Just in time for holiday cookie season, we’ve discovered that the vanilla flavoring in your baked goods and candy could come from the anal excretions of beavers. 
 
 Beaver butts secrete a goo called castoreum, which the animals use to mark their territory. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration lists castoreum as a “generally regarded as safe” additive, and manufacturers have been using it extensively in perfumes and foods for at least 80 years, according to a 2007 study in the International Journal of Toxicology. 
 
 “I lift up the animal’s tail,” said Joanne Crawford, a wildlife ecologist at Southern Illinois University, “and I’m like, ‘Get down there, and stick your nose near its bum.’” 
 
 “People think I’m nuts,” she added. “I tell them, ‘Oh, but it’s beavers; it smells really good.’” 
 
 Castoreum is a chemical compound that mostly comes from a beaver’s castor sacs, which are located between the pelvis and the base of the tail. Because of its close proximity to the anal glands, castoreum is often a combination of castor gland secretions, anal gland secretions, and urine. 
 
 The fragrant, brown slime is about the consistency of molasses, though not quite as thick, Crawford said. 
 
 While most anal secretions stink—due to odor-producing bacteria in the gut—this chemical compound is a product of the beaver’s unique diet of leaves and bark, Crawford added. 
 
 Instead of smelling icky, castoreum has a musky, vanilla scent, which is why food scientists like to incorporate it in recipes. 
 
 Save a Cow, Milk a Beaver 
 
 But getting a beaver to produce castoreum for purposes of food processing is tough. Foodies bent on acquiring some of the sticky stuff have to anesthetize the animal and then “milk” its nether regions. (Read about scientists who milk mice.) 
 
 “You can milk the anal glands so you can extract the fluid,” Crawford said. “You can squirt [castoreum] out. It’s pretty gross.” 
 
 Due to such unpleasantness for both parties, castoreum consumption is rather small—only about 292 pounds (132 kilograms) yearly. That statistic includes castoreum, castoreum extract, and castoreum liquid, according to Fenaroli’s Handbook of Flavor Ingredients. 
 
 Still concerned you’re chowing down on beaver-bum goop? Because of its FDA label, in some cases, manufacturers don’t have to list castoreum on the ingredient list and may instead refer to it as “natural flavoring.” Yum. 
 
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 As any Cosmo reader will tell you, it’s a well-tested truth that men love the smell of vanilla. Turns out though, that men may not be falling for a scent that reminds them of childhood, but for something else entirely: Castoreum a.ka. a fragrant, brown slime that comes from a beaver’s castor sacs, which are located pretty much where you expect them to be located. 
 
 The chemical compound that beavers use to mark their territory has a musky, vanilla scent, which is why some perfume makers incorporate the component into their products and food scientists add the all-natural ingredient into recipes. As one can surmise, the vanilla aroma is not typical of the area, but is a product of the beaver’s unique diet of leaves and bark, said Joanne Crawford, a wildlife ecologist at Southern Illinois University, speaking to National Geographic. 
 
 Collecting castoreum can be a tricky endeavor though. A beaver’s castor sacs are located between the pelvis and the base of the tail. Because of its close proximity to the anal glands, castoreum is often a combination of castor gland secretions, anal gland secretions, and urine. “You can milk the anal glands so you can extract the fluid,” Crawford said. “You can squirt [castoreum] out. It’s pretty gross.” That may explain why castoreum is not an especially common source of vanilla flavoring. According to Fenaroli’s Handbook of Flavor Ingredients, published in 2005, total annual consumption of both castoreum extract and castoreum liquid was around 250 pounds, undoubtedly because the milking process is unpleasant for all parties involved. 
 
 The U.S. Food and Drug Administration lists castoreum as a “generally regarded as safe” additive, and manufacturers have been using it extensively in perfumes and foods for at least 80 years, according to National Geographic and a study in the International Journal of Toxicology. Because the FDA considers the ingredient safe, in some cases, manufacturers don’t have to list castoreum on the ingredient list and may instead refer to it simply as “natural flavoring.” Apparently “gross” is not something the FDA quantifies. 
 
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 “I couldn’t believe there was beaver’s ass in my vanilla ice cream, coal tar in my mac and cheese, yoga mat and shoe rubber in my bread,” says Vani Hari, also known as the Food Babe. That’s why she started blogging about food additives, she explains in the introduction to her new book, The Food Babe Way. I can’t believe it either. But that would be because none of it is true. 
 
 There is no coal tar in mac and cheese, and there never was, even before Hari led her Food Baby army on a crusade to get Kraft to remove tartrazine, a yellow dye, from its products. Bread does not contain crumbled-up pieces of yoga mat and shoe rubber. And there really isn’t any beaver’s ass in your ice cream cone, though it’s the Food Babe way to tell you there is at every turn. I counted more than 60 references to beaver secretions on her blog, and it appears as No. 10 on her book’s list of “The Sickening 15.” 
 
 Hari tirelessly reminds her blog readers that the next time they take licks of vanilla ice cream or spoonfuls of strawberry oatmeal, “there’s a chance you’ll be swirling secretions from a beaver’s anal glands around in your mouth.” It surely drives traffic: Tell me you wouldn’t click on a link to “Do You Eat Beaver Butt?” She is referring to castoreum, which is indeed extracted from a pair of sacs found on the rear end of a beaver, though not from the anal glands. Castoreum has been used in unguents and medicines for more than 2,000 years, but the Food Babe was appalled to discover the Food and Drug Administration considers castoreum to be not gross but GRAS—“generally recognized as safe” for both food and pharmaceutical uses. 
 
