Vanilla and Beavers

[ecoli73]

Well, if you like vanilla but the vanilla flavored food item have natural ingredients listed instead of outright vanilla beans, guess what are you tasting?

The castor gland(scent marking gland) excretions of a beaver...no wonder this guy is excited!

 

[Red Devil]

yuck

 

[ecoli73]

Oh don't knock it Red Devil...I bet you have some in your Pantry

 

[ElectricBlueSeanBurch]

I thought beaver tasted like chicken

 

[ecoli73]

Not meat but the scent they spray I think...

 

[Red Devil]

i buy the beans.. i don't buy the artificial.. and if i ever thought of buying the artificial i won't have any thoughts about it now..lol

 

[Dan F]

Nice, I had never heard of this before. Apparently it is pretty rare, most vanilla flavored products use vanillin, a purely synthetic flavoring.

If you ever drink "Ruby Red" grapefruit drinks (or other "all-natural" red drinks) than you have ingested bug juice. Look for "cochineal" in the ingredients list....

 

[ecoli73]

http://www.snopes.com/food/ingredient/castoreum.asp

Snopes confirms and expands...

 

[petspoiler]

who's out there collecting that scent?
:-o

 

[ecoli73]

From what I have seen, they don't collect the scent, they collect the gland when they harvest beaver for some other stuff...

In retrospect, I guess my cartoon rodent shouldn't be that happy