Once you notice vanilla, you’ll smell it everywhere.
From custard to candles, we live in a world suffused with vanilla.
Extracted from the bean pod of a delicate orchid, vanilla must be grown under exceptionally precise conditions along a very narrow band of the earth, between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn.
In 2017, a Category 4-equivalent cyclone decimated an estimated 30 percent of the vanilla vines in Madagascar, which produces 80 percent of the vanilla used around the globe.
As a result, the price of vanilla bean pods surged to nearly $300 a pound.
Organizations:
University of Oxford, Karolinska Institute, Cancer
Locations:
Sweden, Madagascar, Mexico, Tahiti