On the road to San Rafael we stopped at the orange plantation of Macario Jimenez. At sixty-eight, he is still strong, with a farmer’s firm grip and a thick head of dark hair brushed straight back off his forehead. He has scary teeth, every one of them banded and rimmed in metal which flashed and glistened with saliva when he spoke, transfixing me with morbid fascination. Victor hadn’t brought me to see the farmer’s teeth. He told me that Macario was experimenting with vanilla, and that he seemed to have hit upon something remarkable. And he was happy to take us into the orange groves and reveal his secret.
It was muddy underfoot on the way to the plantation, clay-like soil which stuck to our shoes in clumps which grew bigger and bigger so that our feet seemed to growing like a cartoon character’s as we walked. The orange trees were larger than I had imagined, big bulbous forms fifteen feet apart. Every one of them was covered in vanilla.
“Isn’t this amazing?” said Victor. “Look at the size of these vines!”
He was right, I had never seen cultivated vanilla bearing so many seed pods. They hung in bunches like swollen fingers about a foot apart along the vines, which themselves seemed to be in rude good health. In the hills around Papantla the farmers reckon on a crop of around two hundred kilograms per hectare, or between two and five kilos of fruit for each mature vine. Macario told me that he could get easily expect ten kilos of green beans from each orange tree, and this year he thought he might get twelve. What was his secret?
The teeth flashed. “There are five commandments in growing vanilla”, explained Macario. “Number One, is water—the vines must drink when they are growing, but they must not get too wet, and the roots must never stand in water. Second: the man who grows them must understand them and watch them every day like they are his children. Number Three: the plant must be strong. The Fourth Commandment is the compost—I have my own recipe. And finally, the tutor, the plant that supports the vine, must be strong and allow just the right amount of shade and light. The orange tree is a good tutor. One more thing: if Number One or number Two fail, then you can forget the rest!”
“You see,” Victor interjected, pumping his fists up and down in his enthusiasm. “No-one else has tried using the orange trees as the tutors. This is so exciting—you see we have 100,000 hectares of orange trees around Papantla—imagine if we could grow vanilla on them all!”
The sums are attractive. Macario told me that he had four hundred orange trees, and if each carried ten kilos of green beans he alone would have four tonnes of vanilla. If he could cure the crop himself—and the farm certainly had space for it—then at the top of the market he might make a quarter of a million dollars. By the same reckoning, just two percent of Papantla’s orange groves could produce a thousand tonnes of vanilla—the equivalent of Madagascar’s total annual production. There are two serious flaws to this plan: first, the resultant glut of vanilla would cause the market value to tumble, and second, growing vanilla and curing it to an acceptable standard are not the same thing. It also occurred to me that if the orange growers took over the vanilla crop on a large scale then the peasant farmers in the hills would be out of a job.
Victor’s desire to restore Mexico’s vanilla crop to its former glory was well meant, but I couldn’t help feeling it was unrealistic. Without an efficient processing industry, growing the beans is simply not enough, and for most farmers the crop is just too labour intensive, and the price too volatile to make it worth a long term investment. Macario, for all his success, admitted he wasn’t an expert in vanilla, and he was happy to grow it as an adjunct to his oranges. In the long term it might be a useful source of extra cash if the citrus market crashed.
However, the visit to Macario had injected Victor with a fresh dose of vigour. We headed back to Papantla at speed, with Victor babbling excitedly about how many millions of dollars the vanilla crop might bring to the region: if only he could get the curers to pay a fair price to the farmers. That was Victor’s mission, to give the campesinos a fair wage for their efforts. I told him that I had been surprised at how little the farmers were getting for green beans—exactly a hundredth of the amount the curers could expect from foreign buyers. “You’re right,” he said. “We must confront the buyers with this figure! Otherwise you never know what could happen in the future. Our poor farmers could become terrorists, driven to do terrible things by poverty!” He said it as if it had never occurred to him before.
It was just getting dark as we reached Papantla, and drew up beside a high white-washed wall on the edge of town. “Here is the warehouse of Don Pedro Heriberto Larios Rivera”, said Victor, “the most important beneficiador in town.”
We squeezed through a narrow side-gate, stooping below a bougainvillaea overhanging the path leading up to the warehouse. Below us to the right was an open yard protected from the street by the high white wall. Outside the doorway to the warehouse there was a queue of farmers and their helpers, waiting to be admitted. They all had sacks of vanilla at their feet.
Victor walked straight through, and led me into the cool interior of the building. More farmers sat inside, occupying a row of plastic chairs opposite a large metal weighing scale onto which sacks of vanilla were being hauled. It reminded me of the big red weighing machines they used to have at English railway stations. It was very quiet, all eyes on the scales while a man with a clipboard noted down the weight of the sacks and called out the totals to an elderly man sitting behind a desk several feet away. The desk was covered in scraps of paper, and the man wrote everything in a dog-eared ledger, occasionally stopping to tap numbers into a rotary adding machine at his elbow. Against the far wall, and with his video camera trained on the activity at the scales sat Dario, the Guatemalan.
