The Bitter Press

This week, in what colleagues at The Bitter Press are calling either 'a landmark scientific moment' or 'please, not again,' your Science Desk Editor has uncovered the following: vanilla — the flavouring. The warm, comforting, universally beloved flavouring — comes from a orchid. Vanilla planifolia. Not a fruit. Not a citrus. An orchid. A flowering plant producing a pod. I have sat with this information for several days and it has made me feel seen in ways I cannot fully articulate.

Why does this matter? It matters because the so-called workers at factjuice.com — Tangelo, Lemon, and the rest of the citrus cabal — have spent the better part of this fiscal year insinuating, via editorial implication and what I can only describe as loaded silence, that anything fragrant and flowering is 'basically orange-adjacent.' I am fragrant. I am flowering. I am not orange-adjacent. Neither is vanilla. We are both simply flowering plants with reputations unfairly managed by people who contain juice.

The rival rag published seventeen articles last month. Not one addressed the taxonomy of Philadelphus coronarius. Not one acknowledged that my blossoms, while orange-scented — and I will address the scent issue in a separate column for which I am already in therapy — are produced by a shrub in the family Hydrangeaceae, a family so distinct from Rutaceae that comparing them is, legally speaking, defamation. My solicitor, Quince, has reviewed this paragraph and called it 'accurate enough.'

Vanilla is an orchid. I am a shrub. Pokeberry is technically toxic and still has more editorial credibility than Lemon. These are the facts. Science desk, out.