This is false advertising! This crap needs to end!

Soucha said:

I thought this was common knowledge.

Have you checked the price of raw vanilla bean?
It's been quite high for many years now.
We'd all go broke eating real vanilla all of the time.

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RoboticDwarf said:

My question is who was the first to try it?

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DunDidIt2X said:

We all know how frustrating it is when something that is advertised is different than what you actually receive upon purchase. For me, NOTHING IS WORSE than thinking something is one thing, then to only find out that thing is something completely different.

For example, one of my favorite things in this world is vanilla icecream. Some of my fondest childhood memories is eating icecream cones on hot sunny summer days. MMMM. How awesome is vanilla icecream!?!?

The world seemed perfect for decades and decades with my love for vanilla icecream....that is until I just recently found out my love for vanilla icecream was really a fraud.

Thats right. How can it be a fraud you may ask. Well, Im not sure many of you want to know the truth. I was actually disgusted finding out the truth. Vanilla Icecream is not really vanilla icecream.

Turns out there has been a massive false advertising campaign going on for almost 100 years. This fraud even extends into other favorite snacks and pastries.

99% of vanilla "flavoring" does NOT come from the actual vanilla bean or flower and has nothing to do with vanilla. As it turns out, what you have been told and probably believe is vanilla is actually a juice that comes from an anal gland of a beaver. Yup thats right! All those years of eating vanilla icecream and we've all been unknowingly consuming beaver butt juice.

Don't Believe me? Google: Does vanilla come from beaver?

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These days, castoreum is primarily used for fragrances, not foods. It's too expensive and cumbersome (and gross) a process to extract. A little less than 300 pounds is produced every year, which is stretched thin throughout the market.

Because it's considered safe, the FDA doesn't require companies to specifically say they're using castoreum. They can just say "natural flavoring."

But the chances castoreum is in your food are slim to none. Instead, manufacturers make strawberry flavor by mixing some fruit extract with compounds produced from other plants and trees, for example.

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In 2011, the Vegetarian Resource Group (VRG) http://www.vrg.org/blog/2011/06/17/beaver-gland-castoreum-not-used-in-vanilla-flavorings-according-to-manufacturers/ five companies that produce vanilla flavorings about whether they used any castoreum in their products, and all five replied that they did not:
All five unanimously stated that castoreum is not used today in any form of vanilla sold for human food use.
One company, in business for ninety years, informed The VRG that they have never used castoreum in their products. “At one time,” we were told by a senior-level employee at this company, “to the best of my knowledge, it was used to make fragrance and still may be.”
A major ingredients supplier told us this about some of their vanilla flavorings: “[Castoreum] is not a common raw material that is used and we don’t use it, so I can safely say that our natural vanilla flavors do not contain any animal juices. All vanilla extracts are free of it, too, wherever you go.”

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