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Eric T. Jennings, "Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean" (Yale UP, 2025)
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Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher. I'm very pleased to be talking with Dr. Eric Jennings about his book titled the History of an Extraordinary Bean, published by Yale University Press in 2025, which helps us understand how actually a quite delicate plant, technically an orchid, became a thing that is in all sorts of things all over the world and. And also became a thing that we don't see as extraordinary in very many senses today. So all sorts of transitions and transformations buried in this history, which I think is going to make for a very interesting conversation. Eric, thank you so much for joining me.
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B
Thank you, Miranda, for having me.
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A
Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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B
Of course. So I'm a history of French colonialism. I defended my PhD thesis in 1998 at Berkeley, and that thesis already dealt with French colonial history and specifically with the period of the Second World War, to which I've devoted several books. And my interest at the time was already turned in part towards the Indian Ocean. I was looking at a comparative history that encompassed Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean and the Caribbean. And that's actually when I started to understand the significance of this orchid, that is this only edible orchid, actually vanilla to the insular world of at once the Masquerains and more importantly, Madagascar. It's while I was conducting research in Madagascar that I came to realize just the incredible weight of vanilla in the economy. The local economy rests on vanilla in large part, and Madagascar has been the world's largest producer since roughly the time of the First World War. And so it's really while conducting research on another topic that I first stumbled upon the importance of this and return to it much later, as one tends to. That said, there's all sorts of wonderful commodity histories. There had been several on vanilla, including one by Timmy Cott that's a bit of a travel narrative woven in, and that definitely also explored the archives in Bruno, which I came to analyze as well, and another one by Patricia Raine that weaves in the history and interconnects them with recipes. Actually, that said, I really wanted to delve into the French colonial holdings. And in the end, this. This project took me to archives on every continent except for Antarctica. And it really did provide quite an incredible sort of detective trail for me along the way, knowing that, you know, unlike cocoa, unlike rubber, unlike sugar, there's very few cartons actually titled vanilla in the archives. And so this really involved sort of looking for vanilla by refraction, by ricochet, if you will, in. In various places where you might not initially expect it, in, you know, reports on piracy, in reports on customs of Asians, in reports on trafficking or adulterating, modifying existent substances or replacing them with something else. So all sorts of sort of, you know, unusual places. And then, of course, more conventional ones like recipe books and places like that.
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A
Hmm. I'm glad you've given us such a sense of the kind of scale and scope of the book from that introduction, because there are so many pieces here that I'm glad you said detective story, because it definitely sort of feels like that, in a sense of like, wait a second, how do we get from this to this? And wait, where does this piece come in? Which definitely makes for a really interesting sort of investigation and read. And in fact, we get to start off with that sort of sense of curiosity right at the beginning, because you mentioned, obviously, the French Empire there, and we'll get to. To it, but in fact, I think we should start with the Spanish Empire. So to what extent does this story start, if we take as our starting point the sort of 17th and 18th centuries, to what extent is it the Spanish Empire that has a monopoly on vanilla at this point?
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B
Well, thanks for starting with the beginning. It absolutely is key to understand that. So, first of all, there's three types of vanilla, but the main one that people think about today, Vanilla planifolia, the sort of dominant kind of vanilla, was basically a Mesoamerican monopoly before became a Spanish colonial monopoly. Right. And I don't use the term monopoly lightly because it turns out that there's specific sets of insect pollinators that are necessary for Vanilla plantifolia to reproduce. Without those pollinators, the orchid will sometimes flower, but it will never bear fruit, or more specifically bear a capsule, which is the technical term for a pod of vanilla. And so as a result, the Vanilla planifolia plant only really grew in Central America. It was, of course, harvested regularly by a wide range of indigenous peoples. The Totonacs, the Aztecs tended to get it from others, including the Totonacs, but before them, the Maya had also been producing Vanilla planifolia. So that's one kind of vanilla that emerged in Central America and which became as a result a Spanish monopoly after the Conquistadors. There's another type, and I don't want to get too technical, but there's also this vanilla pompono, which is a thicker capsule or pod, and it tends to grow farther south in South America. Its range includes Brazil, the Guyanas, Colombia, Venezuela, all the way down to Peru, Ecuador, et cetera, with some overlap actually on the northern side with planifolia. And that too had been used by indigenous peoples for centuries before the Spaniards in particular got hold of it. So several types of vanilla, but all of them basically indigenous to the Americas. By the 16th, 17th century, vanilla was traveling, but again, it would travel, it would look lovely, it was an orchid. And of course, by the time takes over in the early 19th century, a bit like tulip Tulipmania. Once upon a time it was collected, but it would not bear capsules or bear fruit outside of Central America. So the Spanish held this really lucrative monopoly. Now, I don't want to exaggerate, it was less lucrative than, say, you know, their interest in gold and silver, obviously. Nevertheless, it actually followed the trail of silver to the port city of Veracruz, the main port in what is today Mexico, back then New Spain. And essentially there was a complete monopoly over exports of vanilla from Veracruz to Cadiz. And there, there was, you know, this. This enriched government coffers, royal coffers, and all sorts of bootlegging would occur and piracy would occur to try to. This monopoly. So the first chapter is about the Spanish monopoly. It's also about ways that rival colonial powers try to circumvent it, largely in vain. Although interesting exceptions can be found in what are today the. So what became sorry, in the subsequent years, basically British, Dutch and French Guiana, where the vanilla pompona was present and where rival colonial powers of Spain were able to produce some of their own vanilla and bring it to market without having to resort to piracy or larceny.
