.

• 26:46Speaker 07

  But it is your first time.

• 26:47Nicola Twilley?

  Thank you.

• 26:49Cynthia Graber?

  I gave it a try on Luis's farm, and he had me do it without the agave thorn, just with my finger and fingernail.

• 26:54Nicola Twilley?

  OK, so then I'm going to push this up here.

• 26:56Speaker 07

  Yeah, the little membrane right here, the little thing right here.

• 27:00Nicola Twilley?

  Underneath here?

• 27:01Speaker 07

  Lift it.

• 27:02Nicola Twilley?

  OK, oh, there we go.

• 27:03Speaker 07

  All the way up, huh? Yeah, right here, right there. And then use your finger. Right there, push it together.

• 27:12Nicola Twilley?

  And then just push it together like that?

• 27:13Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 27:14Nicola Twilley?

  Oh, this is different.

• 27:14Cynthia Graber?

  It was a slightly different technique than the one Miguel had showed us. But this also was not easy, and Luis needed to help me seal up the flower so that the pollen actually stayed inside where it was supposed to.

• 27:24Speaker 07

  And imagine you have to do, like, 3,000 flowers yourself.

• 27:29Speaker 06

  You have to be quick.

• 27:30Nicola Twilley?

  Having tried this ourselves, we had a whole new respect for Edmund for coming up with it. And frankly, it took him a while to teach others how to do his magical orchid pollination trick.

• 27:41Cynthia Graber?

  His owner sent him out to teach all the local landowners how to pollinate their vanilla orchids, and eventually it did catch on. Within a few decades, Réunion was the largest vanilla producer in the world, larger even than Mexico.

• 27:52Nicola Twilley?

  Edmund is known as the father of the world vanilla industry today, but his breakthrough didn't lead to fame and riches for him.

• 28:00Cynthia Graber?

  His owner didn't free him. That was something that sometimes owners did when their slaves were particularly helpful, like Edmund was. Instead, he wasn't freed until slavery itself was abolished seven years later. He died in relative poverty, even though he was the one who cracked the vanilla code.

• 28:14Speaker 06

  He really unleashes the globalization of vanilla. Vanilla requires some conditions, right? It can't grow in areas where there's frost at night. It does, however, require some cool consecutive evenings to flower. And so, once vanilla was untethered from its insect pollinators, it could really grow in any of those areas that met those natural conditions.

• 28:36Nicola Twilley?

  Vanilla plantations sprang up on Tahiti and Madagascar and other Indian Ocean islands like the Seychelles.

• 28:43Cynthia Graber?

  Unsurprisingly, the price of vanilla fell. It was cut in half, and so more and more people started using it.

• 28:48Speaker 06

  By the 19th century, sort of, you know, everyday women and men are starting to encounter vanilla for the first time.

• 28:54Nicola Twilley?

  Particularly in France, where vanilla had always been popular with the elites. But post-Edmund's Pollination Revolution, vanilla started popping up in recipes aimed squarely at the middle classes. There were more mentions of vanilla than pork in one 1867 French recipe book. Vanilla sauces, a vanilla souffle, a vanilla tartlets, and vanilla ice cream.

• 29:18Cynthia Graber?

  The vanilla ice cream craze spread to the US, and that obsession actually took root before the manual pollination discovery, and it has to do with one of America's founding fathers.

• 29:27Speaker 06

  How does this start? Well, by all accounts, it's with Thomas Jefferson in 1780s Paris. And it is there that he sees and tastes vanilla ice cream for the first time, and he clearly falls in love with it. He's totally under vanilla's charm. And so he starts, upon his return to Philadelphia, going into a kind of withdrawal, for lack of a better word. And he writes letters asking people to arrange shipment of vanilla sticks for him in Philadelphia from France.

• 29:54Nicola Twilley?

  Back when Jefferson was importing vanilla and introducing his fellow Americans to the joys of vanilla ice cream, vanilla was still very much an elite flavor. But again, after the 1850s, once the price of vanilla fell, thanks to Edmund's pollination breakthrough, Jefferson's favorite dessert became much more accessible.

• 30:14Cynthia Graber?

  And the price also fell further because people started making vanilla extract. They were soaking the vanilla pods in booze. That had long been known as a way to capture flavors and scents, but it also made vanilla even cheaper.