Victor nodded his greetings at Larios and we sat and watched as farmer after farmer presented a delivery note to Larios who signed and stamped it with the amount of beans he had purchased. As the last light faded from the sky Larios sat back in his chair with a sigh. The final sack of vanilla was carried to the back of the store-room and the day’s work was done. Dario fiddled with his video camera, packing it away before striding across the floor and shaking Victor and Larios by the hand. They exchanged a few words and then he approached me and again shook hands before bidding us all goodnight and disappearing down the pathway to the road.
Larios and Victor exchanged information about the day’s trading, and it soon became clear that Larios was unhappy at my presence. Although I could follow much of what they were saying in Spanish, it was Victor who made things clear. “Tim, it seems you have cost Don Eriberto some money!”
I couldn’t imagine how, but Victor was grinning from ear to ear as he explained. “The campesinos have been coming here all day telling Larios that a foreigner has been into the hills and he will pay them 200 pesos a kilo for green beans—so they won’t accept 150 any more. And you are that foreigner!” Victor slapped his thighs with amusement.
Larios then explained that the other curers had telephoned him that afternoon with the same story. They all wanted to know who this foreign buyer might be, and they all wanted to know if any of the other curers were paying the ‘new’ price. Eventually, according to Larios, one of the buyers in the town of Gutierez Zamora had cracked, and agreed to pay 175 pesos a kilo. The other buyers had been forced to follow suit, or risk not getting enough green beans to fulfil the contracts they might have with foreign buyers for export.
“So, do you all co-operate and collaborate to fix the price of green beans?” I asked.
“This is the big problem!” exclaimed Victor, without giving Larios a chance to reply. “The curers fix the price—the farmers have no leeway at all, unless one of the curers is desperate and offers more. But they operate like a cartel, and I want the farmers to get a better deal out of this whole process.”
“How much do you think the farmers should get for a kilo of green?”
“I think $50 or $60 would be fair—then the curers will still make a profit when they sell to the buyers for $150 a kilo.”
Larios shook his head. “I have my costs to consider too,” he said calmly. “I have the risk of curing the beans, the cost of security while they are in my charge and of course I need the skill and the experience to get them dried to the very best quality.”
I asked Larios how many beans he would buy this year. “Compared to when I was a young man, hardly any—about ten tonnes of green, which,” he made the sign of the cross, “will give me two tonnes cured.”
I did the sums in my head—for two tonnes of premium quality he could earn $300,000. Even if only half of the beans were premium grade he would still expect to make about $200,000. The campesinos in Zozozolco and Coxquihui had told me that, with careful spending, a family of eight could live on less than one thousand dollars a year.
I left Victor and Larios to talk business and headed back to the hotel, falling asleep to the sound of El Buzon de Coca-Cola as it trundled around the square collecting letters to Santa Claus.
The following morning was clear and bright and in spite of my influence upon the price of beans, Larios had invited me to watch the curing of the vanilla he had bought the night before.
It’s not easy to get away from vanilla in Papantla. As I set out across the market square I noticed that the benches around it were decorated with tiled mosaics showing scenes from local life. One bench panel showed a view of the church, and another depicted the voladores flying from their pole. There was also a mosaic of the magnificent temples of El Tajin, but the prettiest was of a Totonac woman in traditional white dress, holding a flowering vanilla vine.
In the centre of the square there was a hexagonal bandstand. Like many Mexican bandstands it consisted of an open sided platform raised to first floor height from which the musicians could serenade the audience below. Between two of the columns at ground level there were vanilla vines tethered to the cementwork, their roots in large earthenware pots at the base of the bandstand. Several of the plants had been woven together and strung into an arch above a trestle table set up below.
Behind the table stood a man in the regulation straw cowboy hat wearing a shiny jacket emblazoned with a Pepsi-Cola logo. The stall-owner had a long sad face, and very short stumpy fingers with sharp pointed nails. He told me his name was Juan Castaño Parra, and that he made everything on the table himself. There were bottles of vanilla extract and packets of cured vanilla pods, vanilla scented cigarettes and cigarillos, and a range of figures made from woven beans. There was a dog, a butterfly and a hanging basket. He had also made a little peasant couple, the man with a sun hat and tunic, with a machete strapped to his belt. The woman wore a tabard dress and had her hair in two long plaits hanging below her waist. The faces were featureless, but somehow Juan had imbued the little figures with life. There were rosaries, small and large, a crucifix—complete with Jesus and crown of thorns—and several varieties of flowers. We talked for a time, and I told him I was on my way to see the curing process at Larios’s yard. “Ah. Don Eriberto,” Parra nodded sagely, but his doleful expression didn’t change.
