by Matt Siegel
Note that filtration in itself isn’t necessarily nefarious, and a lot of manufacturers filter their honey in good faith to remove unwanted materials such as wax and dead bee parts.106 Removing pollen can also help inhibit crystallization, making honey more attractive to consumers. So filtered honey won’t kill you, but it can have an economic impact, given that the United States gets about 75 percent of its honey107 (roughly 450 million pounds) from foreign imports, of which almost 100 million pounds are estimated to come into the country illegally.108
Similarly, filtering is often used to conceal the origins of honey that comes from cheap manufacturing processes that expose it to heavy metals such as lead109 and potentially dangerous chemicals and pesticides.110 Chinese honey, for example, often contains traces of a banned and potentially fatal antibiotic called chloramphenicol,111 which was used in China to treat bacterial foulbrood epidemics in bee colonies. (In 2011, inspectors found lead and antibiotics in nearly a quarter112 of Indian honey exports.)
Meanwhile, some manufacturers take forgery even further by bypassing honey altogether and selling jars of counterfeit honey made of corn syrup and yellow food coloring.113
Fortunately, various domestic industry and trade organizations have been working together to combat this. About 30 percent of the honey sold in North America is certified by True Source Honey,114 a coalition of beekeepers, honey packers, and honey suppliers who conduct voluntary third-party testing to protect customers and encourage ethical sourcing. Some states, including California, Wisconsin, and Florida, have also passed state laws to enforce transparent labeling115 and prohibit the removal of pollen from honey; however, looser federal regulations tend to negate these—and the FDA is too overtasked and underfunded to enforce testing anyway, which means that we’re basically on a honey honor system.
So to recap, honey is the one food that never goes bad—but it’s also a terrorist informant, a paradoxically vegan and kosher antisiege weapon, a medical-grade antiseptic that doubles as embalming fluid, and an ancient torture device with ties to Hitler and human sacrifice; Cupid used it as a mythological sex drug to ruin marriages, even though the sweetness of marriages tend to wane after the honeymoon anyway; it’s a product of forced insect labor and international counterfeit rings that’s been known to contain hallucinogens, banned pesticides, heavy metals, and the body parts of both bees and mummified humans; and it’s a natural attractant to flies and humans but less so than beer, semen, or vinegar.
That’s not to say that honey is bad; certainly there are worse sweeteners (e.g., sugar of lead), and it’s probably the only sweetener that can treat herpes and sweeten your tea at the same time; however, we should probably stop using it to refer to loved ones.
Or, if we insist on calling our loved ones “honey,” we could at least acknowledge that it’s not because they’re sweet and pure but rather because our relationships are complicated—requiring, like honey, constant labor and equal amounts of pleasure and pain.
Chapter 6
The Vanilla of Society
I’ve spent my life developing scores of flavors,1 and yet most people still say, “I’ll take vanilla.”
—Howard Johnson
If we really need a culinary term of endearment for our loved ones, in lieu of honey, we could always borrow from the French, who call their lovers mon chou2 (“my cabbage”), which is kind of cute but also confusing, especially if you’re a Dutch cheesemonger, in which case mon chou refers to a soft cream cheese3 containing 73 percent fat and made from cow’s milk.*4
Or ma fraise (“my strawberry”), though strawberries are also a French euphemism for menstruation—e.g., la femme fraise des bois5 (“the strawberry woman”) and c’est la saison des fraises6 (“it’s strawberry season”)—so calling a woman “strawberry” could also get confusing.
Or we could just go back to calling our loved ones “vanilla,” which would make the most sense, as this was taken as a compliment up until at least the 1800s,7 meaning the recipient was rare and coveted, a flavor everyone loves:
“Ah, you flavour everything; you are the vanille of society.”8
—Reverend Sydney Smith, London, c. 1837
Salt had a similar connotation back when it was a precious trading commodity and a necessity for food preservation prior to refrigeration; in fact, there’s an old English fairy tale about a father who asks his daughter how much she loves him, to which she replies, “I love you as fresh meat loves salt.”9 The father then gets angry and banishes her for comparing him to something so coarse and superfluous, until she arranges for a feast to be secretly prepared without any salt—wherein he realizes how bland life is without it and promptly forgives her. Nowadays, of course, salt is cheap and easy, and is also used as an adjective—“salty”—to describe crabby people, likely dating back to the stereotype of sailors being tough,10 foul-mouthed, and aggressive.
