Well, as long as it’s not turtle sperm.
I see your Wiki cite and raise you:
ETA: Yeah, there are currently plenty of beavers. I was wrongish.
Very simple. There’s this thing in America called “Capitalism”- maybe you have heard of it? Since you can replace castoreum with actual real vanilla at 1/100 the price and that is something that would be put on the label (it’s like “real sea salt” or things like, thatnit bring in consumer interest, add value) then no-one is gonna add something just to make their product more costly, and take away Kosher certification. AND if it got out via their competitor or a muck-raking blogger they would lose sales.
So sure, a company could possibly add ground up thousand dollar bills as “natural flavorings” but they arent gonna do it.
From snopes:
*In 2011, the Vegetarian Resource Group (VRG) queried five companies that produce vanilla flavorings about whether they used any castoreum in their products, and all five replied that they did not:
All five unanimously stated that castoreum is not used today in any form of vanilla sold for human food use.
One company, in business for ninety years, informed The VRG that they have never used castoreum in their products. “At one time,” we were told by a senior level employee at this company, “to the best of my knowledge, it was used to make fragrance and still may be.”
A major ingredients supplier told us this about some of their vanilla flavorings: “[Castoreum] is not a common raw material that is used and we don’t use it, so I can safely say that our natural vanilla flavors do not contain any animal juices. All vanilla extracts are free of it, too, wherever you go.”*
Read more at Does Vanilla Flavoring Come from Beaver Anal Secretions? | Snopes.com
It has been cited that at least 300lbs a year are used. The 5 manufacturers in your cite don’t use it, but that isn’t everybody.
300 lbs. isn’t a lot, but as they say, a little dab’ll do ya.
somebody above already mentioned lac bugs, so let me throw in cochineal - little scale bugs that infest cactus plants (opuntia in Mexico - you know, the cactus that makes prickly pear) that are collected, boiled and ground for their red colour
also, FWIW, most artificial vanilla (or rather, more-cheaply-produced vanilla, since it’s extracted also but just from another source) is made from wood. That wood has these flavors is also why we age various boozes in wood barrels - that tasty flavor comes out into the booze.
I don’t think the argument is about whether stuff should be labeled beaver free or not, the argument is that companies should have to list the SPECIFIC natural flavor ingredients instead of hiding under a vague banner. If it contains lignin then list it, pretty simple really. For those people that don’t care cool, ignore the ingredient list.
Nobody in the USA uses it for food, it’s all used for perfume. It’s too damn expensive to use for food. Real vanilla is cheaper and will add sales.
I wonder if it was once used as a vanilla substitute because beavers are all over the Northern Hemisphere, if you let them, while real vanilla had to be imported from Mexico, which was especially difficult before 1492.