Talk:Vanilla

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Vanilla was a Agriculture, food and drink good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.

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Date	Process	Result
July 23, 2008	Good article nominee	Not listed

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January 2023

Hello @64.56.11.239 and @Wes sideman: What is wrong with this edit? Invasive Spices (talk) 17:54, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I feel that you are wrong. My reasoning is because their are errors in the non revised version. 64.56.11.239 (talk) 19:52, 30 January 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ancient use of vanilla

Vanilla appears to have been used in the Old World way before contact with the New World.

Linares V, Adams MJ, Cradic MS, Finkelstein I, Lipschits O, Martin MAS, et al. First evidence for vanillin in the old world: Its use as mortuary offering in Middle Bronze Canaan. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. 2019;25: 77–84.

Amir A, Finkelstein I, Shalev Y, Uziel J, Chalaf O, Freud L, et al. (2022) Residue analysis evidence for wine enriched with vanilla consumed in Jerusalem on the eve of the Babylonian destruction in 586 BCE. PLoS ONE 17(3): e0266085. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266085 80.7.184.54 (talk) 22:07, 3 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Morren and Papantla

For quite some time (since 2008), this article contained an anecdote with no source: "In 1836, botanist Charles François Antoine Morren was drinking coffee on a patio in Papantla (in Veracruz, Mexico) and noticed black bees flying around the vanilla flowers next to his table. He watched their actions closely as they would land and work their way under a flap inside the flower, transferring pollen in the process. Within hours, the flowers closed and several days later, Morren noticed vanilla pods beginning to form." The article Morren wrote in 1837 about his method of hand-pollination says nothing at all about being in Mexico, nothing about Papantla, nothing about black bees. All online sources I have found quote the Wikipedia article as the source. This appears to be a fictional story, and I can find no documentation that verifies it, so I have removed it from the article. I welcome any citations from the 1830s that confirm any of these details. Dyanega (talk) 16:35, 4 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]

For anyone who cares: this is an actual topic of research for me, but I do not want to run afoul of the WP:NOR policy, so I will put this in the talk page rather than in the article itself. Morren does not appear to have left Belgium between 1831 and 1854, and having now read all of his papers on vanilla, find no reference to him ever setting foot in Mexico. Worse, a major review published in 1897 by Arthur Delteil on the history of vanilla points out that the first demonstration of a hand-pollination technique in France was in 1830 by Neumann, several years before Morren published his technique, and over a decade before Albius came up with a genuinely practical technique. In other words, Morren's contribution to vanilla pollination is nothing more than a footnote (credit for being first published should go to Neumann), and this story about Morren sipping coffee in Papantla and watching bees is pure nonsense. The only reference to Papantla that Morren ever published was in his own 1850 review of the history of vanilla, in which he cites Schiede's 1829 publication in the journal Linnaea, where Schiede wrote about encountering several Vanilla species in Papantla. Schiede said nothing about pollinators. The oldest reference to pollinators I could find is in Delteil's 1897 review where he suggests that there are bees that probably accomplish pollination, but he misidentified them (he called them Melipona, but goes on to indicate that they include green and blue species, which means conclusively that they were orchid bees and not Melipona), and claimed that they ranged in size from "1 to 7 centimetres", which is literally impossible, given that the world's largest bee species (Megachile pluto) is only 4 cm long. All subsequent authors who have referred to Melipona being pollinators of Vanilla based their statements on Delteil's review, or people who cited Delteil, such as Beck in 1912; no one ever has observed Melipona pollinating Vanilla. Beck does refer to early attempts to introduce Melipona to pollinate vanilla, and it is no surprise that these attempts failed; Delteil's misidentification was a "red herring" that misled researchers and horticulturists for over a century. Dyanega (talk) 00:05, 5 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]