Gradually I worked my way towards Larios’s place, paying a brief visit to a shop which proclaimed itself “El Mundo de la Vainilla”. It wasn’t much of a world, with just a few bottles of extract for sale and most of the shop given over to ornaments made from shells and cheap Taiwanese knick-knacks.
In a side street I came across a man with a small van loaded to the brim with cowboy paraphernalia. He had whips and spurs, blankets and bridles and a magnificent handmade saddle in fine-tooled leather which he was selling for two hundred dollars. On the pavement nearby, a boy of eight or nine was practising with a new lasso, repeatedly spinning the loop in circles at ankle level while trying to step into it and out of it without getting entangled.
The queue into Larios’s yard stretched into the street. The double gates at street level were also open and a large canvas awning had been stretched across one section of the yard to protect the green vanilla from the sun. It lay in a heap, thousands upon thousands of beans piled on top of one another to form a green mountain with seven men sitting on low wooden stools around its base. The pile was almost four feet high and at least twenty feet across. In one corner of the yard there were two more men feeding a fire from strips of old packing crates and kindling which they broke by stamping on it with their boots. At its centre was a blackened tin cauldron filled with water which was just beginning to give off steam.
The men around the green bean mountain were pulling handfuls from the pile and measuring them by eye, then stacking them in loose bundles on hessian sacks laid out on the cement floor of the yard. Dario was there too, still wearing his quilted jacket and training his camera on the beans and on the men as they worked. He put the camera down and beckoned me over to where he stood. We shook hands and he showed me a clipboard on which he had a piece of paper with lines marked upon it one centimetre apart. “Look!” he said with a slight smile. Dario reached into the pile of beans and began to select the longest vanilla pods he could find. He laid them against the paper lines, showing me that many of the beans were twenty-five centimetres long. Long, thin elegant beans as green as Irish grass. He produced two more beans; shorter and curved like a banana. They were much fatter in girth, and as they grew they twisted, showing prominent edges making them look more like mini-courgettes than the other beans. “You know this?” asked Dario.
“Vanilla pompona?” I guessed, though I knew the variety only from books. “Yes, pompona!” he nodded excitedly, at my recognition of the variant species. Dario urged me to take pictures of his measuring chart and enthused about the quality of the beans we could see in Larios’s yard. He seemed less aggressive than on our previous meetings, and had obviously decided that I was no longer a pirate.
A shout from the far corner of the yard told the men around the bean pile that the fire was ready. The men doing the sorting abandoned their little stools and stood up, carrying their small piles of sorted beans over to the fire. The water was giving off steady wisps of light steam and a large wooden box had been dragged close to the fire. One by one the men began twisting the squares of hessian, in which they carried their beans, into bundles and began dipping them into the hot water. They shielded their faces from the heat of the flames with one hand, holding the bundles at arms length for as long as they could above the almost boiling water. For a minute at a time, perhaps longer, they extended an arm above the fire and the water, squatting back on their heels to get away from the heat. “Ayee!” Woodsmoke and steam billowed into their eyes making them wince, and occasionally grunt with pain.
One man stood by the wooden box, a giant red coffin into which the steamed beans were hurled and immediately covered with sacking. Again and again the sacking was peeled back and another load of hot beans dumped onto its growing cargo, all of it steaming and throwing clouds of mist into the air around the box.
After an hour or so the box was a third full, and it was time for almuerzo, the men’s mid-morning snack. I watched as they retrieved their small bags of food from a little store-room in the corner of the yard, and placed a large metal kettle on the edge of the fire where they had been steaming the beans. I was offered tea as they produced little bags of tortillas and meat and began to argue good-naturedly about football. The man who had been tending the fire was happy to talk, and he told me that they would expect to fit all of the beans on the floor that morning into the red box—about eight hundred kilograms in all.
Steaming the beans is an essential first step in the curing process, the heat in effect ‘kills’ the bean, preventing any further photosynthesis, or growth, and stimulating enzymes within the bean which will eventually make it smell like ‘vanilla’. By wrapping the beans in sacking immediately after dipping they are kept warm, and consequently begin to ‘sweat’. They remain under wraps for twenty-four hours. However, to prevent moisture accumulating on the beans and making them rot they must then be unwrapped and exposed to sunlight every few hours—depending on the weather conditions—and then wrapped again. Then they will be stored away from direct heat and sunlight for several more months to develop their full aroma and flavour. It is the careful drying process which will ensure the beans have the correct moisture content—between twenty and thirty percent. The curing will also affect the beans’ vanillin content, one of the key flavour components which will determine the bean’s ultimate commercial value to the overseas buyers. Various attempts have been made to speed up the drying and conditioning process—which can take as much as eight months—sometimes with ovens, especially in Indonesia where vanilla production has increased dramatically in recent years. Such efforts always result in a lower quality bean, one which may have sufficient vanillin but usually with a low moisture content making it unsuitable for premium food grade applications. The best quality vanilla beans are dark skinned, soft and pliable.