• 30:25Speaker 06

  And vanilla extract starts going into everything, and you need relatively little vanilla to produce the extract, which is mostly water and alcohol.

• 30:31Nicola Twilley?

  All of this combined to make vanilla just much more common. Coca-Cola had vanilla extract in it. We've made an episode all about Coke. It was introduced in the 1890s and was already hugely popular by the early 1900s.

• 30:45Cynthia Graber?

  So a lot of Americans were tasting a little vanilla in their Coke, but they were also most definitely enjoying it in their ice cream.

• 30:51Speaker 06

  Vanilla ice cream becomes the quintessential American flavor, right? There's evidence that one in two ice creams in the early 20th century are vanilla flavored.

• 30:58Cynthia Graber?

  The military was apparently so vanilla ice cream obsessed that during World War II, there was even an ice cream making barge that was deployed to the South Pacific to make that cold, sweet vanilla treat for the soldiers there.

• 31:09Speaker 06

  There's an anecdote of a ship going down and of US servicemen basically raiding the freezers to make sure they got some vanilla ice cream before the thing went down. That may be apocryphal, but it's oft repeated. And there's an example of an ad from Life magazine that I provide in the book of GIs being finally freed from POW camps in Western Europe after the Allied landings in Normandy, and of their first desire being for vanilla ice cream. It is the sort of quintessential thing that they've been missing all of this time, or at least it becomes a kind of shorthand for home and for what they've been missing.

• 31:44Nicola Twilley?

  So vanilla was clearly popular amongst the rank and file, which makes it seem as though vanilla production must have boomed. And it had, but that's relative, because a little vanilla goes a long way, especially in extract form. Vanilla production had definitely expanded since the days of natural pollination in Mexico, but it was still pretty tiny and extremely labor intensive.

• 32:08Cynthia Graber?

  It still is. Vanilla is produced basically the same way today that it was a century ago.

• 32:12Speaker 09

  The whole process start when you pollinate the orchid, and the orchid only opens half a day. And you have to be here 6 o'clock in the morning all the way through noon and pollinate as much orchids as you can.

• 32:27Cynthia Graber?

  Even in Mexico, after Edmund's discovery, they stopped relying on bees to do the pollination and turned to hand pollinating because you get a far more reliable yield that way. Experts are obviously quicker than we were, but it takes a while to do thousands of plants.

• 32:40Nicola Twilley?

  You do that every day for the two-month flowering season, and then you have to wait nine months for the pods to ripen. You just can't rush vanilla.

• 32:49Cynthia Graber?

  But those mature pods the growers harvest still don't really taste or smell like anything. They're not ready. They have to be processed.

• 32:55Speaker 06

  Vanilla gets prepared in a really intense way, right? There's a short boiling phase, there's a blanketing phase, there's a sun drying phase.

• 33:04Nicola Twilley?

  You have to boil the pods to stop them from continuing to ripen. That's the signal to the enzymes in the pod to start producing flavor molecules.

• 33:12Cynthia Graber?

  In the blanket phase, the enzymes are getting to work. In the heat under the blankets, they continue to produce and develop all the vanilla flavors we love. And then on to the sun drying phase to get rid of a bunch of moisture and concentrate the flavor.

• 33:24Speaker 09

  Starting from then, every day is more intense. I mean, when we're dehydrating vanilla, it's crazy. It's funny, I'll tell you what. In the three-month period of the vanilla dehydration process, I smell like vanilla like 24 hours.

• 33:42Cynthia Graber?

  Luis told us that at some point over that three-month drying phase, he ran into a friend at the store.

• 33:46Speaker 09

  He was like, "Oh, man, I just want to eat you." And I started laughing so hard. I was like, stay away from me, man.

• 33:53Nicola Twilley?

  Luis's dad originally taught him how to process vanilla. It had taken him years to perfect the method that he passed along. And Luis still remembers his first time doing it solo.

• 34:03Speaker 09

  I was so nervous. I was like, what am I doing? Am I doing the right thing? Am I gonna, am I gonna lose this lot of vanilla? But that's always there. That's always it. Every day you're thinking and you go to bed and you're like, is my vanilla be doing OK?

• 34:17Cynthia Graber?