Whereas the semantics of vanilla shifted not because of any change in popularity, cost, or demand but, at least in part, because LGBTQ populations in the United States started using it11 as a metaphor to distinguish between conventional (straight) and gay or fetish clubs in the 1970s—as heterosexuality, much like vanilla ice cream, was ubiquitous and conventional, part of the fabric of so-called normality. Then the straight population appropriated the term to more generally mean plain or boring—though still largely in the context of sex and relationships—and “vanilla” became a synonym for “ordinary.”
But you don’t become the world’s most popular ice cream flavor12 and second most expensive13 spice*14 by being ordinary—and actual vanilla is anything but.
For starters, vanilla is the only edible fruit15 (though we colloquially call it a bean or a pod) to grow on freaking orchids, despite their being the largest family of flowers, with more than 25,000 species.16 It can take years for one of these orchids,17 which grow only in select areas twenty-five degrees north or south of the equator,18 like Mexico and Madagascar, to bear flowers—and any flowers they do yield will bloom only for a few hours19 before they shrivel up and die, unless they’re pollinated. To add to this inordinately tight window for pollination, their hermaphroditic sex parts are separated by a little flap called the rostellum20 that needs to be pushed aside for pollination and there’s only one or two species that know how to pollinate them,21 at least so we think. Both of these species, the melipona and euglossine bees, are nearly extinct,22 which means that vanilla orchids in the wild have only around a 1 percent chance of producing fruit without intervention23.
And speaking of sex parts, vanilla is one of the few ice cream flavors to be named after genitalia,*24 thanks to Spanish conquistadors who “discovered” it in the sixteenth century and called it vainilla, a Spanish diminutive of the Latin vagina,25 because of its resemblance when spread open to harvest its seeds (and probably because they hadn’t seen their wives in a long time).*26 They then brought the plants back home to Europe and spent three hundred years trying in vain to pollinate them because they couldn’t find the rostellum. (Insert clitoris joke here.)
It wasn’t until 1841 that a twelve-year-old slave named Edmond Albius27 figured out you could pollinate the flowers by hand using a stick or blade of grass to move the flap aside, which is how it’s still done today. (Albius was freed seven years later when France outlawed slavery, then imprisoned for allegedly stealing jewelry, then freed again five years after that, after his former owner petitioned the French government to grant him clemency in honor of his contribution to the vanilla industry and for helping to position France as its largest producer, a title now held by Madagascar28.)
Because its flowers tend to bloom only one at a time,29 it can take months to pollinate a single plant. Then, after pollination, it takes another six to nine months30 before the fruits are ready to harvest, also by hand. But at that point they don’t have any flavor, so they need to be cured and conditioned31 through a process that involves hand massaging them, laying them in the sun to dry each morning, and wrapping them in blanket
s and tucking them in at night to sweat, which can take another nine months. So you could probably have a kid and put them through kindergarten in the same time, and for less aggravation, than it would take to seed and harvest your own vanilla crop.
Of course, if you did it right, your vanilla could be worth as much as six hundred dollars per kilo,32 more than the price of silver. But it’d also take around six hundred blossoms to produce said kilo,33 as there’s a lot of shrinkage involved and the final cured beans contain only about 2 percent extractable flavor,34 so you’re looking at about a dollar per blossom to plant, pollinate, harvest, massage, cure, and sell your own vanilla beans—if you’re lucky.
And that’s assuming you don’t have any losses from fungus, pests, disease, or theft.