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A
Okay, pirates signals that something is valuable, right? And you mentioned gold and silver there as being obviously other fancier, shinier, more famous Spanish imperial imports. Why exactly was vanilla key at that point, that people were willing to be pirates for it? Who were the consumers that they were trying to then sell for, sell to? What was vanilla being used for? Like, why was this in demand?
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Those are key questions. And there's been really interesting work. I'm thinking of, for instance, the book by Marcy Norton, sorry, Marcy Norton, on chocolate and its uses. And basically what you have occurring is a sort of new Spanish elite embracing indigenous practices around drinks. And those drinks included chocolatil, the, I guess, precursor to hot chocolate, except it wasn't hot, it was spiced. The main ingredients in it, of course, were cacao and vanilla. And so in that sense, Sophie Ko has this wonderful phrase about, you know, basically, vanilla has always been chocolate's ally. And that's certainly true. It followed chocolate to a high degree out of the Americas, where it had already been twinned by indigenous peoples. And so by the 17th century, European elites are starting to mimic those sort of colonial elites in New Spain and are really taking a fancy to, well, not hot chocolate, but cold chocolate, chocolate, liquid chocolate, drinks that have been flavored with vanilla. So demand does spike. And the problem is, of course, that with only one producer, New Spain, and a complete monopoly through Veracruz and Cadiz, you can well imagine that the stuff is incredibly expensive. And so there's contraband, there's all sorts of ways around it. There's also fakes people are going to use over the centuries, everything from Pendant to Burnt Oaks, pretending that it's vanilla, passing things off for vanilla when they are not. And so the original consumption, as I just suggested, was liquid. Over the centuries, that is gradually going to change. I stumbled upon some wonderful early cookery manuals, a 17th and 18th century Italian one, for instance, that is already starting to use a vanilla in a variety of sauces. I suppose that's still liquid, but it's not exactly a drink in the same way. And BY really the 18th and certainly the early 19th century, it's going into confectionery, it's going into chocolates, it's going into desserts and pastries and souffles and things like this. So the evolution also is one from liquid towards solid gradually over time, with one of the main breakthroughs, naturally, when you speak of vanilla being Vanilla ice cream. Right. So Thomas Jefferson, as I replay this vignette that's quite well known, I think, or perhaps not, Thomas Jefferson falls in love with vanilla ice cream while in Paris and then very quickly scrambles to secure supply and send it back to Philadelphia. Now, ironically, the stuff is coming from what is today Mexico, going all the way to France via Spain, and then returning in packages sent by Jefferson to Philadelphia, when of course, it would have been much more straightforward for the stuff to travel directly from Veracruz to the ports of the eastern seaboard of the United States.
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Well, I think this illustrates exactly sort of what the stakes were in trying to figure out some sort of better system to all of this, because there's a lot of interest in vanilla, and yet that is not exactly a straightforward supply chain. So you talk about a vanilla breakthrough in 1836. Can you tell us what this was and why did it happen in Belgium, which is a place we have not yet mentioned?
