MILES TO READ B4 I SLEEP: SMT Vanilla comes from Vanilla planifolia, a fragrant tropical orchid, not a tree.

Sunday, 16 November 2025

Here is a clear bullet-point gist of the passage you provided from the Goods and Services section:

🔹 BULLET GIST — “Goods and Services”

Many people are unaware of how deeply trees are tied to ordinary products.
Ancient Greeks chewed mastiche, a gum from the mastic tree (related to mango, pistachio, and poison ivy).
The Mayan civilization collected chicle (sap of the sapodilla tree), the original raw material for modern chewing gum.
Sapodilla trees grow mainly in the Yucatán Peninsula.
Trees are tapped starting at 25 years old; each harvest every four years yields about 2 pounds of gum.
Other trees from Latin America, Southeast Asia, and pine trees in the southeastern U.S. also supply resins to the chewing-gum industry.

Vanilla comes from Vanilla planifolia, a fragrant tropical orchid, not a tree.
However, the orchid requires trees to climb, using aerial roots to ascend trunks.
Indigenous Mesoamerican peoples first used vanilla; the Aztecs flavored chocolate with it at the time of Cortés.
Other species are grown in Tahiti and Madagascar, but yield weaker extracts.
Vanilla extract is obtained from seed pods (“beans”) that are wrapped and fermented (“sweated”) for six weeks.
During fermentation, glucosides break down into glucose + vanillin, producing the iconic aroma.

Natural vanilla demand has long exceeded supply.
Scientists decoded the chemical structure of vanillin in the 1870s.
In the 1930s, vanillin was chemically extracted from clove oil.
By the 1940s, artificial vanillin became a by-product of paper manufacturing, produced from lignin in wood pulp.
Synthetic vanillin is cheaper but lower quality than natural rainforest vanilla.

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