Vanilla: a far from ordinary history

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2:03And cutthroat capitalism have added flavour to its story.

Botanical traits and cultivation

2:08Eric, thank you so much for being with us today on the History Extra podcast. How's your day going? It's going very well. Thank you, Matt. Thank you so much for being with us to talk about your fascinating history of vanilla. Vanilla has come to be associated with things that are boring, maybe bland, but actually this is a story with piracy, espionage. To kick us off, though, you write that the vanilla orchid and vanilla pod constitute full-fledged actors in this story. Can you introduce our listeners to vanilla? What does it look like? How does it grow? And what form does it take?

2:40Vanilla is the world's only edible orchid. So most orchids are purely decorative. Vanilla, on the contrary, can, of course, be eaten. It can also be used for perfume. It comes in all sorts of varietals. I've gotten to meet botanists, geneticists, and so on with this project, and that's been wonderful. But yes, there's all sorts of inedible vanillas that grow all over the place. But the three types of edible vanilla that we know of today, the main three types, originate in Central and South America. And it is a plant that needs a host. And so I argue in the book that it's just fundamentally sustainable because you don't cut down a forest to grow vanilla.

3:17On the contrary, it requires just the right balance of shade and light, and it requires a host plant to thrive. And so in that sense, yes, it climbs plants, it climbs trees, it climbs old-growth forests. It requires, it's a little bit finicky, it requires at once, you know, intense heat, just the right balance of shade and sunlight, but also three or four consecutive nights of cooler temperatures to flower. And so all of these things make vanilla really interesting. The other thing, of course, that I talk about in the book is that it requires a set of pollinators that only exist in Central and South America,

3:51which for a long time meant that it could not go global. You mentioned that you'd met some botanists. I also think it's right that you had to go at cultivating vanilla yourself. Well, cultivating maybe not, but certainly I had to go at both picking and pollinating vanilla, which are two of the most delicate stages, especially the pollination stage, which is precisely the revolution that I talk about in several of the chapters of the book that enabled vanilla to go to become a global commodity. And it turns out it's very tricky. If you've never done it, with my eyes, those of an individual in their mid-50s,

4:23I required reading glasses. One has to take an implement that looks a little bit like a toothpick or a needle, and then one has to delicately withdraw or retract, rather, a membrane that separates the male and female parts of the orchid in order to put them into dialogue. There's different ways of doing this. Some people actually drop a little bit of pollen. Anyway, there's ways of cutting. But suffice it to say that the first three or four attempts were unsuccessful. I was being basically invited on a vanilla plantation to do this, and I was starting to feel rather guilty because, what, each pod is worth something like 10 Great British Pounds, right?

4:57And so messing this up is a problem because you really only have one go at it. One of the characteristics of vanilla that's so fascinating is basically the flower only lasts basically a morning and into an early afternoon. And if it isn't pollinated either by an insect or by a human during that time, then the flower just fades and falls. And so there is essentially a net loss for the grower. At any rate, I finally prevailed on the fourth attempt, but it's delicate stuff. It takes time. Experts can do it in seconds, but to an untrained person, it takes a while to learn.

5:29And that really highlights a few themes of your book and of this story, which is it's fiddly, it can't be done by mechanical means, and then it can be expensive. So let's keep those things in mind as we go.

Pre-European origins and use

5:39To start, though, can you rewind us back to a time before Europeans had ever encountered vanilla? Where was it growing and what was it used for? So first of all, there's several types of vanilla, and so I should distinguish from the get-go. The two main types in the sort of pre-European conquest era would have been vanilla pompona, which grows largely in South America. Its range extends south to Peru and Brazil, to give just two examples, and north to places like Suriname and French Guyana. And vanilla planifolia, which is much more Central American, so grows in places that we know of today as Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala.

6:15So for the latter, vanilla planifolia is the one that most people consume and most people would recognize. It was produced by Totonac people and largely consumed by Aztec people, which is a really interesting twist to vanilla. It rarely was most enjoyed by people in the area where it grows, interestingly. This has long been true. And so the cultivation, if you will, of vanilla goes way back. The Maya and the Totonacs would have used cuttings, but there's no evidence that they were able to master the technique of pollination.

