Apparently Beaver Buttholes Taste Like Vanilla
The FDA recognizes castoreum as a safe-to-eat food flavoring
Would you ever lick the butthole of a beaver? No? Me neither. But, have you heard of castoreum? It’s a fancy word for what I like to call Beaver Butthole Vanilla - a goo that is “milked” from a beaver’s butthole and it’s used as a replacement for vanilla, raspberry or strawberry in some flavorings and foods. It’s more likely to be found in your perfumes than foods because of HOW they remove the goo. It’s expensive & tedious.
They have to anesthetize the beaver to milk it’s glands and that means only about 300 pounds are produced anally… I mean annually. Okay 300 pounds anally, annually is what I’m trying to say. I would just personally like to know who decided to sniff or lick the butthole of a beaver to figure this out.
Both the Flavor and Extract Manufacturers Association (FEMA) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recognizes castoreum as safe (of course they do) so while it’s deemed “A-OK!” to use as food flavoring I find it to be totally disgusting. It’s just another reason to read labels and check ingredient lists. It’s more likely to be used in the perfume industry for its vanilla scent. It’s also used in whiskey and other expensive products because of the lengthy process of the removal from the poor beaver. Castoreum has been traditionally used in Sweden for flavoring a variety of schnapps commonly referred to as "Bäverhojt" (literally, beaver shout). You can find it in some Chanel, YSL and Dior perfumes (amongst others).
Whether or not it’s commonly used now … it was used pretty commonly back in the early 1900s and once again - im just curious who decided to get all up in a beaver’s butthole to figure that out. YUCK!
SOURCES:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17365147/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castoreum
https://www.fragrantica.com/notes/Castoreum-102.html
Unlike modern humans, who are used to unnatural and sterilized environments, pre-modern humans--the ones who have been existing on this planet for millennia-- have looked to and relied on the natural world (plants, animals, earth, etc.), not Walmart, to meet their survival needs as well as expand and discover life's potentials. Wasting anything from an animal that had been hunted was not in their vocabulary--again, a big difference from modern human "values". It couldn't have been too difficult to figure out what was useful from an animal carcass.
My wife also found this, but only a couple of days ago. I highly doubt that beavers are used for vanilla flavor, because chemical engineers have long been able to produce complex aromatic compounds to emulate the taste and/or the smell of just about anything. Such chemicals are cheap and extremely powerful.