If you have the choice to eat a bland, flavorless diet or an exciting, flavorful one, which one do you choose? The boring diet makes your life longer and may even make it better. So what’s wrong with it?
The answer is that the boring diet will make it harder for you to enjoy life. And if you’re not enjoying life, what’s the point of living?
Many Americans would be unable to cope with the idea of a Christmas turkey without stuffing. But what is stuffing? It’s bread soaked in broth, usually flavoured with sage and onion. What is bread? It’s flour and water baked into a loaf. And what are flour and water? They’re grains. Grains are plants, so now we’re back to plants again.
What about salt to flavor the stuffing? Salt, it turns out, can also be made from plants, so now we’re back to plants again too. We’ve gone around in a circle: we still have the same food we started with, but we’ve added an extra layer of processing — baking and flavouring — that makes it seem like something entirely different.
Many people feel this kind of processing is cheating, or at least unnecessary; so they try to avoid it. Not only do they buy corn flakes instead of cornmeal (no grinding), but they buy unbuttered popcorn instead of corn kernels (no roasting), unground peanut butter (no grinding), and frozen broccoli rather than fresh broccoli florets (which have been blanched).
But it’s not cheating; they’re still eating food. The processing people feel uncomfortable with is just as natural as any other
Spices are dried plants. You already knew that, but you probably didn’t know that dried plants can be packed into a form that has at least 5 times the surface area of the original material. That is what allows them to be sold in small containers and to age well in storage.
Taste is mostly a function of how much surface area there is to interact with your taste buds. More surface means more flavor. The age-old process of drying plants increases their surface area relative to their weight many times over.
In other words, when you make a stew with fresh spices, they are still mostly flavorless; they just get in the way of your real food. When you use lots of spices, you are doing the same thing as if you were making a stew with fresh herbs; the herbs are still mostly flavorless, they just get in the way of your real food.
The difference between fresh herbs and spices is not so different from the difference between fresh herbs and dried herbs: fresh herbs have comparatively little flavor, and dried herbs more flavor than you would think given how much space they take up.
If you are reading this, you probably already know that the food you eat has traveled a long and complicated road to get to your table.
The foods we eat now are not the same as they were in the past. In fact, that process is never-ending; foods continue to evolve, just as we do. Spices are a good example of how far food has traveled from its origins.
Alfred W. Crosby, an expert on the Columbian exchange, points out that “the modern world did not begin when Columbus sailed.” The new crops from America were a tiny part of it; in fact, they almost didn’t make it across the ocean.
In the first place, they weren’t much good. The potato was edible but hardly anyone ate it at first; they thought it was poisonous. Most of the others were mainly just things to look at: pretty flowers like marigolds and sweet potatoes, which you could grow for their beauty instead of just for food. And when the Spaniards tried to force them on the Indians, the Indians refused them. They wanted nothing to do with these strange new foods that had no taste and gave you stomachaches.
In the second place, Europeans didn’t need them anyway. It’s easy to forget how well-fed they were compared with us today—and how little they cared about food as a source of pleasure. They had enough food without potatoes or maize or chocolate or vanilla or any other American product except tobacco. There wasn’t a lot of hunger in Europe until long after Columbus’s voyage. So it wasn’t until centuries later that Europeans started eating what we now think of as New World foods.
The spice trade was the original open-source movement. When Europe manufactured its own spices, it was a sign that the Renaissance had gotten under way. And the unifying force behind this great change was not science or technology but a deliberate attempt to suppress information. Keeping spices from being grown locally so that they could be imported from afar was good for business; it raised profits and lowered costs. But it required an elaborate infrastructure of repression and deception.
The spice trade began in India, where nutmeg and cloves were already being domesticated by 2000 BC. It expanded into Indonesia with the introduction of cinnamon by Arab traders around 300 AD. The Dutch took over Indonesia in the 17th century to control its spices, which required them to fight off the British and French in what became a long war that ended with the Netherlands becoming a province of France.
Spices were essential to European cuisine at that time, but they would have been useless without sugar, which came from Asia too, via Arab traders and Spanish colonists in Mexico. The European diet had come to depend on two foods not available locally: sugar and spices (with coffee as a third). This created an opening for Asian foodstuffs to invade Europe via trade routes controlled by Muslim merchants along the Silk Road or across the Indian
The spice trade was one of the first globalized industries. It was also one of the first globalized industries to be affected by globalization.
The benefits of globalization are sometimes overstated, and its risks underestimated. But it is certainly true that in preindustrial times any change in a major trade route could have a major effect on everyone around the world. The fall of Rome, which brought an end to Roman rule throughout Europe and North Africa and the Middle East, was largely due to the rise of Islam. Islam was founded around 610 A.D., when Muhammad had his famous revelation from God at Mount Hira near Mecca.
The Arab conquests began only twenty years later, in 630 A.D., when Muhammad and his followers seized control of Mecca, ending the pagan worship there that had made it such an important pilgrimage site for polytheists throughout the region. From then until 750 A.D., when Baghdad became the capital of what became known as the Abbasid Caliphate, Islam expanded rapidly throughout Arabia and much of Asia and Africa.
And why did Islam succeed where Christianity had failed? One reason was that from its beginning Christianity had been divided between Eastern Orthodoxy based in Constantinople (Istanbul today) and Western Catholicism based in Rome. That division meant that
