The economy of Madagascar collapsed overnight when Coca-cola changed its formula, switching from real vanilla to a synthetic and didn’t bounce back until New Coke failed and Classic Coke was reintroduced, with vanilla back in. Malagasies were relieved, but conspiracy theorists thrilled to the fact that sugar was gone, replaced by High Fructose Corn Syrup.

Vanilla comes mainly from Madagascar, and grows

on a vine, its flowers both male and female; from planting

to pod can take 5 years. The language of Malagasy has no

grammatical gender. It is not a Romantic language, but has

borrowed a little from the French who took so much.

It’s an island language, Austronesion, and plurals are managed

with a beautiful efficiency: more than one book: book-book;

more than one child: child-child. It’s hard for the Latinate

mind to imagine. They say men give love to get sex and

women give sex to get love, and today a man told me

he doesn’t trust a woman who gives blow jobs. It’s all

about power, he said, and her need to control the man.

I didn’t buy it; I have my own conspiracy theories, prefer

real vanilla to synthetic, sugar cane to HFS. I rarely give in

to a sweet tooth, but now and then, I do, and when I do,

I want it, not like jet fuel, but a slow, complex burn,

the line between control and surrender delicate and uncertain,

like dependent economies, and tenuous like the vanilla flower

blooming for only one day, both male and female, the thinnest

of membranes between them waiting to be stripped away.