6:48And so they required insect intervention. And that's another interesting trait of the book. Once upon a time, 100% of all the vanilla eaten in the world was pollinated by insects, and today it's close to nil. And that really is a radical transformation. And the fact that people were so reliant on this bee, was that one of the factors that kept it in this region, or these regions, for such a long time? Well, so it's a family of bees, the Meliponini beans. Absolutely. That's definitely one factor. Although, again, botanists have shown that, and experts in vanilla more broadly, have shown that actually there's other means of propagation, for instance, through the digestive tubes of small mammals and birds.

7:27But at the end of the day, that can explain the spread of vanilla. Vanilla, it turns out, can travel quite easily. The question then becomes, can it pollinate and can it bear fruit? That is sort of the crux of the problem, if you will.

Spanish monopoly and empire

7:39Can you guide us through some of the historical contours that led to the Spanish Empire having such a stranglehold over, having such a monopoly over vanilla for such a long time? So in the book, I describe it as a near monopoly, and I'll get to why that is in a second. But basically, it has to do with the natural range that I just described of vanilla planifolia. So, so long as Spain basically had a stranglehold on Central America, then things like the silver that was produced there and the vanilla that was produced there were pouring out of the port of Veracruz and going to Cadiz.

8:11There was a real Spanish monopoly over these things, and a dedicated warehouse and monopoly system run out of Cadiz for a very long time. And this meant that rival empires, be they Portuguese, Dutch, British, or French, had to rely on the other type of vanilla that I mentioned quickly, which is to say vanilla pompona. It's actually almost twice as large as vanilla planifolia. It's well worth checking out, ideally in a store, but if you have to, maybe online. It has a different, smokier perfume than vanilla planifolia.

8:43At any rate, it grows farther south. And so, you know, the Portuguese were able to find some in Brazil, the French in French Guiana, the Dutch in Suriname, and so on and so forth. And so when countries were at war with Spain, which happened, of course, in the early modern era, or when there were tensions or strains, those countries were able to rely on that modest production of pompona out of South America and or piracy, which you mentioned at the outset. And I want to talk about that piracy because there's some fascinating stories of other empires, other nations trying to get some way into this.

Piracy and trade routes

9:14Can you talk to us about some of the piracy, some of the buccaneering that happened around this product? So there's at once proper buccaneering and piracy, and then there's biopirates, as one historian has called them. And those biopirates were really on missions to try to get hold of specific plants from Central America and pillage them and grow them elsewhere. This was not unique. The same thing was happening in the Indian Ocean with all sorts of spices that were grown by the Dutch in Indonesia, for instance, or by the Portuguese. So that kind of pilfering is part of a broader strategy.

9:46But yes, I was struck, especially actually working in the National Archives at Kew, by the number of seizures of vanilla on the high seas. And so early on, some of the pirates don't really know what this stuff is. In the 16th century, they imagine that maybe it's something to be smoked. But gradually over time, the value to weight ratio of vanilla becomes quite well known. And it really is a luxury commodity well into the 19th century, when successive revolutions are going to transform that. And I'm happy to get into that in a bit. But yes, interestingly, actually, piracy, or at least buccaneering, is one of the few ways to find the trail of vanilla, because vanilla is so small.

10:22Prior to 1830, there were only, what, one or two years when more than a ton circulated around the world. And so it doesn't leave much of a trail. And so as a historian, one of the challenges that I faced was reconstituting those trails, reconstituting everything from the consumption to the production of vanilla. That's sort of the ambition of the book, is to do at once a commodity chain history, but also a cultural history of vanilla. As you said at the outset, it's become terribly bland, while for centuries it was the summit of refinement. And it was, you know, in some ways an aphrodisiac, a cure for depression.

10:56It's been all sorts of things to different people over the centuries. And listeners, if you want to delve into even more food histories, don't miss our podcast series, History's Greatest Dishes, in which Emily Griffith talks to historian Annie Gray about everything from Le Mange to Victoria sponge and pizza. You can find all the details in the description for this episode. Back to you, though, Eric. While it was still constrained within this empire, within this near monopoly, as you point out, how was it produced and did it rely on enforced labour in the same way that other products in these histories do?

