[Animals] What if your vanilla ice cream contains beaver fatty fluids?

[FNX Magokiler]

Press articles or social media influencers could make you believe that castoreum, a yellowish and viscous substance from the castor sacs near the beaver's anus, is found in traditional vanilla-flavored products, disguised as "natural flavoring." According to some of these sources, castoreum is an ingredient in all kinds of products, from ice cream to strawberry-flavored oatmeal.

But experts say this couldn't be further from the truth. Although people have used castoreum for medicinal purposes and, yes, to flavor perfumes and foods since ancient times, today there is almost nothing in the supermarket that contains castoreum.

"It turns out that the material 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 in the United States who studies food science. In 2020, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), about 16 million kilos of vanilla extract, extracted from vanilla orchids, were produced worldwide, a large group of flowering plants.

That said, castoreum still exists in niche products like bäversnaps, a Swedish liquor, according to the 2022 book Beavers: Ecology, Behavior, Conservation, and Management. by Frank Rosell and Róisín Campbell-Palmer.

 

 

According to the latest edition of Fenaroli's Handbook of Flavor Ingredients, less than 300 pounds of castoreum, castoreum extract, and castoreum liquid are consumed in the U.S. each year.

To collect castoreum, trappers kill beavers and extract their castor bean glands, which are dried and crushed. They then use alcohol to extract the castoreum, similar to how vanilla is extracted from the plant, Francl explains.

Versatile medicine
For more than 2,000 years, castor oil has been used to cure all kinds of ailments, such as fevers, stomach problems and mental illnesses. The secretions were also used in soaps and creams, and were once added to cigarettes to enhance their aroma. Hippocrates even wrote about the healing properties of castoreum in 500 BC.

"In Roman times it was already part of the po[CENSORED]r pharmacopoeia," says Francl.

The po[CENSORED]rity of castoreum as a medicine likely has something to do with its chemical composition. According to the 2022 book, castoreum may contain more than 75 different chemical compounds, an unusually high diversity.

 

https://www.nationalgeographic.es/animales/2023/11/y-si-tu-helado-de-vainilla-contiene-fluidos-grasos-de-castor