Helen FieldsScience Writer

Oh hey – another of my National Geographic stories turned up online! It’s about vanilla, which is native to central America but has until recently mostly been grown in Madagascar. I reported this story and the story about silky sifakas at the same time. And get this neat bit of synergy: the silky sifaka is a lemur that lives in a region of Madagascar where a lot of vanilla is grown. Whoooa. Trippy.

I wish I still remembered all the fascinating things I learned about vanilla…but I wrote it 10 months ago, so the details have gotten a bit muddied. I heard a lot of tales about sketchiness in the vanilla trade, but they were way outside of the scope of this short piece, so I didn’t try to confirm them. I did come away from the whole thing with the impression that the only way I was going to be sure any vanilla extract I used didn’t contain any artificial flavorings was to make it myself. Vanilla beans aren’t as expensive as you’d think, if you buy them on the internet, and they’re so much better than the sad, dry, crusty ones they sell in jars at the grocery store.