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B
Absolutely. So I was trying to set the stage there in answering to your question, for increasing demand. Increasing demand, admittedly, in certain circles. Right. I'm not suggesting that all, all segments of society were absorbed or fascinated or even addicted to vanilla in the way some of the elites become, but elites certainly are. And those elites aren't just aristocrats, they're also merchants, traders, the middle classes, in other words, the bourgeoisie. And nowhere is that truer than in northern Europe. So you, I mean, I also, I catch sort of statistical glimpse of vanilla exports, unfortunately, in the 16th, 17th century. They're few and far between. But it's quite clear that this stuff is being consumed interestingly, primarily in places like Italy, what's today Italy, what's today Germany, as well as the northern countries of what are today the Netherlands and Belgium. So interesting patterns of sort of redistribution towards the boot of Italy, towards Northern Europe, towards Hamburg, out of Cadiz. And fascinatingly, the stuff was consumed in Spain, to be sure, but Spain was not the main consumer of the vanilla that it over which it had the monopoly. So there's interesting patterns of consumption there. So in the northern countries, there's obviously a taste for exotic substances inherited from an earlier colonial empire, from the voc, from Dutch trading in what is today Indonesia. And so that fascination with spices, if you consider vanilla to be a spice, which most people do, certainly was something that was pre existing. The other thing, of course that's just happened in Belgium in the 1830s, is an independent country, a breakaway country, a new kingdom that has actually severed ties to the Netherlands and its sort of overseas Empire. And so there's a sort of moment of opportunity. There's also something very odd that. Another weird connection here in terms of Belgium. It's also, I suppose, outside of Great Britain, the country in Europe that first industrializes. Right. Some have argued that the term Industrial Revolution was first used in a Belgian context rather than a British one. At any rate, without going down that rabbit hole, the Industrial Revolution actually has an interesting role to play in this 1836 breakthrough I'm about to describe. So all of that said, sorry to be so long winded, but in 1836, a Belgian scientist by the name of Charles Morin discovers the manual pollination technique for vanilla, or rather I should say a manual pollination technique for vanilla. So prior to that, remember, only bees had been responsible for basically pollinating the plant. And nine months, I think that's a sort of telling amount of time in human terms. Nine months after it was fertilized or pollinated by the bee, a pod would emerge, a capsule would emerge and would be ready to be picked. Sorry, it emerges earlier, but it's ready to be picked nine months later. My mistake. So, for the first time, Charles Morin, having already experimented techniques on other orchids, by the way, I don't have time to do the whole portrait portrait, if you're interested. There's a long portrait of him in chapter two of the book, after having experimented on other types of orchids, basically predicts that he's about to pollinate Vanilla planifolia for the first time, and does so in his Liege greenhouse or glass house, which has these tremendous creepers. You know, vanilla is actually a sort of plant that requires a host tree and that climbs atop a host tree almost parasitically. And so he had these tremendous vines of vanilla again growing in the Liege greenhouse. And he's able to pollinate every single flower on one of those vines and very quickly has a minor harvest. I can't remember if it's 50 or 100 pods, but nine months later they emerge. And so he really is the first to have, in a documented way, manually pollinated vanilla. Unfortunately, he's very mysterious in what he's done. He's done this basically in laboratory conditions. It's not readily apparent from the historical record whether he has used an implement or not, whether he has sort of humidified the plant before doing this, what exactly he's done to retract the membrane between the male and the female parts of the orchid, which is what you need to do to pollinate vanilla, how much pollen he's actually transferred all of this is unclear. And so although he has this discovery, it isn't yet in my argument at least a method. And I know that, you know, some biologists and I have disagreed on this, in particular Adam Caramance, who sees this as sort of the moment and everything else having emulated it. To further complicate things, by the way, in the book, I have a suggestion that perhaps, just Perhaps, a certain Mr. Geneve may have actually beaten Charles Morin to the punch on what is today Mauritius a few years earlier. So there's a whole, you know, there are challenges around who, who first devised this technique, and there are questions remaining over whether there were multiple techniques devised around the same decade or whether there's just emulation and copying going on in a large scale. At any rate, it's in 1836 that this breakthrough takes place in Liege. Morin is a fascinating character. He's also a self promoter. So very quickly he shares word of his discovery not just with scientific academies, which you would expect, but also with, with crowned heads of state. So he sends news to the Tsar, he sends news to his own king, et cetera, and sends news to Vienna in hopes that basically he'll be able to cultivate European vanilla under greenhouses. Now, interestingly, that turns out to be a pipe dream. Just a few years ago, a Dutch enterprise gave up on that. And I was just made aware of this past summer by friends that there's now attempts to and actually I'd met that the people who are behind this a few years back, there's now attempts to grow vanilla in greenhouses in Bretagne in Brittany in western France. For the most part, this has not been a winning enterprise up to now. It's a lot easier to grow marijuana in greenhouses than it is, for instance, growing vanilla. This podcast is supported by FX's English teacher. Last year's critically acclaimed series returns to follow Evan, Gwen and Marky as they vie for their students divided attention. See why Cosmopolitan called its premiere season a masterclass of comedy while glamour raved it's the year's funniest and most heartwarming new comedy series, FX's English Teacher. All new Thursdays on FX. All episodes now streaming on Hulu. My marathon isn't about time. 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So it's even a big deal to have that perspective, right. If we still can't do it now, Right. What it mean to have that breakthrough then, even with all the mystery and confusion about exactly what happened. But I think the mystery I want to have us turn to next is how we get to the French Imperial part of this. You mentioned that right at the beginning, but we've talked about the Spanish Empire. We've talked about breakthroughs in independent Belgium. How do we get the French involved? I mean, we've still got Bourbon vanilla as a name we recognize. Now, how is the French French bit coming into all of this?
