Vanilla: a far from ordinary history

Vanilla. It's now often used as an adjective for anything standard. plain and borderline boring, but its history is anything but In this episode of the History Extra podcast, I spoke to Eric T. Jennings, whose book, Vanilla The History of an Extraordinary Bean, is among the titles shortlisted for this year's Clendon History Prize, about how piracy, espionage, and cutthroat capitalism have added flavor to its story. Eric, thank you so much for being with us today on the History Extra Podcast. How's your day going? It's going very well. Thank you, Matt. Thank you so much for being with us to talk about your fascinating history of vanilla. Vanilla has come to be associated with things that are

Boring, maybe bland, but actually this is a story with piracy, espionage. To kick us off, though, you write that the vanilla orchid and vanilla pod constitute full-fledged actors in this story. Can you introduce our listeners to vanilla? What does it look like? How does it grow, and what form does it take? Vanilla is the world's only edible orchid, so most orchids are purely decorative. Vanilla, on the contrary, can of course be eaten. It can also be used for perfume. It comes in all sorts of varietals. I've gotten to meet botanists, geneticists, and so on with this project, and that's been wonderful. But yes, there's all sorts of inedible vanillas that grow all over the place, but the the three types of of edible vanilla that we know of today, the main three types, originate in central and south America. And it is a a plant that needs a host. And so I argue in the book that it's just fundamentally sustainable because you don't cut down a forest to grow vanilla. On the contrary, it requires just the right balance of shade and light, and it requires a host plant to thrive. And so in that sense, yes, it climbs plants, it climbs trees, it climbs old growth forests.

It requires, it's a little bit finicky. It requires at once, you know, intense heat, just the right balance of shade and sunlight, but also three or four consecutive nights of cooler temperatures to flower. And so all of these things make vanilla really interesting. The other thing, of course, that I talk about in the book is that it requires a set of pollinators that only exists in Central and South America, which for a long time meant that it could not go global. You mentioned that you'd met some botanists. I also think it's right that you had to go at cultivating vanilla yourself. Well, cultivating maybe not, but certainly I I had to go at both picking and pollinating vanilla, which are two of the most delicate stages, especially the pollination stage, which is Precisely the revolution that I talk about in several of the chapters of the book that enabled vanilla to go to become a global commodity. And it turns out it's very tricky. If you've never done it, with my eyes of those of an individual in their mid fifties, I required reading glasses. One has to take a an implement that looks a little bit like a toothpick or a needle, and then one has to delicately

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