  There's a lot that can go wrong in all of these stages. At the end of it all, you want just the perfect pod with the right aromas and just the right amount of moisture still in it.

• 34:25Speaker 06

  It has to be just supple enough. If it's too dry, it's not good. If it's too soft, it's gonna mildew. So there's a lot of work that goes into it and a lot of expertise. And if you look online, there's wildly different temperatures and durations for this.

• 34:40Cynthia Graber?

  And then at the end, you have a cured dark brown or black leathery vanilla scented seed filled pod.

• 34:46Nicola Twilley?

  All of this adds up to make vanilla expensive. Even after Edmund's discovery meant that vanilla production could spread around the world, that may have democratized access to vanilla flavor and vanilla extract. But vanilla and vanilla pods themselves never became cheap. There's too much work and too much risk.

• 35:05Cynthia Graber?

  But today you can buy a really cheap synthetic version of vanilla in the store. What is this and is the real thing still worth it? That's coming up after the break.

• 35:15Speaker 16

  I'm Bridget Reed.

• 35:16Speaker 17

  And I'm James Walsh.

• 35:18Speaker 16

  The Alexander Brothers moved in a world of multimillion dollar homes, exclusive parties and powerful people.

• 35:25Speaker 17

  Behind that glamorous lifestyle were years of rumors and allegations that they were committing sexual assault.

• 35:31Speaker 16

  In our reporting for New York Magazine, we investigated what people knew and heard from women who came forward to tell their stories.

• 35:39Speaker 17

  Now, that reporting is the basis for a new three part docu-series, The Wolves of Real Estate: The Alexander Brothers.

• 35:46Speaker 16

  You'll see exactly how privilege protected them and how they were finally stopped.

• 35:51Speaker 17

  Stream all three episodes now, only on Peacock.

• 35:59Speaker 06

  So the key molecule in vanilla is something called vanillin.

• 36:03Nicola Twilley?

  First of all, I have been saying this incorrectly my whole life. Farewell, Vanilla. I thought I knew you, but you turned out to be Vanilla all along.

• 36:12Cynthia Graber?

  So flavors that we enjoy are typically made up of lots of different chemicals that affect that final flavor. Some foods have one kind of dominant note, and that's true for vanilla. It's this molecule called vanillin, which, yes, I too had been mispronouncing.

• 36:26Speaker 06

  And vanillin was first identified in 1858 by a French chemist by the name of Théodore Nicolas Goblet. However, it was only isolated and then synthetically produced a few decades later, in 1874, by two German scientists.

• 36:43Cynthia Graber?

  They found a way to make vanillin from a chemical in pine bark.

• 36:46Speaker 06

  And so what they were able to do, basically, is come up with the very same molecule that naturally occurs in vanilla, to the point where it is impossible to discern in a molecule what comes from a plant and what comes from one of those synthetics. It is the identical molecule.

• 37:02Cynthia Graber?

  This was an impressive breakthrough in chemistry, but their particular process didn't make even artificial vanilla flavoring any cheaper. It was still wildly expensive, even more expensive than real vanilla.

• 37:12Nicola Twilley?

  Over the years, various other substitutes for vanilla pods were trialed and sometimes used, including infamously beaver butt secretions.

• 37:21Speaker 06

  Don't ask me who first figured out that a gland of a beaver produces something that smells a lot like vanilla, but apparently it does. So it was literally cheaper to find and kill a beaver and secrete this thing from its gland than it was to produce a vanilla pod, which tells you something about vanilla pod production.

• 37:39Cynthia Graber?

  That was briefly used as a flavoring in the early 1900s in food, but it is not used at all today. It has thankfully been replaced.

• 37:46Speaker 06

  By the 20th century, new types of synthetics are coming up, which are much cheaper. And then by the 1930s, a chemist at McGill University in Montreal by the name of Harold Hibbert, building on the work of German scientists and Scandinavian scientists, comes up with a way of deriving vanillin from pulp paper waste. And this means that all of a sudden, there's a way of disposing of the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, the Globe and Mail's waste, literally. Canada, the US, Scandinavia, Northern Europe become top producers of the synthetic stuff in the second half of the 20th century.

• 38:24Nicola Twilley?

  And vanillin made from wood pulp is ridiculously cheap, way, way, way cheaper than vanilla pods or even extract made from those pods.

