Deborah Lee Simple Chocolate, Strenuous Vanilla Two of the most common flavors in the world are chocolate and vanilla. Candy, cake, ice cream, chocolate and vanilla can be found almost everywhere! How are these tastes created? Without a strong growth and production process, it would be impossible for these flavors to exist anywhere within the world, but one of these spices is significantly more troublesome to create than the other– vanilla! The article “Vanilla! It’s Everywhere!” by Gail Kay Haines and “Chocolate’s Sweet History: From Elite Treat to Food for the Masses” by Christopher Klein discuss the manufacturing process of vanilla and chocolate, and by comparing information from both works of literature, it is obvious that vanilla flavoring …show more content…
On the other hand, early development of vanilla can trace back to 1841, where “growers began to hand-pollinate the orchids with a sharp bamboo stick—as they still do—and V. planifolia flourished” (Haines 4). Vanilla growers started to self-pollinate the plants needed to produce vanilla because the natural process took up an annoyingly long amount of time. This proves the difficulty that comes with the production of vanilla because while alternatives to growing chocolate worked well and rapidly sped up the process, alternatives to growing vanilla barely made a difference and still required human work rather than a machine. Also, the process in which growers of vanilla must determine when vanilla pods are ready to be used is severely complicated; “[t]hey must be ‘killed’ in hot water, ‘sweated’ in the sun, dried in the shade, and ‘conditioned’ in a closed box until they turn brown, supple, and fragrant,” and these steps can take up to 8 months to complete (Haines 4). There are only three steps in this process, but it still takes more than half a year for a vanilla pod to be ready for