Vanilla Is the World's Second Most Expensive Spice and Was Named After a Vagina

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Despite its cultural reputation for blandness, actual vanilla is anything but ordinary. It grows on a specific variety of orchid native to Mexico that blooms for only a few hours at a time, must be hand-pollinated during that narrow window, and only thrives in a thin band within 25 degrees north or south of the equator. The labor-intensive process of pollination was perfected in the 1840s by Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old enslaved boy in Réunion, and his technique is still used today. The resulting spice is so costly that it regularly trades for more per kilogram than silver. The name comes from the Spanish word "vainilla," a diminutive of "vaina" meaning sheath or vagina — a reference to the pod's shape noted by the conquistadors who first encountered it. Vanilla was considered a term of endearment until the 1800s, when it began its slide toward connoting ordinariness. Despite its real cost and complexity, approximately 99 percent of vanilla-flavored food and beverages use vanillin, a synthetic compound first derived from pine bark and now mostly produced from petrochemicals.