What is castoreum

Instead of smelling icky, castoreum has a musky, vanilla scent, which is why food scientists like to incorporate it in recipes. But getting a beaver to produce castoreum for purposes of food processing is tough. Read about scientists who milk mice. Due to such unpleasantness for both parties, castoreum consumption is rather small—only about pounds kilograms yearly. All rights reserved. Save a Cow, Milk a Beaver But getting a beaver to produce castoreum for purposes of food processing is tough.

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Beavers, both male and female, have to be "milked" in order to capture their secret sauce, a process that involves first anaesthetizing the animals. When it is successfully released, the secretion appears quite a bit like thinned out molasses — dark and thick and slimy. And it smells like, well, it smells a lot like vanilla, apparently. But beaver diets, consisting of specific leaves and bark, cultivate a biological flora that against all odds, smells more like the inside of a bakery.

So we eat it. The Tamworth team is hardly the first company to toss a little castoreum into their recipe. The secretion has been used to flavor ice creams, sodas, candies and other alcoholic concoctions in recent decades.

Tracing its presence to a particular product today can be nearly impossible, however, as the U. Food and Drug Administration classifies castoreum as merely a natural flavor , an umbrella term that houses more than 3, different ingredients and chemical compounds. The colonization of America led into an increase in the availability of beaver pelts, which were used to make fine hats all over Europe, and to a resurgence of interest in castoreum as medicine.

Sold in drugstores and pharmacies, it was recommended for earaches, toothaches, colic, gout, inducing sleep, preventing sleep, and general strengthening of the brain. It was also in the 19th century that the substance began to be used in the perfume industry as a fixative—an ingredient that makes other scents smell better and last longer. By the end of the 19th century, the demand for pelts and castoreum was so great that North American beavers were on the edges of extinction.

He cannot coexist with civilization. According to The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets , castoreum was first used as a food additive in the early 20th century, but is now rarely, if ever, used in the mass-produced flavor industry. Beavers are generally no longer hunted for their pelts or castoreum, so to acquire the sticky stuff, beavers must be anesthetized and the castoreum gland milked by a human.

Due to the inconvenience and expense of harvesting castoreum from live beavers, the substance is now seldom used.