Jessica Badalana

That would be interesting to, like, drill down more on how things are hand-pollinated.

But, you know, you start to see, like, okay, here we have this plant that only grows in a really narrow band in the world that will not...

you know, propagate unless a human intervenes.

And that discovery was actually made in the, you know, 1840s.

So there was an enslaved, I was going to say man, but really a child, a 12-year-old, Edmund Albius, and he worked on a plantation on the island of Réunion.

But he learned that, you know, they brought these vines to Réunion Island, which is in the Indian Ocean, and they were like, hey,

Nothing's happening.

Like these vines aren't, you know, like they're not propagating.

And so he realized that they all had to be hand pollinated.

I doubt they gave him a lot of credit for that discovery.

But that's the only way that vanilla has been able to flourish in places around the world because he discovered that they all have to be hand pollinated.

I mean, so many origin stories are dark origin stories.

To further complicate things.

So like, here it is, narrow band of the world.

Now it has to be hand pollinated.

You can only hand pollinate vanilla bean orchids for like a couple of hours is the window of pollination.

So, like, God help you if you're on your lunch break then.

Like, forget it.

It's just, like, the crop is... And then they're, like, adding to all of that, like, you know, the weather things.

Yeah.