![]() They then use alcohol to extract castoreum, similar to how vanilla is removed from the plant, Francl says. To harvest castoreum, trappers kill beavers and remove their castor glands, which are dried and crushed. consumes less than 292 pounds a year of castoreum, castoreum extract, and castoreum liquid, according to the latest edition of Fenaroli's Handbook of Flavor Ingredients. That said, castoreum still exists in niche products such as bäversnaps, a Swedish liquor, according to the 2022 book Beavers: Ecology, Behaviour, Conservation, and Management by Frank Rosell and Róisín Campbell-Palmer. (Read more about the history of vanilla.) Meanwhile, she says, in 2020 about 16 million pounds of vanilla extract-collected from vanilla orchids, a large group of flowering plants-was produced worldwide, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. “It turns out that the stuff is incredibly expensive, because it’s rare there's no way it’s in your ice cream,” says Michelle Francl, a chemist at Bryn Mawr College who studies the science of food. While people have used castoreum for medicinal purposes and, yes, to flavor perfumes and foods since ancient times, today there’s almost nothing in the grocery store today that contains castoreum. News articles or food influencers on social media might have you believe that castoreum, a yellow, syrupy substance from the castor sacs near a beaver’s anus, is found in your everyday vanilla-flavored products, disguised as “natural flavoring.” According to some of these sources, castoreum is an ingredient in everything from ice cream to strawberry-flavored oatmeal.īut experts say this couldn’t be further from the truth. ![]() Are there beaver secretions in your vanilla ice cream?
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