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B
So you very nicely segued over to the Ile Bourbon, which is today known as Reunion Island. And Reunion island, of course, is not terribly far from Mauritius or Madagascar. And all of this comes together. It kind of coalesces around Bourbon, Reunion. So Bourbon, Reunion, the island's renamed many times. I won't get into the details. Reunion finally sticks after the Revolution of 1848. But for simplicity's sake, let's just say Reunion. Although it is significant that, you know, Bourbon vanilla is basically a label that is tied to this second revolution that I'm about to talk about on Bourbon Island. So a few years after Morin in 1841, an enslaved teenager by the name of Edmund also achieved this breakthrough. Now, he does so not under laboratory conditions. And unlike Charles Morin, he immediately shares his discovery first with his master. He's 12 years old. He's basically an amateur botanist who already knows the Latin names of all sorts of plants, who's mastered the manual reproduction of other plants as well the manual pollination of several other varietals. And the breakthrough happens in a state called Bellevue on the northern side of reunion in 1841. And there, Edmund, basically Edmund's master, turns around to him and says, how come this pod is growing here? And his gardener, Edmund, turns to him and says, well, some months ago, I manually pollinated it. And Billy Beaumont, the quote unquote master, turns around and says, well, this is impossible. Edmund insists. And then a Few days later, more pods appear. Edmund shows exactly what he'd done and and he becomes a kind of minor local celebrity. He is actually asked to show the technique on other plantations. And what's interesting here is of course, the sharing of information. I don't have firm proof of this, but I wonder if Billy Beaumont didn't take a cut on sort of these guest appearances by Edmund. That's a really interesting story in all sorts of ways. There are of course, other enslaved scientists and enslaved botanists out there. He's not unique in that respect. But Edmund's discovery is going to completely transformed the economy of Rio New island, which was a. A sugar heavy island, if you will, or it had recently become one. That's one of the things I go over in the book. It had previously actually grown everything from coffee to other substances, but was starting to throw all of its eggs into the basket of sugar because France had lost so many colonies recently during the Napoleonic War. So just as that turn is taking place, Edmund makes this discovery and basically you could argue, at least I do in, in the book, that he kind of saves Rio Neo from monoculture, soils from intensive monoculture. Because within a few years of Edmund's discovery, by the mid-1840s, you're starting to see signs of vanilla production, signs of vanilla, know how being shared. And then it radiates out of Madagascar to other French colonial holdings. And of course, a mere seven years after Edmund's discovery, there's the final abolition of slavery in French colonies. Edmund, who was never, by the way, manumitted, never freed by his owner, achieves independence. And the plantation owners on Reunion decide, as good capitalists might, that now that they no longer have free labor to produce vanilla, which is extremely time consuming, I can get into that later, extremely labor intensive, that they'd best find another place to produce it. And that's when they start to look to still independent Madagascar as a source of cheap labor in the production of Rimmel. And I show in the book that the first cuttings of vanilla, of edible vanilla, I should say, because they're non edible forms of vanilla already in location in Madagascar, reach the outer fringes of Madagascar, in particular a place called Sainte Marie in 1822. So very early on, even before Edmund's breakthrough, and therefore shortly thereafter, by the sort of mid-1840s, Madagascar is becoming a minor producer in its own right.
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A
Okay, this is really helpful to understand kind of why this particular area becomes so central. But with the establishment then of the success of these methods, the expansion of French interest in Vanilla. What did the actual production process of vanilla look like at this point when it's kind of moved beyond the one individual and is obviously a much bigger deal?
