The Truth About Vanilla

Taking care of small children doesn’t exactly tax the brain. Most days involve a variety of repetitive activities that are far from stimulating, if almost totally mind numbing. Recently I was at a friend’s whose parents live with her so they can be around her kids. Her parents are child psychologists and there are no two more dedicated people when it comes to the face time, but for the mind numbing stuff like laundry, toy sorting and meals, her mother straps on a fanny pack and walks around listening to books on tape. I was pretty impressed when she told me how many books she’d “read” so far this summer because it takes me weeks to creep through page-turning novels. But then on Tuesday I opened up the Science section of The New York Times to find a story making a case for my totally disengaged brain. The idea of the piece was that boredom’s kind of a good thing because “falling into a numbed trance allows the brain to recast the outside world in ways that can be productive and creative...”

Dr. Mark Mintun, a professor of radiology at Washington University in St. Louis says that even when the brain is disengaged, say chopping apples or rinsing diapers, it’s actually highly active -- only consuming about 5 percent less energy than usual. It was probably in one of these disengaged states that I started thinking about something my friend said about giving up vanilla because it was made from wood. It didn’t sink in at the time, but I’ve since looked it up and he’s right. Maybe this is part of your general knowledge already, but it was news to me that natural vanilla flavoring is rarely used because it’s expensive – around two bucks a bean. Natural vanillin comes from the seed pods of a native Mexican orchid and, after saffron, is the priciest natural flavor out there. The unnatural kind, which is often used, is actually synthetic vanillin. It’s made from either the petrochemical guaiacol, or from lignin, a natural constituent of wood, and a byproduct of the paper industry.

Apparently it’s nearly impossible to taste the difference between the wood vs. natural vanillin, so I will be reading the labels more carefully and asking questions about cakes and desserts and ice creams to try and avoid wood pulp in my diet (those beans that come packaged in your vanilla ice cream are added for effect, not flavor).

Everette Humphrey, a former Science teacher from Michigan, has figured out a way to pollinate vanilla, but I doubt I’ll taste the benefits of his handiwork any time soon. In the meantime, when it’s 100 degrees and you’re not sure what’s in the ice cream cone you’re dying for, maybe go with the chocolate.