This is a really interesting subject to me, I always like reading the articles about it. I had no idea about the hand-pollination mentioned in this one, that's fascinating. I submitted another...
This is a really interesting subject to me, I always like reading the articles about it. I had no idea about the hand-pollination mentioned in this one, that's fascinating.
I was about to say "How did I miss that post?" because I agree this is a fascinating subject - then realised that I missed it because I'm not subscribed to ~food. It's mentioned in your article...
I submitted another really interesting article about it a few months ago
I was about to say "How did I miss that post?" because I agree this is a fascinating subject - then realised that I missed it because I'm not subscribed to ~food.
I had no idea about the hand-pollination mentioned in this one, that's fascinating.
It's mentioned in your article too...
"With no natural pollinator, vanilla flowers must be pollinated by hand. In 1841, Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old slave from the nearby island of Réunion, invented the pollination technique that made the crop commercially viable. This simple yet labor-intensive procedure, using no more than a splinter to manually pollinate the flowers, is still used today."
It's explained in my article: "He has to hand-pollinate each vanilla orchid so it can grow into a bean. There's no native bee in Madagascar that will do the job."
Yeah, looking back at it now, it does talk about it a bit. I think it just didn't make much of an impact on me for some reason, maybe because the way they described it made it sound a little more...
Yeah, looking back at it now, it does talk about it a bit. I think it just didn't make much of an impact on me for some reason, maybe because the way they described it made it sound a little more offhanded with the "simple yet labor-intensive" description compared to this new article saying it is "fiendishly difficult to get right" and dwelling a little more on how time-sensitive and tricky it is. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
Either way, it's overall really interesting to me that they're basically the center of the vanilla industry, yet you have these multiple disconnections from what you think would make sense for a place with that role. There's no natural pollination for vanilla there, it wouldn't even naturally grow without human intervention. The people growing it may not even know what it's for. And so on.
This is a really interesting subject to me, I always like reading the articles about it. I had no idea about the hand-pollination mentioned in this one, that's fascinating.
I submitted another really interesting article about it a few months ago that talks about a few other aspects of it: https://tildes.net/~food/6ww/bracing_for_the_vanilla_boom_in_madagascar
I was about to say "How did I miss that post?" because I agree this is a fascinating subject - then realised that I missed it because I'm not subscribed to ~food.
It's mentioned in your article too...
"With no natural pollinator, vanilla flowers must be pollinated by hand. In 1841, Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old slave from the nearby island of Réunion, invented the pollination technique that made the crop commercially viable. This simple yet labor-intensive procedure, using no more than a splinter to manually pollinate the flowers, is still used today."
It's explained in my article: "He has to hand-pollinate each vanilla orchid so it can grow into a bean. There's no native bee in Madagascar that will do the job."
Yeah, looking back at it now, it does talk about it a bit. I think it just didn't make much of an impact on me for some reason, maybe because the way they described it made it sound a little more offhanded with the "simple yet labor-intensive" description compared to this new article saying it is "fiendishly difficult to get right" and dwelling a little more on how time-sensitive and tricky it is. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
Either way, it's overall really interesting to me that they're basically the center of the vanilla industry, yet you have these multiple disconnections from what you think would make sense for a place with that role. There's no natural pollination for vanilla there, it wouldn't even naturally grow without human intervention. The people growing it may not even know what it's for. And so on.