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B
So what's interesting about vanilla is that it has resisted attempts to industrialize. I actually dropped a hint about Morin and industrialization and then never followed up on it. So allow me to do that. Now, Charles Morin believed that his vanilla, which was heated in the greenhouse, so by the sun's rays, but also, interestingly, by the coal that Liege was producing as one of the hubs of the industrial revolution, he believed that sort of industrialization would allow him to produce cheap European vanilla which could fend off its sort of Central American rivals. Right. And he daringly tells people to compare his vanilla from Liege to that from Mexico, and so on and so forth. Well, what's interesting is that attempts to industrialize vanilla really fail. I mean, yes, you can tamper with heat, you can tamper with humidity, et cetera, et cetera, but by and large, the way of producing vanilla hasn't changed that much in centuries, with the major exception of this manual pollination revolution, where humans have basically taken on and replaced the rules of bees. Now, let me start with that. As you sort of wander a vanilla grove or plantation, the vanilla flowers early in the morning and by, I'd say 2, 3pm or if not noon, depending on where you are, and the rays of the sun, it has withered and faded. And so that's a huge economic loss if you consider that, what pods. Nests retail for something like US$10 each, depending on where you're buying them. That's a huge loss. If you've missed out on pollinating that one flower, the flower's gone, you can no longer pollinate it. So there's huge intense resource mobilization here. And basically, one has to hire or have a kinship network that can pollinate hundreds, thousands, thousands upon thousands of flowers in a single morning. So it's super intensive at certain times of the year. Then once it's been pollinated, fair enough, you don't need to do that much for the intervening nine months, other than, for instance, ensuring that the vines don't strangle each other, ensuring that the pests don't make off with your precious pods, ensuring that there's the right light and shade balance, ensuring that the notorious Fusarium fungus doesn't ravage your crop. So there's actually quite a bit to do. And then roughly nine months later, another frenzy takes place, which is to say the picking moment. And here too, I would argue that just like the pollination, you can't replace this with a machine. No machine can determine exactly. Well, first of all, it would have to sort of fray its way through the undergrowth and into the forest. And secondly, no machine can actually determine precisely when the pod is at its optimum point for picking. You don't want it too ripe, you don't want it unripe. And so humans once again are responsible for that. After that, there's a short boiling process, then a long drying process, drying in blankets, drying in the sun. Basically a lot of this involves reducing the percentage in water of the pods and then finally crating in optimal conditions. And as I say in the book, things can go wrong at any turn and things could either over dry or mildew. So it is a high risk, high reward crop in that sense, to this day.
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A
Yeah. That's really fascinating to have you take us through. So thank you for doing that. Because there is the assumption that kind of, well, at some point machines. Right. And it's like, well, no, that's, that's really in fact not the case and for the reasons you've outlined. So that definitely gives us a much better idea of what's happening in places like Reunion or Madagascar. What about Tahiti? How does vanilla get there? Is it also through sort of French colonial conquest, like in Madagascar?
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B
In a way, yes. Although in Madagascar the pods precede formal conquest, which only takes place in 1896. In French Tahiti, it actually takes place shortly thereafter, where in the middle of the 19th century. And this is where again, I do some detective work on where Tahitian vanilla originates. Now, I mentioned Vanilla pompona, I mentioned Vanilla planifolia. Crucially, there's a third type of vanilla that is eaten widely. I shouldn't say there's just three types, but there's three broad types that are eaten. And the third one is Vanilla tahitensis. And there's some mystery around how it emerges. For a long time it was thought that perhaps it had come to Tahiti from the Philippines. The evidence that I mobilized suggests that it actually probably came from Central or South America and that it was brought by one of the very first shipments near the start of French colonialism on Tahiti proper. And then by the late 19th century, it radiates out of Tahiti towards surrounding islands. So that interestingly, in the present, the main island of Tahiti produces very little vanilla at all, whereas places like Taha nearby are the, the main producers. So it is also a tale of, of interconnections, because in Tahiti. The methods that were elaborated in Reunion are applied. The same manuals, the same articles circulate. There's knowledge brought by, you know, sort of unexpected characters, naval officials who take a fondness to vanilla, who explain the ideal host trees, for instance, for vanilla, which, by the way, is a subject of some controversy to this day, as is the question of how best to conserve it. So all of these things circulate both the vanilla itself and the vanilla science.
- [30:38]
A
Okay, so that's useful to understand sort of what knowledge about vanilla is going on, which, of course, is helpful, as you said, for science, but also for consumers. And knowing more about the thing can make one want it more. And so, in fact, there is vanilla mania. When. Why? What's going on with this?
- [30:57]
B
So vanilla mania really is a phenomenon of the early 19th century onwards. And you can register there's sort of an interconnectedness here between obviously, production and consumption. And you can register several spikes. Right? So one of the first ones actually has to do with extracts in the 19th century, when vanilla can become an extract. And this is especially appreciated in the United States. The top global consumer of vanilla until 1905, 1906, 1907 is France, and thereafter it becomes the US and that ranking of 1, 2, now inverted 21 has not fundamentally changed. Those are the two global consumers of vanilla par excellence. So the first revolution basically essences, if you will, extracts the idea of making a liquid out of the vanilla, preserving it longer. Although the problem with this, of course, one that remains to this day, is how much actual vanilla is there in your extract? How do you know that it's real vanilla? In fact, how much of the extract is actually alcohol or water, and how much of it is vanilla? Right. That's a first moment when vanilla becomes almost, I hate to use the word, but democratized in a sense, it can reach a broader audience. The second moment, which is an even more critical one, is in the middle of the 19th century, two German scientists are going to basically produce vanillin, so the key molecule in vanilla synthetically and thereafter. By roughly the beginning of the 20th century, vanillin. Synthetic vanillin becomes much cheaper than real vanillin. And by the 1930s, it's absurdly cheaper. And today, I mean, it's just completely incommensurate. And so why would you. You pay for something that's several hundred times more expensive than another product if, at the end of the day, it has the same taste? And we can return to that question of whether it has the same taste exactly or not. But what is clear is that the molecule Vanillin is exactly the same, be it synthetically produced or the one produced in vanilla. And so that is the next moment when vanilla becomes democratized. So add that to, of course, the manual pollination revolution. That's three revolutions in the 19th century. 19th century. Each one is going to make vanilla more and more affordable, if you will, to various social groups. And that's when it becomes a true global favorite in ice cream, but also in things, as I show in the book, like Coca Cola in the 19th century. It becomes an ingredient for drinks and as they called Coca Cola early on, syrups, interestingly. So, yes, it's a kind of vanilla mania. It becomes just the, the flavor, the global flavor. For a limited time at McDonald's, get a Big Mac Extra Value meal for $8. That means two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun and medium fries. And a drink. We may need to change that jingle.
