This is how the world’s favorite scent disappears

Once you notice vanilla, you’ll smell it everywhere. It’s in sweets, pharmaceuticals, mosquito repellents, seltzers, makeup and hair products. When real estate agents host open houses or advise clients, they suggest infusing the house with vanilla, for its particular ability to put potential buyers at ease.

Two years ago, scientists from the University of Oxford and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden presented 225 people from nine cultures around the world with 10 different scents. All agreed that the scent of fresh vanilla was their favorite. From custard to candles, we live in a world suffused with vanilla. And the plant that produces it is in danger.

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. This supreme finickiness makes it unusually vulnerable to the growing shocks of climate change and deforestation.

Most commercial production of vanilla is in Madagascar, Mexico and Tahiti. As the world warms, cyclones and storms in these regions are growing stronger, toppling the orchid blossoms and vanilla beans before they get a chance to fully mature. 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. The increasingly erratic weather, along with pressure to cut the forests that harbor the orchids, is particularly worrisome for farmers who rely on this crop and wait up to four years for a single orchid to blossom.

Most people I know who brood and despair over climate change might know that extreme weather could soon threaten crops like corn and coffee. But you probably haven’t fathomed what it would be like to lose the scent and the taste of real vanilla. Yes, vanilla substitutes exist, but there is no replacing the symphonic complexities of the real thing. For me, nothing can compare to the memory of baking birthday cakes or leche flan in the kitchen alongside my mother, or having my own teen sons baking alongside me.

To understand how much we could lose if real vanilla disappears, you have to understand the history, some of it dark, of how it became a global commodity. We wouldn’t have vanilla ice cream, perfumes or desserts without a 12-year-old named Edmond Albius. His mother died in the early 19th century, on the island of Réunion (then called Bourbon), off the coast of Madagascar. The man who enslaved him was a botanist who fussed and fumed over his vanilla orchids, which simply would not bloom.

At the time, only bees were known to pollinate vanilla flowers, something that posed a problem for plantation owners in the tropics who wanted to grow this expensive spice, second only to saffron in price.

The lure of vanilla’s irresistible flavor and scent was spreading around the globe, creating a feverish demand and desire for it. By the 17th century, the French started adding vanilla to ice cream, as Tim Ecott notes in his book “Vanilla: Travels in Search of the Ice Cream Orchid.” The French writer Marquis de Sade requested vanilla pastilles while in jail. Madame de Pompadour, a mistress of King Louis XV, liked to have chocolate flavored with vanilla and ambergris alongside celery soup and truffles at dinner, Ecott writes.

Historians don’t know if the young Mr. Albius was ordered to find a solution or if he came up with it on his own, but in 1841 he developed the technique — flattening the anther sac and the stigma of the orchid blossom with his finger and thumb — that is still used today all over the world to pollinate vanilla orchids manually and produce large quantities of the extract. This discovery made vanilla far easier to farm commercially, and helped turn vanilla into the essential, pervasive spice it is today.

Farmers also figured out that when you bend vanilla vines, which grow about 30 to 50 feet tall, and keep them low, they produce more flowers. But the orchids’ bloom is brief: Morning sees them unfurl in wide display, but by noon, the flower closes, making the window for hand pollination very narrow.

Then, for each pollinated blossom, it takes nearly a year to fully grow and dry the beans. When the pods shrivel and become supple, they turn a dark brown color and then give off the rich aroma.

Farmers today grow about 4.4 million pounds of dried vanilla beans annually, but it takes about 300 hand-pollinated orchid blossoms to produce just one pound. So if wind and unusually heavy rains knock these blooms off early, farmers must start the whole lengthy yearslong process from scratch. They don’t cultivate them indoors because of the extremely high costs of providing enough space, heat, indirect sunlight and humidity for the vines, which grow draped on trees and shrubs and extend to upward of 100 feet, flourishing under the soft, dappled light that pokes through a tree canopy.

Because the production of real vanilla is so labor-intensive, scientists have experimented with creating substitutes. But many of these substitutes are terrible for the environment, creating large amounts of wastewater.

One vanilla substitute is castoreum — a secretion from beavers that use it to stake their claims and mark their territory. Castoreum extract possesses a warm, sweet odor and may be used as a stand-in for vanilla extract in many dairy products and baked goods, but mostly now is used for perfumes and colognes. I don’t want a world where these are the only vanilla-like scents we have left.

When I cook or make gifts for friends using vanilla beans, my fingertips stay oiled with the scent of vanilla beans and the tiniest whiff of orchids for days. The scent creates a kind of nostalgia of having sweets cooked up for me at various family gatherings — that my grandparents in India and the Philippines have passed on to my parents here in the States, and that I hope gets carried onto my sons living in north Mississippi.

It would be a pity to lose these soothing, warm sensations to something chemically made and onedimensional, while the real deal gets relegated to the memory bins of an older generation. Mostly, I hope that we’ll learn to recognize the value and the time it takes to grow a single vanilla pod, especially in the tropical belt full of birdsong and bright-colored insects. Under that colorful canopy of wild and audacious feather and carapace, the pale vanilla orchid glows as if it were a sentinel, a lighthouse offering us a gentle warning before it’s too late.

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is a poet and essayist and the author of “Bite by Bite: Nourishments and Jamborees,” “World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments” and four books of poetry.