In comments to my post Ok, Time to Stop Treating Healthy Vanilla Relationships as if We Already Know Everything That Needs to be Known About Them ImogenQuest said

Even the label “vanilla” is interesting in that respect. I noticed the other day that, as I’ve gotten older, the taste of vanilla is no longer bland/neutral/sweet. It tastes that way to kids, and artificial vanilla is like that, but real vanilla is dark, smoky and spicy as well as sweet. Make of that what you will.

I say oh heck yeah!

Like a lot of other heavily-oxidized aromatic natural ingredients vanilla’s awesomely complex. And, at least until they synthesized vanillin and started putting it into everything on the planet, it was considered exotic, erotic, and mysterious. But they put it in everything not because it’s cheap but because it’s delicious! Or check this out — you know what ingredient is even more basic, universal, and “generic” than vanilla? Salt, right? And yet nobody scorns someone else for being sexually “salty.”