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A
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- [35:30]
B
No, no, those are. Those are good ones. So vanilla poisonings really rattled the 19th century. And as I say in the book, it's worthy of Sherlock Holmes in a way. Although the mystery is so enduring, it encompasses basically the entire 19th century where people would show up in digestive distress, terrible digestive problems, gastric pains after having eaten vanilla. And vanilla was incriminated to such an extent that scientists, some doctors were talking about vanillism as a kind of condition, as a kind of disease. And a variety of scientific articles took this up. Some began to argue that, you know, if you manipulate a vanilla orchid, and it's mostly, it's. It's a vine by hand, you can get an irritation on the skin. Perhaps that's what's going on with people's digestive systems. By the way. There is. There can be an irritation on the skin. This is not just made up, but gradually, over time, it becomes quite clear that the actual culprit. And it's a. It's a scientist at the University of Michigan who figures this out by. By drinking an entire vial of vanilla extract to prove that it's not the vanilla that is to blame, that it's been wrongly incriminated. Incriminated. And as you might have figured out, unsurprisingly in the 19th century, the real culprit was poor refrigeration of the cream and dairy goods which vanilla was being in which vanilla was a recipe, be it sort of, you know, vanilla cream, vanilla custard, or vanilla ice cream. The problem wasn't the vanilla at all. It was the curdled or otherwise compromised dairy product which had not been kept cold or frozen as it should have. So that's. That's one of the sort of manifestations. And there was obsessions over, you know, just how. How severe this epidemic was. And it's described as a kind of horrible epidemic. The other example that you mentioned is indeed World War II. We're in the. In the Pacific Ocean. The American US infatuation with vanilla is such that the Americans actually devote a. The American Navy devotes a barge to basically ice cream production and ice cream distribution to the Marines and to the soldiers of the U.S. army in the Pacific theater in World War II. And another example is a sinking U.S. warship that's been hit and where the sailors, before they leave the boat, fill their helmets with the vanilla ice cream and their helmets as they're leaving sort of the most precious belonging that they have, and they leave with it to go into their lifeboats.
- [38:06]
A
Thank you. For telling us those stories. That was a delightful addition to our conversation. And of course, listeners, there's more detail in the book if you want more of that sort of thing.
- [38:16]
B
I only gave two of them away. Yeah.
- [38:19]
A
I mean, even just rereading some of those bits again, like, the images are very evocative. So listeners, there's quite a lot to look forward to there. But I don't want to kind of digress too far into story time in that sense. I would now like to pick up that thread, please, about synthetic vanilla and these questions you raised around. Kind of. Is this legit? That's obviously a scientific question, but. But probably more importantly a consumer question. How was that navigated by the proponents of synthetic vanilla?
- [38:48]
B
So the synthetic Vanillin advocates basically argued, and specifically German scientists in the late 19th and early 20th century, that their product was purer than the stuff that came off of an orchid because they distilled the actual essence of vanilla, which was this molecule. Now there is of course pushback from vanilla producers and I devote a whole chapter to a vanilla cartel that set up in the 1960s of producing nations that fight back. And basically the EU is going to have a kind of certified real vanilla label by the 1960s and 70s to push back. But the synthetic people, of course, insist on the fact that this is a much cheaper product. Interestingly, the real stuff tends to be grown in the global South. So today places like Madagascar, Mexico, still to some extent Indonesia, Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean islands. Whereas the synthetic stuff, because of another revolution I haven't yet spoken about, tends to basically be derived from pulp paper waste. And so it tends to come from places like Canada, Sweden, Germany, northern countries with lots of pine forests and lots of pulp paper waste. So you see where I'm headed with this. I mean, one of the things I ask very candidly in the book is am I being a culinary snob for thinking that matters is that, you know, there is real vanilla versus the fake stuff if the fake stuff is several hundred times cheaper and is exactly the same thing and nine out of 10 pallets and noses cannot tell the difference. So that's one side of the argument. The other side of the argument is of course, that there's livelihoods on the line. And I would argue that there are both, you know, gastronomic and health benefits and actually environmental benefits to the real stuff. So unlike some other crops, vanilla actually is an enhancer of force. You don't strip strip forest down to grow vanilla. You need pre existing forests on which vanilla can climb and so it is, you know, sort of a preservationist crop in that sense, an environmental crop in a variety of settings, especially around, you know, old growth forests. Add to that the fact that Vanillin is only one molecule, and vanilla actually has all sorts of complex flavors that go beyond just Vanillin. And the one where, of the three types that I mentioned, the type of vanilla in which Vanillin is the least prevalent is actually vanilla titensis, which was once depreciated for that reason and which today has reinvented itself as, you know, interesting for that very reason. It's the one that's farthest removed from the synthetic stuff. And there's notes of caramel and anise and all sorts of interesting things in there that you cannot duplicate in the same way. So it's a fraught question. I think I probably revealed some of my own biases here. I been studying real vanilla for 10 years. I'm not going to turn around and say embrace the fake stuff, but, you know, there is a real question about whether it matters, whether fake is actually the right word here at all.
