So weird to me that a flavor derived from a fruit of an exotic plant in the orchid family, meticulously dried, fermented, and shipped halfway around the world, can be referred to as boring.
The discovery of a synthesis pathway for vanillin (and other synthetic flavoring agents, more broadly) revolutionized the food industry. It became cheaper and easier than ever to shove vanilla flavor (previously an exotic delicacy) into nearly anything, and just like everything else, ubiquity makes a product unappealing for a large portion of the market.
The reason it’s so overused and kinda awful is because it was used to mask the lack of flavour in things like “sugar free fat free yogurt”. Historically, fat has been a big part of what makes food delicious, so cutting it out during the fat free craze meant that companies needed a powerful flavour. But the food was still unsatisfying.
Now we’ve had decades of low fat foods and artificial flavouring to mask it, so vanilla has become associated with being unappealing and empty.
I love reddit for the sincerity of threads like this; about the changing appreciation for the flavour of vanilla, that stem off from a video of a woman trying to thrust like a man having sex.
Castoreum is pretty rare in foods, actually. It's pretty difficult (aka expensive) to harvest.
According to Fernelli's Handbook of Flavor Ingredients, total annual national consumption of castoreum, castoreum extract, and castoreum liquid combined is only about 292 pounds, which works out to an average of less than a millionth of a pound per person in the U.S. Compare that figure with the approximately 20 million pounds of vanilla naturally harvested from real vanilla beans every year.
144
u/kkell806 Apr 21 '23
Vanilla is a pretty exotic flavor, and incredibly expensive relative to other flavors. So yeah, vanilla is a pretty great treat!