• 38:32Speaker 06

  So why would you introduce real vanilla into something today when it's, say, 150 times more expensive than the fake stuff?

• 38:41Speaker 09

  Artificial vanilla, oh my god, price. I'm selling my liter of vanilla, natural vanilla extract on like about 1,000 pesos and you'll find the artificial in 60 pesos a liter. So it's a whole difference right there.

• 38:59Cynthia Graber?

  All this means that vanilla flavoring is everywhere these days. You can get any and every type of sweet treat in a vanilla flavor and nearly all of it is synthetic.

• 39:07Nicola Twilley?

  The synthetic vanillin revolution really got going after the wood pulp method was discovered in the 1930s. Like we said, the price plummeted and the flavor became even more ubiquitous. But something else happened, too. The word vanilla acquired a whole new meaning.

• 39:24Speaker 06

  By the 1940s, plain vanilla has come to mean boring, right? I see examples in the press of chocolates that are being advertised as either fancy or comma, plain vanilla. Well, that would have been unthinkable 150 years earlier, right? Vanilla would have been the summit of sophistication. Now, all of a sudden, it's come to mean ordinary, mundane, ho-hum.

• 39:47Nicola Twilley?

  It is really kind of shocking. Vanilla was and is one of the most expensive crops in the world. It's an orchid, for heaven's sake. Every single flower is hand-pollinated and it's also still the most popular flavor in town.

• 40:02Speaker 06

  I think it's safe to say that it's perhaps the most universally appreciated flavor. There's evidence of it being used to sell houses, you know, the smell of vanilla wafting out of baked good.

• 40:13Cynthia Graber?

  And yet somehow, now, weirdly, it also means boring. Eric tried to figure out why, what happened. And when he looked at the rise in print of vanilla being used to mean boring, it seemed to increase as the use of vanillin rose. Eric thinks they're connected.

• 40:26Speaker 06

  It's the absolute homogeneity, the blandness, the routine-ness, the constantness, if you will, the flatness of the fake stuff. But also its availability, the fact that all of a sudden, anybody can have it. It becomes the sort of white bread of spices. That in turn becomes a reason for it to go bland.

• 40:46Nicola Twilley?

  To Luis, the idea that English speakers use vanilla to mean bland and boring is honestly kind of offensive.

• 40:53Speaker 09

  To me, it does not make sense. You know, you say vanilla, to me, is something very important.

• 40:59Cynthia Graber?

  Like Eric, Luis thinks that maybe Americans call boring things vanilla because vanillin, all by itself, is kind of boring.

• 41:05Speaker 09

  Artificial is way more loud. You know, like, natural vanilla has its own, it's got 200 compounds, more than 200 compounds of aroma. And artificial has only one, and it's just one hit.

• 41:20Nicola Twilley?

  But that one-note flavor, that is vanilla for most people. Eric says nine out of 10 consumers can't tell the difference between synthetic vanillin and vanilla flavor from a real bean.

• 41:34Speaker 10

  Well, I think most people just don't know what the true flavor of vanilla tastes like.

• 41:40Cynthia Graber?

  Natural vanilla is still grown and appreciated, even though it's only a tiny fraction of the world's vanilla flavor market. Chefs often use it, home cooks often use it. But it's becoming more expensive these days because the orchid is threatened, in part because all of those vanilla orchids all around the world are grown from cuttings.

• 41:56Nicola Twilley?

  Miguel told us that researchers have found that all the commercial vanilla grown all around the world comes from maybe only five or six original plants total.

• 42:09Speaker 10

  And that's why its genetic capacity is greatly diminished to cope with pests or a disease. So what we are doing here is securing genetic biodiversity to be able to have alternatives against climate change or disease.

• 42:27Cynthia Graber?

  Rebecca runs a vanilla gene bank in Jalapa, which is the capital of Veracruz. They have about 90,000 tiny little orchid plants in a crowded, warm room.

• 42:37Cynthia Graber?

  It's lit with fluorescent lights, and small glass jars are stacked all around on steel shelves.

• 42:44Speaker 09

  This is the incubation room. And what we do here is incubate the seeds so they can germinate and grow.

• 42:49Nicola Twilley?

