Vanilla: A Tale of a Botanical Mystery, Colonialism, and Savvy Marketing
canopic jug writes:
Atlas Obscura has a deep dive into the history and socio-economic factors behind the world's second most expensive spice, vanilla. Vanilla originates from and is still produced in Mexico. The plant, Vanilla Planiflora, is an orchid which grows in the wild in southeastern Mexico. The vines are easily grown, but only very rarely produce fruit outside their native range. Cultivating vanilla worldwide was only possible once it was known how to manually pollinate the flowers. The flowers last only for a matter of hours and although self-fertile, cannot self-pollinate without mechanical intervention. In regions like Madagascar, the pollination is done by hand. Madagascar has been the world's largest vanilla producer for a very long time for a wide range of reasons which the article explains.
It's pretty likely that there is exactly one product from Madagascar in your home right now-no more, no less. That product is vanilla, and Madagascar is at the moment the world's leading producer of this ubiquitous natural flavor-despite the fact that Madagascar is a very strange country to be the world's leading producer of vanilla.
Vanilla, at least the vanilla we eat, is not native to Madagascar; it originated some 10,000 miles away. Madagascar is also a chaotic place to do business, as an article in The Economist's 1843 Magazine showed in 2019. The modern vanilla industry in Madagascar involves crushing poverty, splurge-producing wealth, theft, murder, and money laundering-in addition to natural disasters and the leveling of pristine forests.
Vanilla is inexorably intertwined with food trends, colonialism, slavery, and capitalism at its most rank. Vanilla is the second-most-expensive spice in the world-saffron maintains that crown-and there's nothing boring about it.
Since the vanilla orchid grows well in greenhouses, and industrial cultivation outside of Mexico needs manual pollination, it should be a decent candidate for urban vertical farms.
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