Um… there’s no easy way to say this. There could be something super gross lingering in your vanilla-flavored foods.It’s called castoreum and, to put it bluntly, it’s brown goo that comes from a beaver’s butt. We’re not sure whether we should laugh, cry, or dial 911.
Castoreum is secreted from a beaver’s castor sac, located dangerously close to the anal gland, and is used to mark a beaver’s territory. Wildlife ecologist Joanne Crawford told National Geographic per Time that the beaver’s diet of barkand leaves gives castoreum a wonderful vanilla-like scent— a scent that has a history of being mixed into vanilla-flavored food products that we, perhaps now regretfully, have consumed.
The musky secretion has been used for various things since ancient times. According to the Huffington Post, the Romans believed that castoreum fumescould bring on abortions. And in the mid 1800s, trappers used castoreum as bait to trap other beavers.
It wasn’t until the early 1900s that someone, somewhere decided to put castoreum in their mouth and determined it was a good idea to add it into foods. Thank you, good sir or madam.
As one can imagine, obtaining castoreum is no easy task. Crawford said that one must physically “squirt” the castoreum out of a beaver’s castor sac. And because the sac is near the anal glands, there’s a strongchance that anal secretions and urine mix into the castoreum during extraction.
EEK!is right.
Fortunately, after all this grossness, there’s good news. Because the castoreum “milking” process is so unpleasant, castoreum is rarely used in vanilla-flavored foods. In 2005, Fenaroli’s Handbook of Flavor Ingredients reported that less than 250 pounds of castoreum liquid and extract was consumed annually. That’s not a lot when portioned out to millions of people.
These days, castoreum is more likely found in fragrances and perfumes like its cousin, musk — which is harvested from a gland located in front of a deer’s penis, btw.
However, on the off chance that a food product does contain castoreum, you’d probably never know it. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says castoreum is “generally recognized as safe,”according to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, and the FDA does not require food manufacturers to list it separately from other “natural flavorings.”
Have we all ingested castoreum or sprayed castoreumon our bodies at some point in our lives? Yes, probably. Is ignorance bliss? In this case, yes — but we suppose it’s too late now.