Someone switched on a radio as the workers took their break, and the yard was filled with the sound of Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas”. I saw Dario sitting alone at the other end of the yard, scribbling notes and measuring beans from the pile against his clipboard chart. Together we enthused about the length of the beans, and I plucked up the courage to ask him whether he had come to Papantla to buy vanilla. “I come, only to learn,” he said gravely. “I will return to Guatemala and create my own plantation. There I will produce the best vanilla in the world. That is my dream.”
Dario became emotional as he talked about his dream, and at one point I thought I saw a tear in the corner of his eye. “Do you have dreams, Señor Tim?” he asked. “Men can only be men if they have dreams.”
In spite of Dario’s poetic stance I couldn’t help being sceptical, especially as Victor had given me another version of why Dario was there. On the car journey from Zozozolco he had told me that the Guatemalan was related to one of the best known vanilla dealers in the world, a company with offices in Europe and north America and significant interests in Latin America. In part, Dario’s version was true, he was hoping to have his own plantation in Guatemala but according to Victor he was also being paid to keep an eye on Larios. It seemed that the previous year the European importers had paid the beneficiador a large amount of cash to secure a specific amount of cured premium quality vanilla. However, when the time came to deliver the contract, Larios revealed that he had no vanilla. In fact he had found another buyer who would pay more than the Europeans had offered, and he had simply sold them the beans. Naturally, he had already used the European cash advance to pay for the green beans, and could not afford to repay it. And, because the price for vanilla had also risen since he had received the down-payment, he could not afford to buy replacement beans for those he had given to the other buyer. It was a common enough tale in the commercial world of vanilla dealing, a market which to this day operates on handshakes and cash advances. Every foreign buyer knows they take a risk if they hand over an advance, but they sometimes do it in order to secure their line of supply. So, this year, Dario had been despatched to sit in Larios’s office and quite literally count the beans. His presence would guarantee that what had been paid for didn’t simply disappear if someone else made a better offer. In the process, he was also learning what he could about how to cure vanilla, and hoping to realise his dream.
In the 1850’s the vanilla was carried into town on mules. In small places like Papantla, Teutila, Gutierez Zamora and San Andrés Tuxtla it came in long trains of pack animals tethered together nose to tail with hoofs slipping on the streets as they went. The curers laid out the pods on the streets to dry and the cobblestones were stained black with the juices that ran out of them. That was when Mexico produced half of the world’s vanilla beans, before the oil was discovered, and before much of the land was given over to cattle.
Today’s beneficiadores are descendants of the men who grew rich on vanilla. Larios’s father began his business in 1906, after the first wave of curers had set up their estates in Papantla. Many of them were foreigners, especially Frenchmen and Italians, men like Don Dominico Gaia Tossi, an Italian immigrant who came to the area in 1873 and whose grandson Orlando opened the Vai-Mex vanilla extract factory seventy five years later. Immigrants like the Gaia’s (who now call themselves Gaya) were encouraged to settle in Mexico under the presidency of Porfirio Díaz, when foreign businessmen and settlers were given land in return for exploiting commercial opportunities in the rural areas. During his presidency, Díaz zealously promoted any enterprises which would modernise the Mexican economy, and great social inequalities sprang from the policy of confiscating land which had traditionally belonged to Indian communities. German industrialists, French planters and Texan oilmen were welcomed to the wild ‘untamed’ territories like Veracruz, which was then mostly forest.
Victor had recommended that I meet someone he knew with a collection of photographs of Papantla. In a small house on the outskirts of the town I found Javier Carreira Dueñas. Javier is in his sixties, and no longer in the vanilla business, but he remembers the old days, when his father in law Don Raul Del Cueto made enough from his vanilla to buy an elegant three-masted schooner to carry his beans to New York. Carreira has gathered together as much information as he can about his family’s connection with vanilla. He showed me old family photographs of the time when Don Raul’s father, Ramon Del Cueto Decuir had been at the very forefront of the industry.
“He was ahead of his time,” Carreira told me, producing a picture of a distinguished man wearing a suit on the verandah of a colonial hacienda. Crescent-shaped birdcages hung from the balcony ceiling and there were men in peasant dress laying out the neat bundles of vanilla in the courtyard beside the house.
Don Ramon did so well from vanilla that he went into banking too, and Carreira proudly handed me an old pen, still in its cardboard box, with the company logo embossed on the side: Don Ramon Del Cueto e Hijo, Exportadores de Vainilla, Corresponsales Bancararios, Papantla 1940. He turned it over and over in his hands, as if it were a religious relic.
