The Cost of Vanilla

I have paid hundreds of dollars for vanilla beans.

Ordered them when the market was high. Winced at the invoice. Used them anyway.

I’ve split them down the center with the back of a knife and scraped those tiny black seeds into pastry cream, buttercream, ice cream. I’ve sent out vanilla desserts that cost more per plate than the man who made modern vanilla production possible ever earned in a year.

That should make us pause.

Because the story of vanilla is not soft. It is not basic. It is not neutral.

In 1841, on the island of Réunion — a French colony at the time — a twelve-year-old enslaved boy named Edmond Albius solved a problem that had frustrated botanists and plantation owners for centuries.

Vanilla is native to Mexico. The Totonac people cultivated it long before Europe ever tasted it. It was folded into cacao by the Aztecs. It belonged to knowledge systems that already existed.

When colonizers carried the orchid across oceans, they brought the vine — but not the tiny Melipona bee that pollinated it.

So outside of Mexico, the plant would grow. It would bloom. And then nothing.

No pods.
No profit.

For three hundred years, educated men with resources tried to fix it.

And then a child looked closely.

Inside the vanilla flower is a thin membrane — the rostellum — separating the male and female parts. Edmond used a small stick and his thumb to lift it and press the pollen together by hand.

The flower fruited.

That simple. That precise.

And that changed agriculture around the world.

Vanilla production spread through Réunion and later Madagascar, where most of the world’s vanilla is still grown today — pollinated by hand using the same technique a twelve-year-old enslaved boy developed.

France abolished slavery in its colonies in 1848. Edmond was freed. He did not receive wealth. He did not build generational security from his discovery. He later worked as a cook. He died in poverty at fifty-one.

The industry he made possible became worth billions.

His name almost disappeared.

This is why knowing the history matters.

Because vanilla is not the only ingredient built on Black innovation and labor.

Black people have been revolutionary in agriculture — not just as laborers, but as growers, seed keepers, irrigation builders, rice cultivators, cattle handlers, fermentation experts, and cooks.

In the American South, enslaved West Africans brought deep agricultural knowledge with them — especially in rice cultivation. The rice fields of the Carolinas were not accidental. They were engineered using techniques from West Africa. Okra, black-eyed peas, sorghum, sesame (benne), watermelon — these are not side notes. They are foundations.

Southern cuisine — the food often marketed as “heritage” or “comfort” — was shaped in kitchens where enslaved women cooked for households while preserving their own foodways at the margins. Barbecue traditions. One-pot stews. Greens slow-cooked with smoked meat. Biscuits and gravies. Preservation techniques. Spice layering. Resourcefulness under constraint.

American cuisine does not exist without Black hands.

Agriculture in the Americas does not exist without forced Black labor.

The techniques became tradition.
The tradition became culture.
The culture became profit.

And too often, the names were lost.

Vanilla followed that same pattern.

Somewhere along the way, “vanilla” became an insult. A word for plain. For boring.

But there is nothing boring about a crop that blooms for one day and must be pollinated by hand within hours. There is nothing simple about months-long curing processes that develop more than 200 flavor compounds inside one wrinkled pod.

Imitation vanilla — the cheap kind that fills grocery shelves — is mostly synthetic vanillin. One note pretending to be two hundred.

There’s a quote often credited to Oscar Wilde, though its origin is uncertain:

“Imitation is the highest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.”

The world imitated what Edmond Albius unlocked.

It just didn’t honor him.

I ask a question a lot in my kitchen.

When I’m sourcing.
When I’m cooking.
When I’m standing over a pot scraping seeds from a vanilla bean that cost more than it probably should.

Who made it?

Not who plated it.
Who figured it out.
Who did the work.
Who changed the course of something and never got to benefit from it.

Vanilla is not basic.

It is delicate. It is demanding. It is labor.

And it tastes the way it does because a twelve-year-old enslaved boy paid attention to a flower.

Edmond Albius.

Know who made it.

 - Audrey Middleton, 2025

This piece is rooted in historical research on Edmond Albius and the agricultural foundations of American cuisine. If you’d like to learn more, these are powerful places to start:

• Smithsonian Magazine – “The Slave Who Revolutionized the Vanilla Industry

• Atlas Obscura – “The 12-Year-Old Slave Who Changed the Vanilla Industry”
  Jessica B. Harris – High on the Hog