11:30So several questions in one there. Its production was, as you hinted, entirely manual, right? And it's really something vanilla sort of bucked the trend of the Industrial Revolution. Sugar, in many ways, you know, as various historians have pointed out, brings about a kind of Industrial Revolution in the Caribbean with, you know, huge amounts of industrialization. This is really not true with vanilla because at once the finicky pollination phase and the finicky picking phase cannot be accomplished by any machine. It's just impossible. Add to that the fact that you then have to cure it, blanket it,

12:03put it in just the right wooden crate for just the right amount of time. In many instances, massage vanilla, if you can imagine. All of this means that it's really hard to get a machine to do it. And so the production took a lot of time and also a lot of lessons learned, right? Trial and error was hugely important. And so one thing that I observe is in the early modern era, maybe half of the vanilla that reached port in Europe was either spoiled, rotten, or too dried and could not be used. This only added to the lure of vanilla, meaning that it was the stuff of the courts or of the papacy, of the elite, in other words.

12:35But to answer your second question, I would argue that it's sort of, how to put this? It's enduring artisanal nature makes it almost in the same category as haute couture. It's really interesting that way. And so again, it bucks the trend of industrialization. And as a result, the connection to slavery, because of the timing of the discoveries of manual pollination, is not readily apparent except for one key point.

The manual pollination breakthrough

13:04One of the main methods used in manual pollination was discovered by an enslaved teenager by the name of Edmund on the island of Bourbon, today, Île de la Réunion, or Réunion Island, in the southern Indian Ocean. I'd like to get into that story because it's in some ways the centrepiece of your book. And it's a really interesting little told story. Can you introduce us to him and also another figure who was operating at the same sort of time who also has something of a role in that story? Yeah, there's actually four people at least who can claim or have claimed

13:34that they were the first to pollinate vanilla. And under very different circumstances, very different parts of the world, one on Mauritius, one on Bourbon, as I just mentioned, one in the French Caribbean, and one in Belgium. So chronologically, it's the Belgian who wins the race. There's no doubt about this. It's 1836. Although actually the Mauritian example I talk about may even be earlier, but there's some mystery still there. It's a little bit like aviation or cinema. There's different claims to the first breakthrough, if you will. So Charles Morin was a Belgian scientist who, in the city of Liège in 1836,

14:08was able to first come up with a manual pollination technique. One of the problems is that he was jealously guarding his findings. And other than a handful of students he showed this to when he first did it, he never revealed his technique to anyone. If you read the description, it's incredibly vague. You don't really know if he snipped anything. You don't know if he used a tool of any sort. He mentioned something mysterious about water helping. Who knows how that actually mattered or not. And there's no way of patenting a discovery like this, if you think about it, right? Unless you use a specific implement, then that implement could be patented, I suppose.

14:42And so because he guarded this so jealously, I think it's extremely improbable that there was a sort of radiation out of Belgium of this particular technique. Just a few years later, in 1841, an enslaved teenager by the name of Edmund, later named Edmund Albius, when he took a surname upon the final emancipation of French slaves in 1848. But he wasn't yet called out in 1841. And so anyway, Edmund, a 12-year-old, basically amateur botanist, right?

15:12Gardener, an enslaved person who was what you might call a specialized slave on a smallish plantation on the north shore of Réunion Island, was able to achieve this breakthrough. And we know this, interestingly, through the records of his then master, Ferrol Bélier-Beaumont, in part because somebody else tried to lay a claim to it. And out of a bizarre sense of either sort of slave ownership, pride, or perhaps even some degree of solidarity, he rebutted this and said, no, no, it was my enslaved botanist, or my enslaved gardener, as he would put it,

15:45who made this finding in 1841, and here's the evidence for it. So Edmund is able to basically put into contact the male and female part of the orchid, which again seems completely easy now, but somebody had to think of it first. And he did. And in the relation told by Ferrol Bélier-Beaumont, you have basically a kind of lesson that's being taught by the enslaved to the enslaver, where, you know, at first he's not believed by Ferrol, and then Edmund proceeds to actually undertake the pollination right in front of his very eyes.