“The business today is nothing,” Carreira lamented. “I remember the days when the beans we had here were 40 centimetres long. No,” he shook his head sagely. “The planters have lost the secret of growing good beans, and the beneficiadores are not what they were.”
Carreira showed me his father in law’s notebooks and letters going back a century to the time when Papantla vanilla was widely acknowledged to be the best in the world. The notebooks recorded that it was in 1860 that the beneficiadores first used thermometers to monitor the temperature at which they dried the beans. Ten years earlier the first custom-built drying oven was built in Papantla, an adaptation he said, of technology that had been used in Italy to kill silk-worms. The names of other curers surfaced in his journals, many of them with Italian or French roots: Arzani, Fontecilla, Perrotet and Tremari.
According to Carreira, Don Raul (his wife’s grandfather) had set out rules for the quality of the vanilla pods to be exported, laying down a standard which they hoped would ensure Mexico’s pre-eminence in world trade. In 1915 he wrote “Mexico can, and should, recuperate its place. By 1960 we can predict that Madagascar will produce a thousand tonnes of vanilla. We in Mexico could produce twice that much if only we develop our industry along scientific lines.”
It was not to be. Don Raul’s predictions for Madagascar were uncannily accurate, but the Mexican industry would go into a steady decline, in part due to the advent of cheap artificial substitutes for natural vanilla, but more crucially because the Mexican workforce would find easier, and more lucrative alternatives than this labour intensive cash-crop.
That evening, Victor told me to meet him at the Plaza Pardo café on the town square. “You’ll find me with Larios,” he grinned. “He’s always there with the other old men. You know, they call themselves the ‘pajaros caidos’—the fallen birds—because their ‘dicks’ no longer rise up!” Victor clearly didn’t include himself in the group. In any event he wasn’t there, and nor was Larios. I ordered some food and then noticed that Dario was sitting alone on the balcony overlooking the street. I waved a greeting, and he got up and lurched unsteadily towards my table. “I will buy my friend the English pirate a drink!” he said, drawing up a chair. “You will join me, yes?”
I tried to decline but it was one of those conversations that was always going to be one-sided. During the next hour I learnt a lot about Dario, not least that he had been Guatemala’s National rodeo champion in 1981. It partially explained the strength of his grip as he held my hand in his own, holding my forearm with his other hand and tugging on my arm every time he made a statement.
“Tell me, Inglés. Can I trust an English man to tell me what is in his heart?”
I’ve never been very good at bar-room confidences, perhaps because I rarely go into bars. Fortunately, Dario’s questions were mostly rhetorical. Each one was followed, however, by another test of forearm strength and an earnest request that I look him in the eyes. “Veme a los ochos” he would say, and I feared for the consequences if my gaze wandered. Each time I met the staring-test we had to chink glasses of rum together with a hearty ‘Salud!’ the only time my arm was released from his bear-like grip. Our food lay uneaten beneath our straining forearms as Dario outlined his dream of becoming Guatemala’s best vanilla farmer. “No-one can be richer than the man who lives out his dream.”
As the rum disappeared I tried frantically to catch the waitress’s eye, so as to summon the bill and escape from the drunken embrace. However, the restaurant staff seemed to be occupied with some unfolding drama of their own. They were clustered at the restaurant door, giggling and shrieking dementedly at something on the other side of the glass. Fortunately, Dario’s mood swung swiftly from bellicose to lachrymose. “I am just a poor Que’Chi Indian,” he intoned tearfully. “Seriamente” Truthfully. “Salud!” A toast. And so it went on. “Look me in the eyes, tell me are you really a pirate?”
Just when I thought I was going to be challenged to some kind of all out wrestling match the waitress appeared and Dario said he had to go to the lavatory. I told him I had to meet Victor, and apologised that I might not be at the table when he returned.
Outside on the pavement I found out what had been amusing the waitresses. A very large but somewhat threadbare dog was lying in the entrance to the restaurant with a length of nylon cord knotted tight around its neck. Its tongue lolled from its mouth and by now it had barely the strength to raise its head. No-one seemed to find the sight distressing, but a few people stopped and stared at the pathetic sight of the choking animal as I bent over it. I think they were waiting to see if I would get bitten. An old lady in a neighbouring doorway was persuaded to fetch me some scissors and somewhat gingerly I managed to free the cord which had bitten deeply through the skin on the dog’s throat. It sagged to the floor, retching and gagging in that whole-body-way that dogs do so well. I thought it might die, but after a few minutes it stood up and followed me back to the hotel. I left it on the steps outside, hoping it would survive the night. Once upstairs, I couldn’t get to sleep, lying in my bed waiting for any sound of Dario returning to the adjoining room. I half expected him to appear at the door for some more arm wrestling.
