There is nothing vanilla about vanilla.

Despite being synonymous with being boring and bland, vanilla is a beautifully nuanced flavor.

And its backstory?

Probably one of the wildest culinary tales you'll find in your pantry.

Vanilla is part of the orchid family, and if you're a plant parent like me, you know that orchids are notoriously temperamental.

The only orchid I can keep alive is one made of Lego.

There are roughly twenty-five to thirty thousand different species of orchids, and they're incredibly adaptable.

They can grow almost everywhere except for Antarctica, making them one of the world's largest flowering plant families.

Even though they can grow from the humid rainforests of the Amazon, to the dry arid terrain of the Sonoran Desert, each orchid has its own hyper specific needs when it comes to temperature, sunlight, humidity, and so on.

This is true for vanilla, which can only grow between the tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.

Getting them to flower is challenging, and even if they do flower, pollinating them, getting them to produce the vanilla beans we use in our kitchens is tedious and labor intensive.

A single flower only blooms for a few hours, and in that time pollination has to be done by hand.

It takes around 300 hand pollinated orchid blossoms to produce just one pound of vanilla beans.

And depending on how the market is doing, that one pound can cost about $300, making it the second most expensive spice in the world after saffron.

But before we go into the volatility of the vanilla market and why it's in a very precarious situation, let's take a moment to understand its history.

Vanilla's story begins where most of the best flavors on the planet begin, Mexico.

The plant is native to parts of South and Central America as well as the Caribbean, but historians believe it was the Totonac people who were the first to cultivate it.

The Totonacs were conquered by the Aztecs.

The Aztecs were conquered by the Spanish, and in a series of events that should be familiar to those who have watched Delishtory before: In the early 1500s, tomatoes along with chocolate, potatoes, vanilla, gold, and enslaved people were taken from Mexico and other parts of Mesoamerica and brought to Spain.

At the time, vanilla was just seen as something you'd add to chocolate to enhance its flavor.

A practice Europeans took from the Aztecs.

By the 17th century, Queen Elizabeth I's apothecary, Hugh Morgan, started making sweets using just vanilla.

No chocolate.

One hundred years later, the French started adding vanilla to ice cream, and in 1789, after Thomas Jefferson's tenure as the American minister to France, his enslaved chef, James Hemings, introduced vanilla to American confectionary with recipes for French vanilla ice cream and creme brulée.

Popularity for vanilla was steadily growing on both sides of the Atlantic, driving demand for the sweet, fragrant ingredient.

Spanish, British, French, and Dutch colonists were all trying to figure out how to grow vanilla, but to no avail.

The plants would grow, some would flower, but no one could really figure out how to get vanilla to fruit.

That is until 1841.

Off the coast of Madagascar, on the small island of Bourbon, now called Reunion, a 12 year old enslaved boy named Edmund Albus revolutionized vanilla production by inventing a method for hand pollinating vanilla flowers.

Edmund's pollination technique allowed for production on a mass scale and was replicated across other French colonies, including Madagascar, which surpassed Mexico as the world's leading supplier of vanilla in 1898.

Today, about 80% of the world's vanilla comes from Madagascar.

Even though Edmund's process for hand pollination is effective and still used to this day, 99% of vanilla flavored products do not contain real vanilla.

Most are made with synthetic vanilla.

Vanillin is the molecule that gives vanilla its characteristically sweet, warm, floral aroma.

Synthetic or imitation vanilla isolates that molecule, deriving it from petrochemicals or, on rare occasions, castoreum: a secretion that comes from beaver's butts.

Even though vanillin is the main flavor in vanilla, the synthetic stuff doesn't capture the plant's true complexity.

Real vanilla has roughly 250 aromatic compounds that feature woodsy, smoky, and somewhat spicy notes, in addition to the floral sweetness we know and love.

In 2023, the world produced only 7704 tons of vanilla.

When you compare that to the roughly 20,000 tons of synthetic vanilla we consume in a year, you can see that the real deal falls short of the flavor's demand.

Part of this is because vanilla is really expensive, both to cultivate and to buy.

But climate change is making the market even more volatile.

The UN lists Madagascar as one of the countries most impacted by climate change.

Over the past few years, cyclones, droughts and floods have ravaged the island country, destroying crops, demolishing the infrastructure and causing millions of citizens to lose their livelihoods.

And rising global temperatures are spelling trouble for the sensitive orchid.

Vanilla's situation is truly dire.

But in Mexico, in the La Chinantla region where wild vanilla still grows in the rainforest, Chinantec natives are trying to reclaim this culturally significant crop and preserve it for the future.

Using their ancestral knowledge, many are returning to agroforestry, basically companion planting vanilla orchids in areas where they're naturally protected by trees and supported by other native flora.

Scientists at the nearby university of Veracruz are also trying to develop plants that are more resistant to temperatures that extend past vanilla's maximum threshold of 95 degrees.

Genetic diversity may also be a key to protecting vanilla's future.

The Global Crop Diversity Trust, established by the United Nations FAO says that vanilla's wild relatives still growing in parts of Central and South America hold important genetic data.

If we could collect and preserve different vanilla species in gene banks, in farmer's fields, and in protected areas, scientists can study these plants and develop more climate change resistant varieties so future generations can enjoy the warm, mellow notes of real vanilla.