16:17And this was a breakthrough because, of course, vanilla had been able to travel all over the place. There was vanilla in many parts of the world by then, at least edible vanilla. And it had flowered, but it had never borne fruit. And so the appearance of those pods was the big breakthrough. Thereafter, Edmund is taken by Ferrol, by his master, to other plantations to show how it's done to other people. And as I say in the book, this must have been a moment that really challenged the very foundations of slavery. Do we know what happened to him after that part of his story?

16:49We do. I mean, it's not in the heart of my book, because I'm really interested in the moment of discovery, if you will. But a recent find at the archives, Archive de la Réunion, not mine, by the way, somebody else has found this, was able to ascertain that he did not die in the utter squalor that we'd long assumed, because he married a woman of South Asian ancestry who actually owned some land. And so in the last five years, basically, there's been a bit of a turn to suggest that he didn't die in utter squalor.

17:20But he did face all sorts of challenges after the end of slavery, one of which is that he was jailed for theft of a necklace with some seashells on it after he left his native village for the big town of Saint-Denis. So he faced all sorts of challenges in his life. But interestingly, he was recognized. Locally, you know, there's a few schools that bear his name. There's a couple of statues I discuss in the book. And his breakthrough really was a hugely pivotal moment in this story. It was, because all of a sudden, so unlike Morin, who jealously guarded his finding,

17:52in part because of his status as an enslaved person, also as a teenager, Edmund didn't have much of a say. And so he was forced to share his method immediately. The other way in which the Edmund moment matters deeply is geographical. If you think about it, this is the moment when the production is going to begin to slide from Central America to the Southern Indian Ocean. And what's astonishing is that in the span of just 30 years after his discovery, tiny Reuño Island is going to overtake all of Mexico as the world's leading producer.

18:23And that then has ripple effects, consequences of its own, when after the abolition of slavery in 1848, French planters on Reuño Island decide that they don't want to have to pay their workers, or at least not as much as local wages run, and decide to take up plantations in Madagascar, which at that point is still an independent country nearby. So the whole shift of production sites from Central America to the Indian Ocean is in effect the result of contingency, and specifically the result of Edmund's breakthrough.

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Culinary and perfume consumption

20:51We've talked a bit about production there. I wanted to get into a little bit some of the ways in which vanilla was consumed during this period, because there's some fascinating little case studies through your book of the ways in which vanilla was used. Is it right, for instance, that Marie Antoinette used it as a perfume? That's correct. So the elites, the European elites, were using it as a perfume early on. And certainly I have evidence that, you know, in the 17th, 18th century, it was extremely appreciated in female fragrances. You're going to have to wait until the early 20th century for it to be incorporated in what's considered to be traditional male fragrances and colognes.

21:25But yes, that's a whole angle of this, is the smell of vanilla. The sort of entrancing smell of vanilla is one of the ways in which it's consumed. And this is true to this day, by the way. There's certain companies, I'm not going to advertise for any of them right here, but a few of them still use actual vanilla, for one thing. And then others very much make vanilla the base of their fragrance. Now, the other ways in which vanilla was consumed include early on the Aztec-inspired drink, Chocolatil, which basically was a liquid cacao drink that incorporated vanilla as its second main ingredient,

22:01and then a number of other spices as well. And it was enjoyed cold. And that basically was, you know, sheer emulation on the parts of the Spaniards in New Spain and what is now Mexico, copying the Aztec drink and then bringing it to Europe thereafter. So it arrives as, if you will, an ally of cacao. And then over the centuries, gradually becomes incorporated into pastries, sauces, all sorts of chocolates, and then eventually ice cream. And by the late 19th century, things like Coca-Cola begin to incorporate some amount of vanilla in them.