The dog was still there the next morning, wagging its patchy tail at me and following me back to the restaurant. Of Dario there was no sign, but Victor decided to show up for breakfast, and apologised for not appearing the night before. He wanted to talk about how successful his efforts at the Vanilla Council had been. “Once upon a time,” he said, “all of the vanilla in Papantla went to Coca-Cola, and I think we can bring back those days. You know they’ve been down here twice this year already.”
It is an open secret in the vanilla business that some of the world’s crop eventually finds its way into the world’s most popular carbonated soft drinks. Pepsi-Cola readily acknowledge vanilla essence as an ingredient in their drink, but Coca-Cola will make no official comment on any of their ingredients. Victor had no such inhibitions.
“Oh yes, Coca-Cola was here, they sent a lady down in a private jet and she has been twice to see the farmers with me. One day when it was very hot she forgot to drink enough water and became dehydrated and fainted. It was terrible, she cut her head and we wanted to take her to a doctor, but her assistant wouldn’t allow her to be seen by a Mexican doctor! Imagine, they sent for the plane to fly her back to the States!”
Victor said that in Papantla the incident had caused ill-feeling, not so much because no vanilla was sold, but because the executive in question had not been allowed to consult a Mexican doctor. “You see,” Victor muttered darkly, “what we have to put up with from our neighbours across the border.” He reminded me of the saying coined by Porfirio Díaz at the turn of the nineteenth century –“pobre Mexico tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de Estados Unidos”— poor Mexico, so far from God and so close to the United States.
Victor told me that as far as he knew none of the beneficiadores had signed a contract with the American company. The recent launch of a new brand—Vanilla Coke—the Mexican growers had high hopes that once again they might benefit from supplying the giants of the beverage industry. It was a story I had heard before, and newspapers in Uganda, India and Tahiti had reported similar hopes for their own vanilla growers. In fact industry insiders say that if vanilla is still a vital ingredient in Coca Cola it is a very small, very dilute amount which is used, and that Pepsi and Coke probably only buy around forty tonnes of vanilla each per year—just a few percent of the world market between them.
No-one at Coca-Cola will confirm that vanilla is an ingredient in the world’s most popular soft drink. I telephoned the lady at Coca-Cola whom Victor named, but she told me that she could not even confirm that she had ever set foot in Mexico. Vanilla dealers all say the same thing—‘even if we sell vanilla to Coca Cola we can never admit it’. One man, who has been in the industry for forty years, told me an anecdote that he said was widely believed in the vanilla world. “Remember New Coke? Back in 1985 they introduced ‘New Coke’ and a few months later they went back to the old formula because it was so unpopular.” Indeed, how could anyone forget.
“Well, let me tell you they tried to sell off the vanilla they had stockpiled because they didn’t need it in ‘New Coke’, and I believe that’s why people didn’t like the new brand—it had no vanilla! So, guess what? They brought back the original flavour.” He also said he knew that the company had been forced to buy back the vanilla they had sold off, but at an inflated price from a canny broker.
Another version of the story is that the company reformulated its product with the express purpose of removing vanilla as an ingredient, not wanting to be dependent upon an ingredient that could fluctuate widely in price and availability. Whether the story about vanilla, and its role in the debacle, is true or not, the fact remains that original Coke was reintroduced after three months, and relabelled ‘Classic Coke’. According to this man, Coca-Cola were originally planning to phase out ‘original Coke’ completely, and sell only the ‘new’ version. The company therefore no longer needed to keep any vanilla in stock. Like urban legends, rumours about Coca-Cola and vanilla abound. What is certain is that no-one who does business with the big players in the food and beverage industry dares talk about what they do or do not supply to them. However “Vanilla Coke”, introduced in May 2002, does contain a certain amount of natural vanilla flavouring, and according to Coca-Cola it has been a huge success, reputedly accounting for a rise in profits in the company’s 2002–2003 sales figures. According to official figures from Coca-Cola the vanilla flavoured drink sold almost a hundred million cases in its first year and “brought in eight million new consumers who were not drinking Coca-Cola”.
Victor Vallejo was equally happy to tell me that he had been entertaining other high profile figures from the vanilla world in recent months. Buyers from the big vanilla import-export companies like Aust Hachman, Zink & Triest, Shank’s Extracts and Vanipro had all passed through on buying trips. With no more than six or seven significant players in the world vanilla trade it isn’t difficult to find out who is buying beans, although the quantities and the price they pay are closely guarded secrets.
For Victor, and the Vanilla Council, the obstacle to securing a fairer price for the farmers is not the foreign buyers; it is the Mexican curers. Not only are they reluctant to pay a higher price for green beans, but they also find it difficult to stick to the rules governing the official harvest date. “We know they buy beans at an even lower price before the harvest day,” said Victor. “They are businessmen, and they won’t turn down a good deal—but cheap beans are often stolen beans, and if people know the curers will buy them then they have the incentive to steal.”
