Bean or Factory? Vanilla and Food Wraps in a Home Kitchen

Vanilla From a Bean or From a Factory?

1Seventh grader Esme Vandermolen was baking cookies for a school bake sale. At the grocery store, she found two bottles of the same size: "pure vanilla extract" for $14 and "imitation vanilla" for $3. Her grandfather, Wim Vandermolen, worked for many years as a food chemist. When Esme asked which bottle was the real thing, he smiled and said, "That depends on what you mean by real."

2He explained that natural materials come from plants, animals or minerals and are only cleaned, cut, dried, soaked, melted, spun or woven, without becoming new substances. Synthetic materials are made when substances taken from natural resources go through chemical reactions that form new substances.

3Pure vanilla extract is made by soaking cured vanilla beans in a mix of alcohol and water. The liquid takes up vanillin, the molecule that gives vanilla most of its flavor, along with many other flavor substances from the bean. On most farms, each vanilla flower must be pollinated by hand, and the beans take many months to grow and cure. Most of the world's vanilla beans come from one island country, Madagascar, where storms or a poor harvest can make prices jump.

4Imitation vanilla is flavored with vanillin made in factories. Most of it is made by chemical reactions that start with substances from crude oil. Some is made from lignin, a substance in wood that is left over when paper mills turn wood into pulp for paper. Today, most of the vanillin in foods around the world is made in factories, and only a small share comes from vanilla beans. To show Esme what this means, Grandpa Wim found the property data in Table 1 in one of his old lab books.

5Grandpa Wim also wanted to use less plastic wrap at home. Plastic wrap is a synthetic material made from natural gas or crude oil: in a chemical plant, small molecules react and link into long chains. It is cheap and clings tightly, but each sheet is used once and thrown away, and it can last for a very long time in a landfill. A beeswax wrap is a piece of cotton cloth coated with melted beeswax and tree resin. It is washed in cool water and can be reused for about a year. Esme and her grandfather set up the test in Table 2 to compare ways of keeping cheese fresh.