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Edmond Albius's method of pollination is now used by all vanilla growers
The Boy Who Was King of Vanilla His brilliant method of pollination is now used by all vanilla growers. By Elena Kazamia Sign up for our monthly newsletter! Vanilla has a secret and a story to tell. Most every bean that is sold has been pollinated by human hands, in a deft gesture using a...
His invention rescued the island’s collapsing economy, transformed a tropical orchid into a cash crop, and commodified vanilla, turning it into the world’s most recognized flavor. “Like many brilliant inventions, Edmond’s appears disarmingly simple, but only after the fact,” says Eric Jennings, professor of French colonial history at the University of Toronto, in a lecture on the subject. In a 1938 racist historical novel Les Vanilliers, white French author Georges Limbour depicts Albius as possessing “the clumsiness of an ignorant insect.” Many botanists had tried to work out how to pollinate the plant by hand and failed.
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