Once you notice vanilla, you’ll smell it everywhere. It’s in sweets, pharmaceuticals, mosquito repellents, seltzers, makeup and hair products. When real estate agents host open houses or advise clients, they suggest infusing the house with vanilla, for its particular ability to put potential buyers at ease.
Two years ago, scientists from the University of Oxford and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden presented 225 people from nine cultures around the world with 10 different scents. All agreed that the scent of fresh vanilla was their favorite. From custard to candles, we live in a world suffused with vanilla.
And the plant that produces it is in danger.
Extracted from the bean pod of a delicate orchid, vanilla must be grown under exceptionally precise conditions along a very narrow band of the earth, between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. This supreme finickiness makes it unusually vulnerable to the growing shocks of climate change and deforestation.
Most commercial production of vanilla is in Madagascar, Mexico and Tahiti. As the world warms, cyclones and storms in these regions are growing stronger, toppling the orchid blossoms and vanilla beans before they get a chance to fully mature. In 2017, a Category 4-equivalent cyclone decimated an estimated 30 percent of the vanilla vines in Madagascar, which produces 80 percent of the vanilla used around the globe. As a result, the price of vanilla bean pods surged to nearly $300 a pound. The increasingly erratic weather, along with pressure to cut the forests that harbor the orchids, is particularly worrisome for farmers who rely on this crop and wait up to four years for a single orchid to blossom.
Most people I know who brood and despair over climate change might know that extreme weather could soon threaten crops like corn and coffee. But you probably haven’t fathomed what it would be like to lose the scent and the taste of real vanilla. Yes, vanilla substitutes exist, but there is no replacing the symphonic complexities of the real thing. For me, nothing can compare to the memory of baking birthday cakes or leche flan in the kitchen alongside my mother, or having my own teen sons baking alongside me.
To understand how much we could lose if real vanilla disappears, you have to understand the history, some of it dark, of how it became a global commodity. We wouldn’t have vanilla ice cream, perfumes or desserts without a 12-year-old named Edmond Albius. His mother died in the early 19th century, on the island of Réunion (then called Bourbon), off the coast of Madagascar. The man who enslaved him was a botanist who fussed and fumed over his vanilla orchids, which simply would not bloom.