- [41:41]
A
Yeah, I mean, part of why that's a question to ask is because it's not like there's a sort of clear answer of like, the only type we have anymore is synthetic or synthetic was tried and then completely failed. So given that we sort of still have both options, should we think of synthetic vanilla as succeeding?
- [41:59]
B
I think so. I mean, if you look at the broader trends over the last 80 years, really, synthetic Vanillin has won the war. Just about any supermarket product, be it a yogurt or an ice cream or a custard or a cookie. You know, the term natural vanilla flavor is a giveaway that there's no vanilla in it that can be natural because it's made from cloves or it's made from wood or it's made from rice. Those are all natural products. They're just not vanilla. And so there's this new category of nature identical vanilla. There's all of these. These things where consumers don't really know what they're consuming. But for the most part, very few big ice cream makers, with a handful of exceptions, use the real stuff. And if they do, sometimes they use the casing or they use. You know, there's different parts of the vanilla pod as well. Right. The fragrant beans in the middle are what you really want to be using. So in an odd sense, the best thing you can do. And, you know, this sort of goes back to the home baking and home cooking Moment of COVID I suppose the safest way of knowing that you're using real vanilla is just buying a pod and integrating it in, slicing it down the middle and then extracting the seeds.
- [43:12]
A
So is vanilla then still a big deal for places like Madagascar? Obviously it's an independent country now. Some of the ones we've spoken about are still French controlled. Is vanilla still important?
- [43:25]
B
It absolutely is. So vanilla's Madagascar has been independent since 1960. And in the post colonial era, if anything, vanilla became even more important. I chronicle in the book the sort of general, the Admiral Ratsureca, who in the 1980s tries to take Madagascar into the orbit of the Soviet Union and even, even North Korea. And so part of that attempt is, well, let's secure other markets for vanilla. And very briefly, you know, Russian Soviet citizens were eating real vanilla in their famous vanilla ice creams. Didn't last terribly long. But all of this to say that, yes, this was a key question of vanilla remains a really important part of the economy in Madagascar. Now, I shouldn't generalize. Madagascar is a huge island and really the. The producing areas lie predominantly in the northeast, around the area that is known as Sava today. S A V A. And in those areas, you know, if you go at the right time of year, as I did, and you arrive, you can actually smell the fragrance of vanilla. Is something that really hits you just as you arrive in town shortly after landing. And in those areas, in a very poor country, vanilla just, you know, implies huge amounts of money dropping from the sky and in regular intervals. And I talk about the work of anthropologists like Anna Zhu, who's shown that there's quite an effect anthropologically of money arriving in these quite poor areas. And there's these stories of this lore around one farmer supposedly boiled the money, the bills that he received, much as you would boil the vanilla, and then he drank the liquid and then he was found dead the next morning. I'm not suggesting we necessarily lend credit readings to these stories, but a lot of these stories in postcolonial Madagascar, the main one being that vanilla isn't eaten by Westerners by the north, but indeed used for other things. I think these stories are very telling. And that last one in particular, you sort of. It makes sense because very few Malagasy will actually can afford to eat vanilla or want to eat vanilla. It's not necessarily part of the local gastronomy. And so it's basically an export substance, just like sapphires. And my friend Andrew Walsh, anthropologist, Canadian anthropologist, has worked on, you know, sapphires as well, in Madagascar are often seen as having some alternate ending, perhaps in, you know, weapon components or something like this, for that same reason.
