The Rise of Vanilla as the Epitome of Blandness: Unveiling the Fascinating Origins

From a profit perspective, synthetic vanillin offers clear advantages. True vanilla is a labor-intensive crop, sometimes more valuable than silver when considering weight for weight. Additionally, pure vanilla is costly due to its low vanillin content, with each bean yielding only 2 percent at best. In 2017, a cyclone devastated vanilla farms in northeast Madagascar, resulting in beans surpassing $600 per kilogram. This equates to a staggering $30,000 per kilogram of pure vanilla, considering 20 grams of vanillin per kilogram of beans. While the vanilla boom may have improved incomes, it also led to inflated prices and increased crime rates, requiring machete patrols to protect the fields (as documented by Wendell Steavenson for NPR in 2019).

The vanilla bean on my desk originates from the quaint town of Laie in Hawaii, situated on Oahu’s North Shore. Its length and dark color distinguish it from the vanilla beans in my cupboard, while its fragrance remains incredibly intoxicating. Saili Levi, originally from Samoa, moved to Laie at a young age and began cultivating vines in his backyard in 2018. His endeavor was sparked by the discovery of a wild vanilla plant by a colleague at the local water company. Nowadays, Levi operates the Laie Vanilla Company full-time on a larger plot of land, using dark mesh panels to provide shade for the vines. His three young daughters assist in the vigilance required to safeguard the plants, while his wife works as a nurse. Hawaii stands as the sole location in the United States where vanilla is commercially harvested, with only a handful of farms dedicated to its production, and Levi’s farm is the sole one on Oahu.

This work is difficult and uncertain. While the vanilla orchid, specifically the planifolia species, possesses both male and female reproductive organs, it cannot self-pollinate. Initially, when botanists tried transplanting it outside of its native Mexico, far away from its natural pollinators, fruiting proved impossible. Europeans relied on beans transported by ship across the Atlantic until Edmond, a 12-year-old enslaved child laboring on a plantation on Réunion Island (a former French colony in the Indian Ocean), discovered how to coax vanilla beans from a non-fruitful vine in 1841. Edmond had been taught to manually pollinate separate plants, but he adapted the method for a single plant, gently manipulating the male anther and female stigma to transfer pollen, referred to as pollination “marriage” by botanists.

Hand-pollination can only occur during the brief hours when a flower blooms, which happens once a year. Thankfully, each orchid can produce up to 20 flowers over a couple of months, although growers advise restraint in pollination to encourage plumper beans. On the vine, the beans resemble slender green bananas or haricots verts in clusters. Upon harvesting, they undergo a curing process that can span several months. This process involves blanching in hot water or freezing to halt ripening, wrapping in wool or keeping them moist in a heated environment to induce the breakdown of starches into desirable vanillin, and finally drying in the sun or a dehydrator. Constant monitoring ensures they do not become brittle, and they are ultimately stored in a sealed container to enhance their aroma.