So it’s equally important to know to manage the plants once they bear fruit. Moreover, the vanilla aromas and flavors we know and love don’t reveal themselves until the crop is cured and dried. Smallholder farmers … have an absolute sixth sense as to when the orchids will bloom.”
Many farmers have been growing vanilla for three to four generations. “You can’t just put seed in the ground, tend to it and expect it to produce a yield. “Vanilla requires a fair amount of skill to grow,” explains Tim McCollum, co-founder of Madécasse, a direct-trade chocolate and vanilla company. Nearly all of the vanilla produced commercially today is hand-pollinated. But despite growing demand and a robust crop, the tremendous amount of time and energy that went into cultivation and processing affected farmers’ ability to supply the market-and continues to do so today. The spice quickly found its way into cakes and ice cream, perfumes and medicines, and was valued for its intoxicating flavor and aroma. This proliferation helped whet the world’s appetite for vanilla. His technique spread from Réunion to Madagascar and other neighboring islands, and eventually worked its way back to Mexico as a way to augment the vanilla harvest pollinated by bees. In 1841, an enslaved boy on the island named Edmond Albius developed the painstaking yet effective hand-pollination method for vanilla that is still in use today, which involves exposing and mating the flower’s male and female parts.
(A recent study, however, suggests that Euglossine bees may actually be the orchid’s primary pollinator.)įive years later, on the island of Réunion, a 39-mile long volcanic hotspot in the Indian Ocean, everything changed. Growers couldn’t understand why until centuries later when, in 1836, Belgian horticulturist Charles Morren reported that vanilla’s natural pollinator was the Melipona bee, an insect that didn’t live in Europe. Vanilla was cultivated in botanical gardens in France and England, but never offered up its glorious seeds. The Spanish conquest of the Aztecs in 1519 brought the fragrant flower-and its companion, cacao-to Europe. After conquering the Totonacan empire, the Aztecs followed suit, adding vanilla to a beverage consumed by nobility and known as chocolatl. The Maya used vanilla in a beverage made with cacao and other spices. While the Totonac people of modern-day Veracruz, Mexico, are credited as the earliest growers of vanilla, the oldest reports of vanilla usage come from the pre-Columbian Maya. Long before Europeans took to vanilla's taste, the creeping vine grew wild in tropical forests throughout Mesoamerica. The work of hand pollination is painstaking, but not new. Consumers’ insatiable appetite for this fragrant spice means that an estimated 18,000 products on the market contain vanilla flavor today, with prices for natural vanilla hovering around $300 per pound. That’s a costly mistake for what has become one of the most beloved, lucrative spices in existence: vanilla. To wait too long or to damage the plant during pollination is to lose a precious flower that could have matured into a pod. “The swollen base matures into a green fingerlike seedpod-a fruit-that ripens yellow and eventually splits at the end.” If the union is successful, “the thick green base of the flower swells almost immediately,” as food writer Sarah Lohman writes in her book Eight Flavors. With thumb and forefinger, they push the segments into each other to ensure pollination. They use thin, pointed sticks to lift the delicate membrane that separates the male and female parts of the flower. The farmers move quickly through snaking vines, seeking out the pale, waxy flowers that bloom just one morning each year.
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