22:34So it's several different types of consumption, wider ranging than you might assume right off the bat. Let's talk some more about ice cream there, because there's an extraordinary story in your book about Thomas Jefferson being so captivated by vanilla ice cream that he experienced withdrawal from it. That's right. He was scouring Paris when he lived there for vanilla beans, as he called them. He even left us a recipe for just how many you need in order to make ice cream. Ice cream, of course, had to be hand-cranked. It was very time-consuming. But then when he returned to the United States, he very much missed the vanilla ice cream that

23:06he'd enjoyed in Paris, and he calls upon all sorts of contacts to ship the stuff to him. And then he provides details on how best to ship it, wrapped in newspapers, he suggests. Which, by the way, is another sort of ongoing question of how best to preserve and ship vanilla, which doesn't last terribly long, is one of the things of vanilla. Anyway, so he begins this American infatuation with vanilla, which I'm then able to trace through Louisiana, one of the small ironic twists to Thomas Jefferson's fascination with vanilla is that it originates in Paris. But the pods that he's enjoying have, of course, left Mexico via Veracruz to the port of Cadiz

23:42and then on to France. It would be much easier geographically, one would assume, from the east coast of the United States to get the stuff directly from Mexico. But that would be flouting the Spanish monopoly. Do these case studies existing in France and in the United States tell us something about the wider parts of the world in which vanilla was desired and consumed? They absolutely do. And so vanilla goes basically... Can you imagine a world without vanilla, first of all? We have to think of the ancients, in Europe at least, as not having known anything about

24:14the smell or scent or perfume of vanilla. Anyway, it definitely does tell us something, which is that, again, vanilla is appreciated far more outside of its zone of origin very quickly than it is inside of it. And that goes way back. By the 18th century and through to today, the two main consumers in the world remain, interestingly, the United States and France. I'm still trying to grapple with why the UK, for instance, was a relatively small consumer. Whereas, you know, then dominions like Australia and Canada overtake it quite quickly in terms

24:45of vanilla consumed. So there's all sorts of interesting twists here. The United States finally overtakes French consumption in 1906. But those two were the titans of vanilla consumption for many centuries. And you mentioned there the importance of not being overly simplistic with that story and adding the twists and turns you mentioned in. Are there ways in which the currents of production and of desire of vanilla are more complicated than we might expect? Or tell us something different about this story.

The rise of synthetic vanillin

25:13Well, I mean, one of the things about vanilla is that it becomes hugely democratized, but very slowly. And so I think that is an interesting twist. In some ways, it's closer to some extremely rare spice than it is to cacao that it's associated with, right? So saffron, for instance, is something it's sometimes compared to in terms of the amount of labor that it takes to extract something worth that much. So yeah, there's some interesting parallels there with everything from, you know, marijuana to saffron to be made.

25:45But going back to my point about democratization, it happens in stutters, in steps. The first one being, of course, the manual pollination, which I just mentioned. And that's going to suddenly allow prices to drop because all of a sudden there's new producers in the Indian Ocean, thereafter in the Pacific Ocean with Tahiti becoming a major producer. Java later becomes a major producer. So that's the first democratization of consumption. The second one is going to take place with distillation. So, you know, drops of vanilla and so on.

26:15And then the third one, which in some ways is actually the death knell of real vanilla, is the elaboration of synthetics in the second half of the 19th century. And suddenly by the early 20th century, they cost a fraction of what real vanilla tastes like. And of course, the key here is that vanillin, the molecule that actually gives what we know of as the vanilla flavor and scent, is something that can be completely synthetically produced. And really, it is identical to the real stuff, at least the molecule of vanillin is. And so this begs all sorts of questions about, you know, does it matter that you're eating

26:48real vanilla versus the fake stuff? So, but that last transformation, which culminates in the 20th century, means that vanilla becomes this ubiquitous thing, indeed an adjective, as you pointed out at the outset. So, it's this rise of synthetic vanilla that means that we end up using vanilla as an adjective for, as we said at the start, things that are perhaps in some way bland, despite vanilla being this extraordinarily valuable and desired commodity for so long. That's very much one of my arguments, that it was, you know, the quintessential, the definition

27:21of refinement, really, for centuries. Finesse of nuance. And then it becomes something that is bland, everyday, run-of-the-mill, humdrum. And this happens over the course of the synthetic turn. To me, there's a clear connection. Indeed, the nation in which this term, you know, vanilla sex or, oh, that's a vanilla foreign policy originates is the United States, which is in many ways the champion consumer of the synthetic stuff by the 20th century. So, time and place suggest that, indeed, one derives from the other.

