There’s a great interview on the History Extra podcast with Prof. Eric T. Jennings about his book Vanilla: The History of an Extraordinary Bean. It really is a fascinating story, and you get quite a lot of it in the half hour of the pod. If it whets your appetite, as it were, you could do worse than follow it with the global conservation strategy for the crop. One quibble, though. The source of vanilla is definitely not the only edible orchid, as anyone who has had saleb will know full well.