  Each little jar has a layer of brown slimy goo at the bottom, and then a little tangle of green vine growing above it. There's a label saying the accession number and a QR code for more information. And we were completely surrounded by these tiny little vines curling around on themselves in sealed jars, like a weird set from Little Shop of Horrors.

• 43:10Cynthia Graber?

  Rebecca and Miguel have samples of vanilla orchids representing seven species of vanilla. We said that there are three main edible ones, but the team at the gene bank is interested in collecting and cultivating samples from other vanilla species, too, because those might be able to help with disease resistance and the impacts of climate change. They even recently found a new species on the Yucatan Peninsula.

• 43:30Nicola Twilley?

  This germplasm bank is super important because there are almost no wild vanilla vines left. It's officially classified as critically endangered in its homeland. Miguel told us their strategy for hunting down new specimens. They know vanilla likes to grow near rivers. They know it can't grow well above 2,700 foot in elevation. And they know it needs pretty sparse tree cover so it can get enough sun.

• 43:55Cynthia Graber?

  Then they combined that ecological information with historical data about where vanilla has traditionally grown to make a map of where it might be. And they set off to track it down. But even that is a real crapshoot. It's basically never easy to randomly find a vanilla vine in the wild.

• 44:09Speaker 15

  Las poblaciones de vainilla son poblaciones muy pequeñas.

• 44:14Speaker 07

  Vanilla populations are very small. When we find a vanilla plant, we try to rescue a section of the plant to cultivate it in vitro and preserve the material because they are practically unique.

• 44:25Speaker 15

  Son únicas prácticamente.

• 44:27Nicola Twilley?

  Rebecca and Miguel are not only focused on saving these precious vanilla genes, they're also doing a lot of research and breeding. So much about vanilla remains to be discovered, from the kind of fungus it needs in the soil to germinate outside of the lab, to which kind of bees pollinate different vanilla species.

• 44:44Speaker 15

  Hay muy poca investigación en el tema de vainilla.

• 44:47Speaker 07

  There is very little research on vanilla. Almost everything is focused on Vanilla Platinfolia, which is a cultivated variety. And even then, there isn't much information.

• 44:56Speaker 09

  And of the other species? Well, we know practically nothing.

• 45:00Cynthia Graber?

  And those other species aren't just valuable for their potential to help planifolia survive its genetic bottleneck. Some of them are extremely delicious in their own right.

• 45:12Speaker 08

  We have 14 or 15 species under investigation, and we're looking at other alternatives. We're never going to displace vanilla planifolia. No, that's the queen.

• 45:20Cynthia Graber?

  Even though planifolia is queen, Araceli is particularly excited about two vanilla species that do produce aromatic pods, even though they haven't been grown commercially. They're called vanilla cribiana and vanilla odorata.

• 45:33Speaker 08

  The odorata species can have two or three times higher percentage of vanillin.

• 45:37Cynthia Graber?

  Cribiana can have the same amount of vanillin as planifolia, and Araceli says it has some nice anise notes, too.

• 45:46Speaker 08

  I tell them all are my favorites. But between you and me, cribiana and odorata, the new ones.

• 45:51Cynthia Graber?

  And if she's being honest, maybe her absolute favorite is cribiana.

• 46:00Speaker 08

  It's a gem because it's a very rich vanilla with a high level of fatty acids. So it combines very well with fatty things, with mole and with chocolate. It's extraordinary.

• 46:10Cynthia Graber?

  On his farm, Luis grows pompona. It turned out that his pompona plant survived a fungal disease that killed all his planifolia vines, so he went with it. Pompona has traditionally been considered less valuable than planifolia because it has less vanillin. But Luis says it has great culinary potential, particularly with savory dishes.

• 46:28Speaker 09

  I cook with pompona vanilla, and it takes you to another world. It's, oh my god, it's exquisite.

• 46:35Cynthia Graber?

  Luis is a vanilla grower, not a chef, but he told us he always has pompona beans in his kitchen, and he adds them to everything.

• 46:43Speaker 09

  I made, we call it tortita, a gordita of plantain. I mix with some flour and eggs, and I smash it. And then I place some vanilla pompona in it and mix it with the whole thing. I make mole paste with vanilla, which it doesn't taste like vanilla, but vanilla, it's a very smart product because when it competes with other spices, it potentializes flavors, you know? So our mole is great. And something as simple as a fresh salad, lettuce, tomato, probably some berries or some goat cheese and avocado. And then I chop the vanilla bean

• 47:27Speaker 09

  and then just put it on top of the salad, a little bit of vanilla pompona. So when you are eating it and then you bite the small pieces of vanilla, it's an explosion of flavor. It's just incredible.

