Writing Life

Lately the government has been urging bankers and stockbrokers to eschew complicated derivatives and return to selling so-called “plain vanilla” financial products. I have a big problem with this. As a baker and a food lover, I object to the use of the word “vanilla” as a synonym for “boring” or “ordinary.” The vanilla bean produces one of the richest and most voluptuous flavors known to the human palate. While chocolate is widely considered the culinary equivalent of hot sex, the best chocolates are all made with vanilla. Indeed, a chocolate unflavored with vanilla would hardly be worth eating. It would be like sex without love. And chocolate isn’t the only food product improved by the addition of vanilla. Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, the authors of The Flavor Bible, note that vanilla can be paired with dozens of disparate partners, from lamb to butterscotch, from shellfish to ricotta cheese. Nearly every part of the versatile vanilla bean is useable. The seeds can be used to flavor cakes, cookies and puddings. The hulls can be used to flavor creams and custards. Whole beans buried in a canister of granulated sugar impart a rich and exotic flavor to the sugar that improves nearly everything it touches, from coffee and hot chocolate to crème brulées and poached fruits.

Another problem with “plain vanilla” financial products is that the term is likely to frighten away consumers who have any knowledge of how vanilla is produced. The bean is the fruit of an orchid that opens only once a year and remains open for just a few hours. Imagine a financial product that could be purchased only one day a year, on August 16, say, between the hours of ten a.m. and four p.m. Doesn’t sound terribly convenient, does it? But wait, it gets worse. The vanilla plant has only one natural pollinator, the Melipona bee. Imagine an investment that could be bought and sold using only a single obscure type of currency such as the Congolese franc or the Cape Verdean escudo. Does that strike you as simple and ordinary? Moreover, because Melipona bees can’t possibly handle the task of pollinating all of the world’s vanilla plants in a single six-hour period, most plants must be hand pollinated, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. To produce financial products equally as labor-intensive and time-consuming, brokerage houses would have to hire scribes to draw up by hand each individual certificate of stock that they sell. Banks would have to hire calligraphers to handwrite every borrower’s mortgage papers individually. And even after the vanilla plant has been pollinated, its pods take eight to nine months to fully mature. The mature pods are handpicked and then subjected to a curing process that lasts another six months. During this process they will be flash boiled, sunbathed, wrapped in blankets until they are made to sweat, dried out, fermented, and then shrunk until their size is reduced by 400 percent. Do you really want to invest in a financial product that is guaranteed to shrink by 400 percent? Of course not. And the fact that certain people in the government actually believe that plain-vanilla financial products are a good thing proves that they really don’t know beans about financial products. Nor do they know beans about beans. At least not the vanilla bean.