In Madagascar, a few kilos of vanilla beans can be worth more than the average per capita annual income,35 so theft can be a life-or-death problem. Some farmers harvest their beans months early36 to deter thieves, resulting in a lower-quality and less valuable fruit that’s more prone to disease,37 while others seek vigilante justice with machetes38 or use pins or stamps to “tattoo” their beans with their names or identifying marks.39
In fact, a lot of people who call vanilla ordinary have probably never tasted it, as up to 99 percent of the vanilla flavoring in foods is artificial,40 derived from things such as wood pulp, tree bark, rice bran,41 chloroform,42 or castoreum, a natural excretion43 extracted from the asses of North American beavers. In 2006, a Japanese scientist even proved that vanilla flavoring can be extracted from cow dung.44 In full transparency, it’s not too likely that you’ll ever consume anything flavored with castoreum or cow dung—but if you did, manufacturers wouldn’t have to tell you about it, as the FDA’s definition of “natural flavors”45 includes flavors isolated from natural plant and animal products such as fruit, bark, and beaver glands.
(Note that this caveat only applies to foods intentionally flavored with cow dung; the US Department of Agriculture has a “zero-tolerance” policy when it comes to fecal contamination of meat, but it applies only to visible contamination46 detectible with the naked eye. Accordingly, a 2015 study of 458 pounds of beef47 purchased from grocery stores in twenty-six US cities—using actual scientific equipment—found that all of it was contaminated with fecal bacteria. Meanwhile, the Food and Drug Administration has acceptable limits for mammalian excreta,48 rot, mold, insect fragments, rodent hairs, and maggots in food. These limits don’t apply to meat, but it’s worth knowing that you might be eating a gram of insect fragments per every gram of pasta—and one rodent hair, on average, in every 50 grams.)
As for the 1 percent of foods that do contain actual vanilla, odds are it’s in the form of an extract diluted with alcohol, water, dextrose, stabilizers,49 and, you guessed it, corn syrup.
So vanilla isn’t very vanilla. It was slandered as ordinary not because it was boring but because it was so well liked and ubiquitous (and probably because of its perceived whiteness, even though vanilla beans are black and vanilla ice cream, often yellowish with prominent black specks*—not as diverse, maybe, as rainbow sherbet, but not exactly sterile, either).
Yet what really makes vanilla an endearing name for loved ones is that, above all, it’s comforting: churn it with a little cream and sugar at a temperature cold enough to create ice crystals (typically about 27°F), and it provides a pharmaceutical-grade level of comfort that’s helped us cope with everything from bad breakups and oral surgery to Nazi fascism, as we’ll see later.
That’s not to say that vanilla is the only flavor of ice cream that’s comforting. Flavored ices and frozen desserts have been coveted for thousands of years, across many cultures, by people who have gone to great lengths to procure them. The ancient Greeks and Romans used to climb mountains to harvest ice they’d mix with wine50 or honey to make sorbet, a word that comes from the Arabic sharba51 (“drink”) and sharbat, a drink made by mixing snow52 with various spices and flower blossoms. The Chinese made sherbet by covering containers with snow53 and saltpeter (also used in making gunpowder) to lower the freezing point of milk mixed with rice, and the Mongols made ice cream by riding horses in subfreezing temperatures54 while carrying cream stored in animal intestines, which would then freeze and be churned smooth by the galloping of their horses.
Even as late as the eighteenth century, ice cream was often reserved for those patient enough to wait for snowstorms or wealthy and patient enough to harvest ice from mountains or frozen rivers and keep it from melting in underground pits insulated with layers of sawdust, straw, or animal fur.55
Beethoven, for example, writes from Vienna in 1794, “the Viennese are afraid that it will soon be impossible56 for them to have any ice-creams; for as the winter was mild, ice is rare,” while George Washington tried to avoid such a fate by harvesting snow and ice from the rivers surrounding Mount Vernon but was, he writes in a 1784 letter to colleague Robert Morris, “lurched”* when it melted prematurely:
P.S. The house I filled with ice does not answer57—it is gone already—if you will do me the favor to cause a description of yours to be taken—the size—manner of building, & mode of management, & forwarded to me—I shall be much obliged—My house was filled chiefly with Snow. have you ever tried Snow? do you think it is owing to this that I am lurched.