• 47:40Cynthia Graber?

  It's funny to think about eating an entire vanilla pod because if you were to bite into a plantofolia pod that you buy at the supermarket, it's really bitter. It has a strong vanilla scent, of course, but it's not something you'd want to just eat. But when Luis handed us one of his cured pompona beans and told us to chow down, we did. Oh.

• 47:59Speaker 09

  What do you feel?

• 48:01Cynthia Graber?

  A lot of fruit. It's so funny. It looks like a dried fruit. Mmm. I feel like I'm eating dried fruit in a way that I didn't expect. I get the vanilla, but not nearly, as you say, the vanilla extract is like vanilla. And this is like fruit and vanilla. It's sweet and fruity. It tastes much less like vanilla. There's even some tart. Mmm. It tastes like a plum and some cherry-ish notes. Yeah, it's a little like, it's sweet like a dried cherry, but a little more tart even. I love it. As Luis said, he likes to use it in salad. And as it happens, he had some small tomatoes growing at his farm. So we picked the tomatoes and tried them with a bite of vanilla.

• 48:46Cynthia Graber?

  OK, so I have one tomato and one pompona. Which first?

• 48:51Speaker 09

  First the tomato and then right away the pompona or make them together.

• 48:57Cynthia Graber?

  Mmm.

• 48:59Nicola Twilley?

  That's pretty great, actually. That's pretty great. They go well together.

• 49:03Cynthia Graber?

  A bite of tomato and a piece of pompona here? Together. Mmm. It completely transforms the taste of the vanilla and the tomato. But the vanilla tastes totally different than when I tried it on its own.

• 49:17Nicola Twilley?

  It tastes like the more anise or fennel, like a more licorice?

• 49:21Cynthia Graber?

  There's so many interesting flavors going on. Yeah, there's a lot more like herbally, fennely, and a little vanilla-y. It's really great.

• 49:32Nicola Twilley?

  If you want to try these amazing, different vanillas for yourself, you don't have to fly to Veracruz. Vanilla pompona is not on the shelves at most grocery stores in America, but you can find it at specialist spice retailers. Vanilla cribiana is even more rare, but again, the internet is your friend. And of course, you can try all the various terroirs for planifolia, too, and see whether you can pick up the differences between Mexican, Madagaskan, and Indonesian. Have a vanilla tasting party, tag us on social, and let us know what you think.

• 50:05Cynthia Graber?

  We told you that in dishes where vanilla plays a supporting role, like, say, chocolate chip cookies, few people can tell whether the baker has used natural vanilla or the artificial stuff. So is it worth shelling out for the more expensive variety? We think it is, if you can afford it. We want to live in a world with great vanilla and vanilla biodiversity and farmers who are paid well. If it's within your budget, we think it's part of the joy of the dessert and savory dishes, too.

• 50:28Nicola Twilley?

  Thanks, this episode, to Rebecca Menschaka, Miguel Lozano, Araceli Perez, Luis Mora, and Eric Jennings. We have links to their research and Eric's book at our website, gastropod.com.

• 50:40Cynthia Graber?

  Thanks once again to Rodrigo Perez Ortega, who is a fantastic science journalist and a great friend of the show and who was super helpful on our trip to Chalapa. Thank you.

• 50:48Nicola Twilley?

  While we're busy thanking people, we also want to give a huge, huge thanks to some of our supreme fans, listeners who support the show at a particularly generous level. You make the kind of reporting we do possible. Thank you Kylie Chen, Monica Edwards, Sally and Todd Cutler, Van Jensen, Alice Quo, Casey Hill, Ian Burke, Peggy Tulis, Laura Heisler, Jordan Baram, Todd Cooperman, Jarmila Noid-Librock, Valerie Baudreau, and the self-titled anonymous donor, wink, wink.

• 51:18Cynthia Graber?

  And thanks, as always, to our producer Claudia Guy. We'll be back in a couple of weeks with our last episode of 2025. Stay tuned.