![]() But already you can find vanilla beans from Madagascar at Walmart and order beans and bottles for making homemade vanilla extract (alcohol not included) on Amazon. The path of vanilla to our table is less straightforward, and its provenance is often still elusive on commercial labels. Now origin is all, with many craft chocolate makers focusing on bars that use beans from one country or even just one farm, both to showcase idiosyncratic notes of place (stone fruit, young bananas, buttercream, sandalwood, roses) and to underscore the importance of a relationship to the farmers themselves: of knowing their stories. Milk chocolate used to be the default chocolate, the origin of the cacao - and the likelihood that it was harvested using child and slave labor - passed over in silence. ![]() Once the average coffee drinker in America was content with a murky picker upper that might as well have been inky water, knowing little of arabica and robusta beans and the distinctions among brews from Yirgacheffe, Ethiopia (bright and floral, akin to tea) Mokha, Yemen (malty, with coriander and black currants) and Kona, Hawaii (hints of hazelnuts and mellowed brown sugar). Vanilla isn’t the first ingredient to have been diminished by mass production - which made it more widely available, though as a pale shadow of itself - and then rehabilitated and revived in all its richness and multiplicity. (Note that biosynthetic alternatives, derived from the likes of rice bran, clove oil or turmeric, may be legally labeled “natural” in the United States, although these represent a tiny part of the market and, being at an early stage of development and production, are not yet economically competitive with artificial vanilla.) In 2015, Nestlé USA and General Mills announced that they would stop using artificial flavors. Only in the past decade, with pressure from consumers seeking more natural ingredients - whether as redress for skyrocketing rates of diabetes and heart disease, a way of asserting control over what we eat as we’ve grown distant from and suspicious of its corporate sources, a concern for sustainability and the environment or simply a desire in our alienated age to return to an imagined authenticity - have food companies started to back away from synthetic vanilla, at least publicly.
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