I believe that the world today has opened their eyes to the fact that “Natural Vanilla Flavoring” on an ingredient label likely has nothing to with a vanilla bean. Zero.
Is this true? Do you know?
What the dears at the FDA call “Natural Vanilla Flavor” could actually be or include Lignin, a tar-like waste product from paper mills, and castoreum, the powdered scent gland of a beaver. Be reasonable, they are not lying, both of these items do exist naturally, beavers and paper mill waste that is. However, vanilla beans, they are not!
My apologizes if I just blew off the top of your head.
It would seem unsurprising given all we are learning daily about the world we actually live in and how these giant corporations have been essentially poisoning us for several decades now with fast food, ridiculous food pyramids, awful school lunches, food deserts. It’s no wonder we’re all so angry and self-medicating in so many unhealthy ways.
I don’t mean to sound like I’m wearing a tinfoil hat over here, but ask yourself, who is the crazy one, the person offering you organic, fair-trade vanilla beans, and the skills to make your own Vanilla Extract, guaranteed to be better than any you’ve used before, OR the people who are selling you paper mill waste and calling it vanilla???
Our own FDA allows paper mill waste to be fed to us as “natural vanilla flavoring”. Wow!
Now is this not to say the vanilla bean industry is a positive one? No. But I talk about all that in another post here.
It is to you gentle reader I ask, which do you prefer?
If you extract your own vanilla you can use whatever alcohol you choose, whichever beans, and you can do it again and again and again!
It is freedom, true Vanilla Freedom!!!
Together we can make vanilla sustainable, and demand fair labor practices, we can get closer to our farmers and the curers of the beans, on their long journey from supple emerald at harvest all the way through to the finished bean which takes 6 to 9 months. Big business has tried unscrupulous tactics to speed it up with terrible consequence in the very recent past. Prices have just recently come down but are still 5 times higher than just a decade ago.
Getting back to “Natural Vanilla Flavor”, imagine how many vegan people have been unwittingly ingesting trace amounts of beaver in their foods?!?! It’s a tragedy.
And, the beautiful beaver, who does so much to serve our waterways and protect from erosion and create habitats for forest life and prairie life and all places where water runs in nature. They were all but wiped out by trappers for top hats in the 19th century. Then, considered dirty and treated like vermin when the fashion fell away. Here at Triple XXX Vanilla we support the North Coast Land Conservancy, a wonderful organization whose efforts to rebuild beaver habitat along the Oregon coast has resulted in more salmon to emerge, helping to revitalize yet another vital species. Support them here: https://nclctrust.org/.
I’m not down on government, of course we need them to maintain our roads and infrastructure, oh um… this is awkward,, anyway. What perhaps is the case, big business has had a little too much say in the creation of some of these rules and definitions. Maybe write your congress person about it.
Why does the FDA call “natural vanilla flavoring” something which has potentially zero actual vanilla beans in it? I don’t know. Seems weird. I know, they said the word “flavoring”, just like “juice cocktail” right? Screw that. That is absurdity.
That’s like when congress says pizza and ketchup are vegetables for school lunches. Oh, and here I go again on school lunches…. But I can only come up with so many solutions myself. Sharing with you how we can all make our own extract, and conserve Vanilla Beans is a simple solution I can offer. You can purchase a DIY Vanilla Kit here.
Thank you for visiting this website and reading this post. We all can be part of making the world a better place in our own way, and leaving it better than we found it, like a picnic site.
Have a wonderful day!