Despite Morris’s instructions, Washington was lurched again a year later, writing in his diary on June 5, 1785, that “there was not the smallest particle remaining”58 when he checked on the ice he’d packed in his cellar months earlier. Fortunately, he was wealthy enough to throw money at the problem, later spending 51 pounds, 6 shillings, and 2 pence59 (equal to about two hundred dollars today) on ice cream during the summer of 1790 alone. And he still fared better in his experiments with freezing than Francis Bacon, who tragically lost his life in 1626 after catching a cold while attempting to freeze a chicken by stuffing it with snow.60
And it wasn’t just ice that was difficult to procure. Martha Washington once served guests a “stale and rancid”61 trifle in 1789 because she couldn’t find fresh cream; this happened in New York City—to the first First Lady of the United States—so just imagine what things were like for the other 99 percent.
Even getting sugar was a pain in the ass. Explains Anne Cooper Funderburg (more politely) in Chocolate, Strawberry, and Vanilla: A History of American Ice Cream, “Refined sugar was sold in cones or loaves,62 which varied greatly in size but were always formidably hard.” Cooks literally needed hatchets or mallets to break pieces off.
And even if you had all the ingredients, turning them into ice cream wasn’t exactly a cakewalk. Thomas Jefferson’s recipe for vanilla ice cream,63 acquired during his time in France, required specialty equipment and more than a dozen steps:
Ice Cream.
2. bottles of good cream.
6. yolks of eggs.
1/2 lb. sugar
mix the yolks & sugar
put the cream on a fire in a casserole, first putting in a stick of Vanilla.
when near boiling take it off & pour it gently into the mixture of eggs & sugar.
stir it well.
put it on the fire again stirring it thoroughly with a spoon to prevent it’s sticking to the casserole.
when near boiling take it off and strain it thro’ a towel.
put it in the Sabottiere*
then set it in ice an hour before it is to be served. put into the ice a handful of salt.
put salt on the coverlid of the Sabotiere & cover the whole with ice.
leave it still half a quarter of an hour.
then turn the Sabottiere in the ice 10 minutes
open it to loosen with a spatula the ice from the inner sides of the Sabotiere.
shut it & replace it in the ice
open it from time to time to detach the ice from the sides
when well taken (prise) stir it well with the Spatula.
put it in moulds, justling it well down on the knee.
then put the mould in
to the same bucket of ice.
leave it there to the moment of serving it.
to withdraw it, immerse the mould in warm water, turning it well till it will come out & turn it into a plate.
So part of the reason ice cream was so coveted is that, like vanilla, it was scarce and impractical. Writes Funderburg, “the average family was too busy surviving64 to indulge in a luxury that melted, consumed scarce ingredients, and required substantial preparation time.”
And yet, even as its availability and practicality increased, so, too, did its associations with comfort.
When the Eighteenth Amendment outlawed the sale, manufacture, and transportation of alcohol in the 1920s, many early American breweries such as Anheuser-Busch65 and Yuengling*66 turned to making ice cream and soda to stay afloat, capitalizing both on shared manufacturing processes, like bottling and refrigeration, and the fact that ice cream’s ingredients (fat, sugar, and vanilla) made a decent substitute for alcohol for the drowning of one’s emotions.
“The prohibition of the sale of liquor has had one important67 and easily visible effect,” writes one reporter at the dawn of Prohibition:
It has turned hundreds of thousands from beer and whisky to ice-cream and soda water. In one eastern city until recently there were three breweries. That city had been drinking about 300,000 barrels of beer yearly, which sold at retail for about $4,200,000. To-day the city is eating 3,000,000 gallons of ice-cream. It formerly drank about a barrel per capita each year. Now its annual consumption of ice-cream is about eight gallons per head. One of the breweries was making 65,000 barrels of beer every year, and is now making 800,000 gallons of ice-cream annually, with an increase in the value of its production of 150 per cent.