Mexico, the home of xa’nat, now produces just forty tonnes of vanilla each year, whereas sixty years ago it was exporting ten times this amount. The oil industry has displaced the vanilla crop as the main source of income for Totonac wage earners, and with it the rural way of life is changing too. Like many other Mexicans, young Totonacs are forced away from their villages to work in the cities, or across the border in the USA, in order to send vital cash back to their families. Farming is not an easy, or a profitable option, though many Totonac people are proudly defensive of their traditional way of life. For them, growing vanilla is something they have done since time immemorial. They say it is part of them now, in the same way that the dark green vines they tether to the trees become part of the forest.
It seemed a long way back from Papantla to Mexico City. The road inland makes it possible to retrace the route Cortés followed when he made his epic trek towards Tenochtitlan in 1519. I passed through Cempoala again and made my way to Jalapa, where at the recommendation of a friend, I dined at La Sopa. The chef, ‘Negro’ Ochoa gave me chickpea soup spiced with jalapeños, the city’s eponymous peppers. Negro is the first Mexican chef to be awarded the Medal of Honour by the French Institute of Gastronomy, but he is better known in Jalapa as an exuberant advocate of nourishing food provided at minimal cost. He joined me as I ended my meal with a small natilla, a peach and vanilla custard compote. “Don’t worry, it’s not fattening,” Negro pronounced. “I’m keeping the people of Jalapa slim.”
He, and his hand-picked team of model-handsome waiters flitted between the tables like a troupe of unemployed ballet dancers. “Surely, you’re not worried about being overweight?” I said, in deference to his narrow hips and tight trousers. “No” he giggled. “I’m terrified of developing diabetes, I’ve heard it stops you getting it up!”
From Jalapa I continued towards Tlaxcala. Cortés was guided here by three Totonac nobles and his journey took thirteen days, up, up away from the humid coastland and through the high pass between the cloud covered peaks of Orizaba and Nauhcampatepetl. At Tlaxcala, the conqueror made another alliance, boosting his small army with thousands of troops supplied by the Indian chiefs who, like the fat cacique of Cempoala, had long held grudges against the Aztecs who forced them to pay taxes and restricted their own trading ambitions. There, in the Cathedral of the Ascension I tiptoed past a wedding party to see the stone font where Cortés stood as Godfather to four Tlaxcalan nobles who were baptised following the conquest of Tenochtitlan. On this spot, Maxixcatzin, Xicohtencatl, Tlahuexcocotzin, and Zitlalpopocatl became Lorenzo, Vicente, Gonzalo and Bartolomeo. “Here was begun the Holy gospel in this New World” ran the inscription on the original stone pulpit nearby.
I drove on across the flat scrub plain dotted with maguey cactus and fields filled with strange miniature haystacks no more than four feet tall. I skirted the desert and the last pockets of wet swamp where Cortés lost all of his Cuban porters to exposure. That night I slept in a cold bedroom at an old family hacienda on a dusty road some way from town.
The owner was Javier Zamora, a young man with grand plans to turn his grandmother’s home into a modern hotel. He had a face straight out of a Velasquez painting, thick ringlets of onyx-black hair framing his linen-white skin and dark Spanish eyes. The main house had an enormous dining room and a log fire, but because I was cold, and the only resident in the hacienda, (apart from granny who had the upstairs floor), I was allowed to eat at the family table in the kitchen. Javier gave me mixiote, a bag made from a boiled maguey cactus leaf tied at the neck with cord and filled with lamb marinade in a rich scarlet sauce concocted from more twenty ingredients, including garlic, cumin and several types of pepper. He told me the lamb and the cactus leaves all came from his own land. There were also strips of fried nopal cactus, fresh guacamole and an old china teapot filled with hot strong tea. Fortified against the cold, I slept deeply, and had violent spice-fuelled dreams.
Cortés entered Tenochtitlan four months after he left the Veracruz, but by early afternoon the next day I was there, installed in one of the crop of new designer hotels which have reinvigorated the metropolis. If legend is to be believed Cortés became the first European to taste vanilla, an ingredient in xocolatl, which Montezuma presented to him in a gilded goblet carved from tortoise-shell.
I had come to the great city in search of Miguel Soto, a somewhat reclusive botanist, who knows more about vanilla than any man alive. After several conversations by telephone from London, he had at last agreed to meet me, though he said he could not reveal too much of his specialist knowledge about vanilla since it was as yet unpublished.
