Books: Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid

 (Drivebycuriosity) - Vanilla seems to be a very simple and boring product, as the slogan "plain vanilla" claims. But I learned from Tim Escott`s book "Vanilla: Travels in Search for the Ice Cream Orchid", that the world of vanilla is anything but boring (amazon ). Escott traveled to Mexico, Tahiti, Madagaskar, Mahé/Seychelles & Réunion, visited plantations, libraries, a historical greenhouse in London and spoke with farmers, historians, traders, speculators and food producers. He dives deep into the history, biology, chemistry and economics of Vanilla, we read about Thomas Jefferson`s cravings and learn about the politics and violence that were sometimes connected with it.

Some tidbits: 

The vanilla plants are the only orchids - from over 25,000 species - which produces an agriculturally valuable crop. There are more than a hundred different species of vanilla orchids, and they grow all over the tropics with the exception of Australia. All of the vanilla orchids produce fruits containing seeds, fruits containing seeds, but only a few species bear the large aromatic pods which can be used commercially. Virtually all of the cultivated vanilla in the world today comes from just one species,  Vanilla panifolia (sometimes called Vanilla fragrans), a plant indigenous to Central America  and particularly the south-eastern part of Mexico.

Vanilla likes moist heat, a hilly well drained site and just the right amount of sunshine and shade. The orchids cannot tolerate temperatures lower than about 6°C, and prefer the temperature range between 21°-32°C. They also need as much as three thousand millimeters of rain, fairly evenly distributed throughout the seasons.

Drying, curing and conditioning the pods is an art, which if done properly takes another nine months. Escott describes in many chapters why vanilla is the most labor intensive agricultural product in the world.

 

                       Surgery And Sex   

Even the pollination is a very delicate and complicated process. Escott writes: "Orchids have a reputation for lewd sexual display. Their intricate and erotic petals and lips are often unavoidably reminiscent of human female pudenda. But, alluring as they may appear to the human eye, they guard their own sexual parts away from view. While ‘ordinary’ flowers will happily display their breeding organs at the heart of their open petals, the orchid is generally more discreet. One of the special features of orchids is that the sexual parts of the flower are fused into a single structure known as the column ...."

Apparently the very specific conditions for natural pollination exist only in the central American home regions. Vanilla planters elsewhere cannot rely on natural pollinators to fertilize their orchids. They must do the job themselves. The author tried it himself: "The whole process felt like a mixture of minor surgery and sex".

 

                Monopolies Are A Fairy Tale 

In the past a dictator of Madagascar, the leading producer of vanilla, created a stabilization fund to control the Vanilla business by buying the product when prices fall and selling when prices rise, but without success. One producer said: "What the people don’t seem to understand is that monopolies are a fairy tale. They only exist under dictatorships where they can be enforced. Anyone who’s ever tried to farm vanilla on a large scale knows what a headache it is. The security you need to protect thousands of acres of plantation is a nightmare, and actually makes it uneconomic. And anyway—even if we dominated the market—we are still going to have to obey the laws of supply and demand. Maybe we could slow a price crash down a little bit because of the volumes we trade in—but when the market falls, it falls.”

Today the Vanilla market is influenced by speculators who are betting on rising or falling prices. Some are spying to get early information or are bringing rumors into circulation.

The book is highly recommended, I did not only learn much about the tasty product, Escott delivers a lot history and reports about the culture & cuisine of the vanilla growing regions and the functioning of a very special market.