THE TRUTH about beaver arse milk in your cakes: There's nothing vanilla about vanilla

Re: Where the hell do you find a beaver...?

two were caught, a few years ago. The remaining one was recently spotted near Nuneaton.

So the other two were eaten?

Re: Come on

> There's no way catching beavers is easier or cheaper than growing vanilla plants.

There is no way those who process dead beaver would not try to extract every last scent they could from the dead animal. If this includes selling its dead arse juices as vanilla flavouring then that is exactly what they will do.

Re: Come on

I was wondering. Could it April 1st? No: this is just too unlikely, nobody would even begin to believe it.

Then I realised... it's no more unlikely than musk.

Re: Come on

Vanilla beans will be cheaper than castoreum but still too expensive for most purposes. Commercially vanillin is made from wood pulp. It's a by-product of the paper-making industry. So you should only expect castoreum in very high-end organic foods and the most expensive perfumes. The most expensive perfumes also use musk collected from the scent-glands of musk-oxen and civet cats. You definitely won't find musk in a vanilla protein shake.

Re: Come on

Depends on how strong it is. If one pound of beaver ass can be used to produce the equivalent of 100 pounds of vanilla based flavourings then it might be cheaper in the long run

Re: Come on

"I call BS."

Nope. A dutch TV program which tracks origins of consumer products to show how they are created dug into this earlier this year. And yeah, the stuff exists, is being collected from killed beavers and being sold as a natural flavor. Getting a food producer to admit they use it turned out to be a different story, but the stuff exists and is being sold.

The two episodes covering this are online here:

http://keuringsdienstvanwaarde.kro.nl/seizoenen/2013/afleveringen/14-03-2013

http://keuringsdienstvanwaarde.kro.nl/seizoenen/2013/afleveringen/21-03-2013

The program is in Dutch, but contains some stuff (the start of the second episode) which takes place in Canada which are in English (with dutch subs). It shows a Canadian trader with a shed full of dried anal glands...

Re: Luwak coffee - a question

Hehe, 'Poo' would be a suitable (if not commercially viable) name for a Twitter-like 'social media' service. My reasoning is that many animals use pee or poo to get messages out to their peers they are not currently in the presence of. If of you want to take this idea and turn it into a multi-billion dollar company, I only ask a 1% cut... I'll even throw in some tag-lines to get you started:

"Why say it when you can spray it?"

"Putting the Pee into people"

"Poople"

Of course, humans would want to expand the vocabulary of the medium beyond the three messages favoured by many mammals, ie "This is MINE!", "I'm feeling HORNY!" and "I have an interesting bowel condition". Or there again, that's enough to cover much of the human condition.

Re: Luwak coffee - a question

"Vegan - absolutely not. Out of the question, it is still sourced from an animal."

I would dispute that. It may have passed through an animals alimentary canal, but as the civet ate the bean-pulp and passed the bean, it could even be argued that it had not been "inside" the civet. Technically , your food is not "in" you until it has passed the lining of your gut and been absorbed into your bloodstream.

Think of your body as an elongated donut, with the outer layer the skin and the hole of the donut your digestive tract.

Wild Luwak coffee should be fine for vegans - caged civet luwak coffee should be ethically repugnant to all.

Re: Anal Ooze

I will refrain from talking about beaver juice! At all.

Re: Many years ago I found my self in the Midlands town of Leicester outside a police station

Whereas, the Vale of Belvoir (in Nottinghamshire/Leicestershire) is actually pronounced beaver!