Results: There's Beaver Glands in My Ice Cream!

A key ingredient in many vanilla-flavored products — from ice cream to baked goods, pudding, and candy — actually comes from beavers. The ingredient is called castoreum and comes from the castor sacs of beavers. Castor sacs are a type of scent gland located between the pelvis and base of the tail, and the castoreum that the glands produce is used by beavers to mark their territory. Where you aware of the food industry doing this?

Castoreum is often listed simply as "natural flavoring." According to the Food and Drug Administration, castoreum is a generally recognized as safe — which means it is considered safe by experts and thus is exempt from more stringent tolerance requirements. Safe or not, the thought of consuming beaver secretions might turn your stomach. If that is the case, then the best advice is to stay away from cheap, mass-produced items that do not use real vanilla extract. Does the use of beaver glands bother you?

I checked and some products I use say "natural flavouring" so now I'm going to contact the companies to find out if they use castoreum. Will you stop eating/buying products that contain beaver glands (castoreum)?