“Yes: you ate the vanilla made from the beaver’s anus.” The relationship between vanilla and the beavers’ excretory system has been repeated on the Internet for a long time, but no topic was as clear as at the beginning of this paragraph. It has it all: vanilla, anuses, beavers, and of course, food. The only problem is that there are many reports that this is false.

But let’s start from the beginning.

What does beaver anus have to do with vanilla? Nothing with vanilla beans. However, if we say “vanilla flavor”, things change. As flavor historian Nadia Berenstein explains in Vice magazine, in the 1960s and 1970s, American food manufacturers began using very small amounts of castorium to enhance artificial vanilla, strawberry, and raspberry flavors.

Here’s the connection: Castoreum is an oily substance that beavers secrete from nearby glands located between the anus and the tail. Beavers use it to groom their hair, but it has been used as an ingredient in perfumery, medicine, and food since ancient times (due to its sweet and sometimes musky scent).

So this is true. For now, let’s say it’s not a lie. And in fact today the North American FDA continues to recognize the substance as a food additive. But the truth is that these same North American producers quickly realized that castorium use was a major bottleneck.

No beaver to this much vanilla. To begin with, it’s all about vanilla versus no vanilla. As early as the 1960s, manufacturers realized that the demand for vanilla-flavored products would consume the world’s vanilla bean production. Therefore, they began to develop ways to artificially produce this taste (as in strawberries and raspberries).

The story is simple: As with drugs, it is always better to have a compound that is standardized (and easily produced) at the industrial level. The taste of herbs depends on many environmental factors, and depending on them is generally a bad idea.

Beavers rush to the rescue. In the 60s and 70s, many vanilla flavor manufacturers turned to castoreum as a way to round out their flavors, but they ran into the same problem. The “beaver years” did not have a large-scale commercial cycle. In fact, at that time beaver farms, which had been healthy until the first half of the century, were in decline. Synthetic leather had brought ruin to these farmers.

Manufacturers are asking themselves, “What are we going to do?” they asked. Swap out vanilla and beaver. The important thing was to find a way to produce vanillin (the main flavor compound). And they did it, boy did they do it. Today, less than 0.3% of the vanillin used to flavor foods actually comes naturally from vanilla beans. And of course, there is almost no vanilla flavor coming from the beaver’s anus.

As far as we know, the majority of vanillin today is synthesized from guaiacol, a natural compound that can be obtained from guaiacs, desert locusts, and the processing of coal. I mean, in very strange places, yes, but unfortunately not in the beaver’s ass.

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*An earlier version of this article was published in April 2024.