27:54Is it too simplistic, then, to say that people such as Thomas Jefferson loving ice cream so much led, in turn, to it becoming democratized, to it becoming bland? At the end of the day, yes. There's no doubt that that ongoing demand, which was particularly strong in the United States, means that these breakthroughs occurred and that these breakthroughs, in turn, made vanilla just, you know, saturated us, if you will, with vanilla. I'm interested in how vanillin is made. So, initially, it came from cloves. You can synthesize it from rice.

28:27In the 21st century, a Japanese chemist was able to do so from cow dung. I'm sorry for those of you who are just finishing dessert or something. But anyway, there's all sorts of ways of achieving synthetic vanillin. But by the 20th century, lignin is the main way. And so, nations with lots of forests, be they in Scandinavia or North America, end up producing all of this pulp paper waste for newspapers. And there is a way, then, of distilling that and turning it into vanillin. And so, it's described as a way of not wasting these byproducts of newspaper production.

29:02And so, very interestingly, production of synthetic vanillin is going to shift to the global north, whereas, of course, production of the real stuff, vanilla, remains a kind of monopoly of the global south. And one of the things I describe in the book is how the producers of real vanilla fight back. And they fight back starting in the 1960s. They organize what I describe as a cartel. And I don't mean that in a particularly pejorative way. But they band together to try to establish a price, a set price, to ensure that farmers make a decent living, and to fight the ravages of synthetic vanillin.

29:35And basically, they put out, you know, what they call propaganda sheets. There's a whole advertising campaign to defend real vanilla in global public opinion starting in the 1960s. And is it then we have to thank for the fact that vanilla, the original vanilla, hasn't been eradicated? I think it's one of the factors. Now, I end the book on a sort of pessimistic note. But I don't know that we're headed to a complete eradication of real vanilla. I mean, if you consider the other cases of substitution, margarine never completely eradicated real butter. I don't think that synthetic meats will completely eradicate real meats.

30:06And ditto with diamonds, right? You have fake diamonds that people enjoy and are definitely more affordable. But I don't think that they're ever going to manufacture diamonds or ever going to completely replace real diamonds. There's all sorts of different ethical stakes in each of the examples I gave, by the way. But I'm not sure it will ever completely replace it. But I do think that that moment of banding together in the 1960s definitely helped. Unfortunately, from my standpoint, the effort of this cartel ultimately failed because they were only able to bring together the producers of the Southern Indian Ocean.

30:38So Mauritius, Reunion, Madagascar and the Comoros Islands. But they were never able to bring into the fold places like Indonesia and Mexico. Meaning that some of the big consumers, mainly in the US, were able basically to undercut the cartel or bypass the cartel. Are there other ethical complications or considerations we should think about in the ways in which vanilla is made in the modern era? There are several. I mean, historically, the pollination process that I described was often undertaken either by women or by children.

31:10The logic being, supposedly, that their finer fingers and deft touch meant that they wouldn't ruin the process. And indeed, I can confirm that if you use too heavy a touch when pollinating the stuff, you can crush rather than transfer the pollen. That said, I also have evidence, archival evidence, to suggest that this was very much a pretext. So I have, you know, planters in early 20th century Madagascar explicitly saying, let's go recruit some women, remember how much less we pay them than men. So, you know, and I'm guessing the children, much the same.

