ISSUE #22: Vanilla Is Expensive Because of Bees

I guess it’s Bee Month now. Nothing I can do about this.

I watch a lot of cooking TikToks, partly to inspire myself to cook at home more (it’s sort of working), but mostly because it’s both therapeutic and interesting to watch short videos of people throwing a bunch of ingredients together to make something out of nothing, especially if they’re using ingredients I’m not familiar with. One such ingredient I’ve been seeing a lot of lately is vanilla, specifically in bean form, given that so many young TikTok chefs are secretly very wealthy. Vanilla is expensive—a tiny bottle of extract retails anywhere from $5 to $10, and the beans themselves are even more than that. The beans can be cut open and the seeds scraped from the inside with a sharp knife and added to food (if you’ve ever seen black specks in your vanilla ice cream, that’s what those are). 

Why are beans—beans!!—so expensive? The answer is, of course, bugs, but for a very specific reason with a very fascinating and troubling history.