- [46:02]
A
So what you've been telling us so far then, in Madagascar, vanilla is important. It has a lot of meanings attached to it. And that it was important in the Spanish Empire, it was important enough that pirates were involved. If we go all the way back, it was important in terms of 19th century science and economics. It was important to soldiers in World War II. It's all these places and times we've gone to in different areas of sort of society. The really high stakes and importance of vanilla has come through. And yet today in many places, vanilla also means bland. So how does that fit in?
- [46:40]
B
So that brings me to my most sort of cultural history chapter, the penultimate chapter in which I deal with that question. And it's a delicate topic, right? Because it's not like in cultural history you can draw the same sorts of straight lines that you could in, say, economic history or even to some degree, social history. That said, I do think that there is a direct connection between, on the one hand, the synthetic turn that I described, and on the other hand, this linguistic turn, which basically has vanilla becoming increasingly white and bland over time. And so I trace it in the book, I trace it across continents. It's not just the North American phenomenon, but it reaches its kind of zenith in the United States. There you have in the 19th century, the contrast between so called, you know, fancy chocolates and plain vanilla chocolates emerging. And here, plain vanilla, basically, although lacking punctuation, it's sort of becoming an adjective. By the early 20th century, it has become an adjective. Plain vanilla, foreign policy is something that pops up. I believe it's in the 40s as a term. And so it's become an adjective for bland, not coincidentally, in the country that is by far the largest consumer of the fake stuff and where vanilla has become ubiquitous, so ubiquitous that at a soda fountain or in an ice cream, it's almost, you could argue, the bread on which you place a sandwich. It's almost the base. It is in a sense, becoming a kind of nothingness. And that descent into bland, that spiral into bland, is something that I trace across cultures. And it simultaneously is mirrored by a descent into white, which is in many ways disturbing and fascinating for a number of reasons. Right in the US south, you have all of these stories. Maya Angelou tells one of these about, you know, African Americans would be banned from having vanilla ice cream and could only eat chocolate ice cream outside of maybe the 4th of July. Andre Lourde also tells stories like this. And so these evocative memories of vanilla being tied to racism in the Jim Crow south are things that I explore as well, but not just in the U.S. right. So some of the powders to make geisha seem even whiter than they are in Japan actually incorporated vanilla powder, which, again, is totally counterintuitive because the vanilla pod itself is black. Right. What people have come to associate with as white is, of course, either the flower, which is not what you eat, by the way, it's what gets pollinated, or the cream. In other words, the milk, the cream and the ice cream. So there's all sorts of really interesting slippages that I explore. All of this to say that, you know, it's not. The chronologies do differ, and it's not true in all cultures. Right. The term, the absolute apogee of this is the term vanilla sex, meaning something that is. Is downright unsexy and that has not necessarily traveled the world. That has become a sort of staple of the English language. And maybe shifting back again, I don't want to sound like I'm just an advocate of vanilla, but there's absolutely fascinating reasons why this once opulent orchid reserved, you know, sort of the purview of this elite has now become this sort of synonym with bland.
- [49:47]
A
Well, it's definitely a great history to investigate. Obviously. We've done sort of a highlights tour version of it here. The book has so many cool details, some of which we've sort of touched on, but there's definitely nothing bland, I think, about the stories you're telling us here. So thank you for doing that. And if I can ask as a final question, what you might be working on now that vanilla is out in the world, are you staying with, I don't know, is Coco next, or are you doing something completely different?
- [50:15]
B
I'm doing something completely different. I'm actually returning. I think I mentioned at the outset that I began working on World War II in French Colony. And so I'm returning to World War II. The final sort of months of the war were in 1945. And it's going to deal with the last Atlantic pockets, the last zones of German control in Atlantic France and their liberation by colonial troops in 1945. And some of these bastions only fall actually after Hitler's suicide. So they really are a kind of thorn in the Allied side. So I'm doing a completely different kind of history, one that'll be social, military, political, and I've moved back, in a sense, but Vanilla wasn't an interlude. This took me something like 10 years, and it's not a part of my life that I regret in the least. The odd thing about it is that it coincided with COVID So just as I thought I was heading to Madagascar for a second crucial trip, everything was frozen. And so I ended up looking at things that I might otherwise not have looked at. The cultural dimension sort of became. Became more prevalent as a result. So in a weird way, this project was actually shaped by the pandemic as well.
- [51:19]
A
I mean, so many projects are. And of course, we all know as historians that so many things in history are shaped by sort of contingent circumstances like that. So I'm sure your next project will develop in all sorts of unexpected ways, but probably interesting ones, too. So best of luck with it.
- [51:34]
B
Well, thanks so much for doing this, Miranda. It's much appreciated.
- [51:37]
A
Well, I definitely had fun learning about Vanilla. And any readers or listeners who want to learn more can, of course, look at the book published by Yale University Press in 2025 and titled the History of an Extraordinary Being. Eric, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [51:53]
B
Thank you.