31:43So yes, that's, you know, child labor is definitely a consideration. On one of the plantations I visited in Madagascar, there was a big sign that said, we proudly state that we don't use child labor. I'm not a journalist. I wasn't able to stay there for the long haul and describe and analyze and check that that was true. But that's one consideration. Another is environmental. You know, real vanilla, of course, saves forests. In a place like Madagascar, which is, again, the world's top vanilla producer, but which also faces deforestation, it's a way of preserving old growth forest. So that's important. The flip side of that is synthetic vanillin, if you're living in a place like London or Toronto,

32:17synthetic vanillin comes from much closer to you and doesn't require a trip around the world. So there's those things to weigh as you're considering this ethically. It's definitely not a sort of short circuit local food kind of phenomenon, unless you're living in Madagascar or Mexico, when then, of course, it is. In preparation for this interview, I took out from my freezer a tub of vanilla-flavoured ice cream and was interested to read the ingredients on the back, which, among other things, cream, milk, sugar, lists vanilla extract and then also Madagascar grand vanilla pods.

32:49Is this my way of checking that I am eating real vanilla? And how else do we tell now in this world of multiple synthetic options? Well, you've done your homework well, Matt, and those descriptions are very promising if you're looking for real vanilla. The truth of the matter is 9 in 10 industrial ice creams don't contain any real vanilla. And the kiss of death is something that says vanilla flavour. There, you're certain that this is derived from wood, from bark, from cloves, from something else. In fact, even though the presence of those little black dots is not a guarantee of anything anymore.

33:20At any rate, if you're looking for real vanilla, then yes, you have to read the labels. I mean, ideally, you're making the dessert yourself, in which case you're slicing open a pod and you certainly know that you're using real vanilla, but not everybody has that amount of time, starting with me. The other part of the answer, a key part of this answer, is that it varies from place to place. So the European Union has some quite strict rules about what can pass for vanilla and what terms you have to use for something that isn't vanilla. Those particular terms and that legislation, as I understand it, does not apply in the UK

33:52and does not apply in the US, and there's different legislation in each place. And so the vanilla lobby that I described earlier was very keen on introducing the word chemical substitute, for instance, on something that didn't have real vanilla in it, which they hoped would put off consumers. And it has, and there's been moments, there's been ebbs and flows in legislation. The FDA in the United States, around 1905, introduced new measures that actually helped real vanilla producers a lot. And then, of course, over time, these measures ebb and flow. And one of the problems is there's very few machines that can tell you if there's real vanilla in something.

34:25Because if you're looking for the molecule vanillin, again, that molecule can be completely identically produced from something else. So, you know, the trick then becomes, well, do you look for traces of something botanical? Well, it turns out something like St. John's wort can be made to taste like vanilla, or all sorts of other substitutes. Even burnt oats, I heard in one of my sources, can be made to approximate vanilla. So it's a tricky business looking for real vanilla in something, but you've gone the right way. And sometimes provenance matters.

34:57So yes, Madagascar vanilla, since to date Madagascar doesn't produce very much synthetic stuff, that's actually a pretty good hook. And finally then, to bring this story to a close, this is a complicated history that at once takes in a product that's comparable in some ways to a spice, but in other ways has come to mean an adjective that sort of means bland or nondescript. How would you like our listeners to think about vanilla and its history as we close this conversation? Well, I think it's all of those things in one. And actually, thinking about whether vanilla is a spice is an interesting consideration as well, right?

35:30Is it dry enough to be a spice? Can you powder it into something? How do you define a spice? All of these things. It's certainly, you know, the high value aspect is implicit in the word spice, and therefore it would fit. But of course, vanilla completely bucks the trend of the spice route or the spice trade or the overland spice route that you might think of to bring us to an altogether different history that puts into dialogue Central America, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific Ocean. Vanilla today is produced mostly on islands, which is fascinating in its own right. There's no reason for this to have happened other than Edmund having discovered this on Rio Nioh Island.

36:03But yes, I do think that there's all sorts of interesting ways of thinking through vanilla. But at the end of the day, what fascinated me about this was the way in which it went global, how these particular discoveries mattered, and from a cultural history standpoint, how vanilla has become denigrated in the last hundred years for, if you will, being a victim of its own success. That was Eric T. Jennings, author of Vanilla, The History of an Extraordinary Bean, which is out now and is set to be re-released in paperback later in October.

36:36Eric's book is among the titles shortlisted for this year's Kundal History Prize. For more details about all the nominated titles, head to kundalprize.com.

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