After several days in town, we eventually met on the Avenue Masaryk, one of Mexico City’s smartest streets with shop-fronts decked out by Cartier and Bulgari, Burberry and Alfred Dunhill. Roadside kiosks offer the well-heeled businessmen a quick shoe-shine for a few pesos or a hot tortilla for the office workers hurrying into the banks and car showrooms that line the avenue. Miguel arrived late, and given how hard it had been to make contact I was becoming nervous that he was not going to appear. He walked into the lobby of my hotel, a slim youthful figure in a denim jacket and faded jeans, explaining that his reluctance to meet was partly due to problems with his car, but he had made the two hour journey from home by public transport. At first Miguel was shy, and reluctant to talk about his work except in a very general way, but gradually he relaxed and began to enthuse about his research. Another factor in his reticence on the telephone had been that he was having problems at the University, some kind of conflict with a junior academic who happened to be having an affair with Miguel’s supervisor, the Head of Department. It was a common enough tale of the in-fighting and petty rivalries which blight academe, and it reminded me of why I had abandoned my own ambitions of writing a PhD.
There was a winter chill in the air as we drank tea on the terrace of the fashionable Habita Hotel, a frosted glass cube of a building with a thin roof-top pool overlooking the vast spread of the city. The heated water sent steam into the sky. Miguel was patient, and explained his own research in a way that led me to believe I understood it. He also said he had difficulty funding his research into the genetic and molecular structure of vanilla orchids. “I love this plant, it’s an amazing survivor,” he said. “I believe it’s quite possible that every cultivated Vanilla planifolia specimen in the world today has come from just one specimen taken from Mexico in the eighteenth century.”
For more than twenty years, Miguel has travelled widely around southern Mexico looking for wild uncultivated specimens of commercial vanilla. He has camped out in the mountains of Chiapas State, and across the border in Guatemala for weeks at a time, hoping to locate vanilla orchids in the thick jungle. In all that time he has found fewer than thirty plants which he believes are truly wild and may have spread naturally—rather than having been transported by human beings. Miguel seemed in awe of the vanilla plant, breathlessly listing its special qualities: “I’ve never seen a seedling in the wild—this is a clonal plant, highly specific in its habitat. It has survived even though it has been the victim of uncontrolled extraction by human beings.”
He said he knew at least fourteen species of vanilla orchid within Central America, several of them as yet undescribed. To the naked eye, many of these species look identical to planifolia when they are not in flower, something which has led to confusion among botanists for centuries. I had been puzzled to see vanilla specimens in Madagascar which local growers said were planifolia but that had different shaped leaves, and great variation in stem sizes. Miguel was quick to explain how these specimens could still be the Mexican species.
“Look, I am made up of my father and my mother’s genes,” Miguel said, rolling up his shirt-sleeve. “But, see here on my arm—these freckles, they are mine, not my parents. These are just somatic differences—a variation in my individual form caused by how much sun my skin has been exposed to. My phenotype—the genetic form my body takes—is very clearly ‘Mexican’, with a little Chinese from my grandfather! So the ‘strange’ vanilla you have seen may well be planifolia, with differences in the leaves cause by soil or heat: without genetic markers it is impossible to be sure.”
The sky darkened as we talked and I watched the aeroplanes descending through the orange haze over the capital as they came in to land at Benito Juarez airport. Miguel is an articulate man, a clear thinker with an understated passion for his work. Gradually he told me more about the difficulties involved in his research. He told me how a well known international organisation refused him access to their extensive collection of vanilla specimens when he wouldn’t reveal the location of a self-pollinating variety of planifolia. The commercial value of a vanilla plant that didn’t need to be fertilised by hand would be enormous, but he didn’t want the specimen he had found in the forest to be disturbed. Miguel also described the dangers in locating vanilla orchids in southern Mexico, not just because they grow in remote mountainous terrain which can only be reached on foot. It is the kind of landscape that bandits and drug traffickers favour too, and they are understandably wary of people, even innocent botanists, invading their territory.
To identify the true spread of naturally occurring Vanilla planifolia within Mexico, Miguel needs more funds and more time. He works as a consultant to the government, and to various botanical organisations, activities which take up time and prevent him publishing his definitive research. He is certain that Vanilla planifolia’s natural range is a more or less straight line from Mexico’s Oaxaca State extending south through Guatemala and Belize. For this reason, he doubts that the plant is truly native to Veracruz, and to the Totonac lands. Miguel believes that pre-Hispanic cultures were probably responsible for its spread northwards from Oaxaca towards the Gulf Coast. However, he is also quite confident that the Totonac would not have relied on natural pollination to produce the vanilla pods they gave to the Aztecs. Even so, there is no direct or even anecdotal evidence of manual pollination being carried out before the nineteenth century.
On one thing we could agree, that Vanilla planifolia had moved from Mexico to the Indian Ocean via Europe. “Don’t forget,” Miguel said quietly. “The English were obsessed with horticulture and cultivating exotic species in a way that never happened in Spanish culture. Yes, the conquistadors came from Spain, but they took vanilla back home only as an item to trade. In England, you were much more interested in it as a plant.”