From: fayanora	Date: December 23rd, 2008 05:05 am (UTC)		(Link)

Chocolate chip cookies will be more expensive now. :-(

	From: corivax	Date: December 23rd, 2008 05:32 am (UTC)		(Link)

> No matter what you are growing, if you don't take good care of it, you will have problems.

Unfortunately, vanilla is really, really hard to take good care of.

Humans cannot plant vanilla seeds. Well, nothing would happen if they did, anyway. Like most orchid seeds, vanilla seeds do not contain any food for the young plant and can't sprout. A symbiotic fungus grows into the seed and feeds the baby vanilla plant until it grows enough to make leaves and start feeding itself.

The symbiotic fungus is, of course, not native to Madagascar, and we haven't succeeded in cultivating it. So in Madagascar, they get new vanilla plants by cutting pieces off the old ones an convincing the pieces to grow roots with chemicals. So all the Madagascar plants are genetically identical, infertile, and cloned. If disease can kill one of them, they'll all die.

Some of the Mexican vanilla plants are grown in a more haphazard, natural way (since the important fungus is native to Mexico and is able to help the vanilla plant the way it is supposed to), and they tend to be a lot more healthy and disease resistant.

On the other hand, some "Mexican vanilla" is made from tonka bean, which contains liver-damaging chemicals. Whee!

	From: ideealisme	Date: December 23rd, 2008 10:45 am (UTC)		(Link)

:(

	From: dakiwiboid	Date: December 23rd, 2008 06:13 pm (UTC)		(Link)
	So far it's only hitting one cultivar.

There are two more varieties. They aren't as extensively farmed, and people don't rave about them as they do the "Bourbon" vanilla orchid. However, there are still vanilla orchids that aren't being affected. Yet. All is not lost if we act responsibly.