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 While in low concentrations castoreum reputedly tastes of vanilla with a hint of raspberry, I’ll admit I’ve never tasted it. Not because I’m particularly disgusted by the source—I eat animal products and am inordinately fond of the fermented genitalia of Theobroma cacao—but because of its scarcity and cost. Enough castoreum extract to replace the vanilla in a half-gallon of ice cream would cost $120. Worldwide, less than 500 pounds of castoreum is harvested annually from beaver pelts, compared with the more than 20 million pounds of vanilla extracted from the ovaries of Vanilla planifolia orchids each year. Perfumers, not ice cream manufacturers, are the real market for castoreum. So while beaver secretions just might be in the expensive perfume you dabbed on your pulse points or in the aftershave you splashed on your face—did you just touch that with your hands, yuck—rest easy, there is no chance that the pint of ice cream you picked up at the store contains it. Not at the price you paid for it. 
 
 Did you know that oxidane, a major component of human urine, is added to coffee beans to enhance the aroma? 
 
 The dyes that Hari was so eager to have removed from Kraft products, Yellow No. 5 and Yellow No. 6, are really called coal tar dyes—not because they contain coal tar, but because a century ago similar dyes were made from chemicals extracted from coal tar. Today they can be made from sustainable plant sources. Are they any more or less hazardous when we imagine they are made from materials extracted from green plants grown under sunny, blue skies, rather than from a sticky, black mess sucked from deep underground? No, but as she does with castoreum, Hari ranks them “high on [her] upchuck meter” not because of their actual source or use, but because, well, oil sludge. Gross. 
 
 I have some shocking news, too. Did you know that oxidane, a major component of human urine, is added to coffee beans to enhance the aroma? Disgusting! Sorry if I made you pour your espresso down the drain. What I really should have said is that most people use water, whose formal chemical name is oxidane—and which indeed is the main component of urine—to brew coffee, its steam efficiently conveying the smell to your nose. Not funny? You would be right to think I’m being deliberately deceptive, mocking, even, by using an unfamiliar name for water and linking a food item with a bodily fluid that you wouldn’t think of drinking, and you’d be right to be peeved at me. It’s not amusing to browbeat people in this way, even less funny when you are a food company, reliant on public perception of cleanliness to stay in business. 
 
 In her book and on her blog, Hari plays this game of malicious metonymy again and again, leveraging common motifs of disgust, such as excrement and body parts, all the while deliberately confusing the source and uses of material with the molecules themselves. She wants you to be aghast that the same chemical used to stabilize the foam in yoga mats, azodicarbonamide, is used to stabilize bread dough, also a foam. Or to be horrified that L-cysteine, added to bread dough to make it easier to handle, is extracted from chicken feathers, or worse yet, human hair. I admit this last example sounds incredibly gross. But L-cysteine is a common, naturally occurring amino acid, and it’s already present in the flour and in the human body. The commercial version is a white crystalline material, soluble in water, with not a feather remnant or stray hair to be found. 
 
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 Should we add azodicarbonamide to commercial bread dough? It can cause respiratory issues when inhaled, which is one reason it is banned in the European Union. Is it ethical to expose workers to it whether they are making yoga mats or bread? These are good questions to ask about any food additive, natural or not. But don’t let the Food Babe distract you from asking the right questions with middle school–style rumors about the cafeteria ladies—or large food corporations—putting feathers or yoga mats in the food. She is being as deceptive as I was with the oxidane in your coffee. 
 
 If Hari’s trademark magnifying glass shifted its focus off beaver butts and yoga mats and onto what happens to molecules as they react in the body, it might be easier to understand what questions to ask. When a chemical goes to work in the body, it meets its fate stripped of whatever packaging it came in, separated from its fellow molecules. No black, tarry stuff is clinging to tartrazine when a digestive enzyme swoops down on it to dismantle it for potentially useful fragments. Nor is any remnant of an organically grown carrot to be found in the active site of the enzyme that converts beta-carotene to vitamin A. Beta-carotene, Hari’s preferred natural coloring, these days is generally made synthetically, not extracted from carrots at all, and is known to increase the risk of lung cancer in smokers. Begin with a focus on these interactions and the metabolites they produce, and leave out of it whether the salicylic acid was synthesized in a lab or extracted from willow bark or from secretions squeezed from a beaver’s castor sac. 
 
 The Food Babe is a business, just like Kraft, and one that is far less grounded in science—see her infamous microwave post and the now disappeared post about the airlines craftily adding nitrogen to the air in planes. Frankly, if Hari were really so worried about animal butts in the food supply, I imagine she wouldn’t have enjoyed this meal quite so much—when you eat shrimp tails, you are eating a shrimp’s anus, secretions and all. But beaver butt brings in advertising dollars and sells books, and that keeps the Food Babe in business.
– Like vanilla ice cream? Don't read this—because the smell of a beaver's butt is key to at least some vanilla flavoring, Time reports. More specifically, beavers like to mark their territory with a musky, vanilla compound located in sacs between the pelvis and the base of the tail. Manufacturers have been extracting it for 80 years to flavor foods and perfumes—but it's tricky, because the compound often mixes with urine and anal gland secretions. "You can milk the anal glands so you can extract the fluid," wildlife ecologist Joanne Crawford tells National Geographic. "You can squirt it out. It’s pretty gross." But she admits to sticking her nose in there and taking a whiff: "People think I’m nuts. I tell them, 'Oh, but it’s beavers; it smells really good.'" For the record, the slimey brown compound is extracted by anesthetizing a beaver and "milking" its nether regions. Ice cream sundae, anyone?