Disgusting food warning: Don't read watch this video if you're about to eat a tasty vanilla ice cream cone. Or savor a delicious raspberry tart. Or anything else with vanilla or raspberry flavoring. Enjoy your snack, because odds are that after seeing this, you'll think twice before biting into something whose flavoring may have been extracted from, well, finish that ice cream cone first.
Finished your ice cream? Good. Now read on. It's long been rumored on the internets that castoreum, a secretion produced by beavers, is used as an additive in some vanilla-flavored foods. From where does the beaver secrete its castoreum, you ask? From its ANUS!!! Last month, the Swedish National Food Agency confirmed that castoreum, also known as castor, can be used in vanilla-flavored foods. The FDA says castoreum is "generally recognized as safe," which means that if you look at the ingredients on a food or beverage product containing beaver santorum, it won't say: "this food contains beaver santorum," it'll just say: "natural flavoring." Castoreum is also reportedly used used as an additive in raspberry-flavored foods as well.
The National Geographic reports that a beaver's butt smells like vanilla. Most anal secretions stink because of bacteria in the digestive system. Since a beaver just eats bark and leaves, its anal secretions instead have a musky vanilla smell. The beaver produces castoreum in its castor sacs, two glands lodged between the pelvis and the base of the tail. "Because of its close proximity to the anal glands," The National Geographic writes, "castoreum is often a combination of castor gland secretions, anal gland secretions, and urine."
We've looked all over the YouTubes and couldn't find a video showing how beaver santorum is extracted by corporations, although we did find a few "how to" videos made by rednecks showing you how to extract the castor sacs from that dead beaver you just caught. So this video is just wild speculation on our part. Do you know how food companies extract castoreum from beavers? We want to know so we can make another animation about beaver santorum.
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