Old Spice

What is a spice, anyway?

As a kid, if I didn’t like the way something tasted, it wasn’t even worth a second thought to shake a little bit of salt and pepper out onto the food. Both spices were incredibly abundant, and you only needed a little pinch in order to improve the taste of your food.

Later, as a cook, I learned to follow recipes to make things like crab cakes in large batches. This meant measuring spices like pepper, cumin, nutmeg, chili powder, and cayenne pepper with utensils that measured quarter-teaspoons and tablespoons.

Spices, in other words, were nothing special.

They were abundant in the restaurant, and there was never any question about being out of a spice that went into a recipe: the kitchen manager would simply order more spice for next week, and we’d make sure to stay stocked up.

Spice has not always been so easy to come by, as I’m sure you’re aware. In fact, for most of human history, we’ve risked our lives and fought wars over the acquisition and control of these… spices.

Why should anyone die for spice?

In essence, spice is made up of dried plant material that’s designed to last a very long time. Spices don’t usually use the leafy green parts—those are usually called herbs to contrast them with spices. If it comes from a root or bark, it’s probably a spice.

Spices didn’t just make the food taste more interesting, as important as that can be. They also kept the food from spoiling, so it’s probably easy to see why people wanted to control where the spice went. After all, if you had spices, your army was more likely to survive the march to the next town, and your people were likely to stay alive for longer (and pay you more in taxes, assuming you’re the king).

You have to go back pretty far to find our oldest evidence of using spices. Thousands of years before Ötzi the Iceman lived or the Pyramids were built, we were experimenting with improving the way food tasted. While humans in Eurasia were using stone tools to build everything, they were using some of the local aromatic seeds to make their meals more palatable.

In Mesoamerica, long before the Olmec or Maya civilizations, we were combining chocolate with spices. This wasn’t just about taste, either: this was an important ritual for these ancient folks, so it would have been important to secure the necessary ingredients.

On the other side of the world, ancient Egyptians preserved bodies for the afterlife. They would use common kitchen spices (common today, mind you) like cinnamon, but there were also substances like myrrh and frankincense—resins designed to eliminate odors, and which had antibacterial qualities.

If something could be used to preserve human corpses, it could also be used to preserve animal corpses, meaning you could store meat for longer. Gradually, as these proto-civilizations grew into permanent settlements, people started wanting spices more for preserving the food than for anything else.

The only issue was that not all spices grew in all climates. This meant travel and trade, sometimes to lands that were very far away.

By the time of the Roman Empire, these routes were becoming well-traveled. Asia and Europe were now connected in ways they never were before, with spices that only grew in the far east being sought after in the Mediterranean, and spices from the common pond making their way east.

I mentioned the Romans because of the crazy impact they had on the rest of Eurasia, particularly with carving out trade routes. Because they were the wealthiest nation ever to exist up until that point, controlling more of the world (by far) than previous empires, Rome had created the first true consumer culture.

Tens of millions of Romans now had the luxury of demanding spices for their food. This demand drove even more trade, including risky ventures that carved out new routes. Arabic traders during antiquity would often meet the Romans halfway, taking the trade further east, and then the Islamic Golden Age ushered in a much more robust trade network that stretched all the way around the Mediterranean, and continued further east.

Hundreds of years earlier, Alexander the Great had forged a brutal pathway into India, connecting Europe and South Asia. Now, these routes were becoming entrenched and well understood.

By the time of Columbus, the spice route to India was well understood, but it involved going all the way around the continent of Africa. This route was largely controlled by the Ottoman Empire, a key rival of the rising Spanish Empire. Spain had just expelled all Muslims from their territory after nearly 800 years of Islamic rule, and they were keen to expand their newly found geopolitical power.

In order to carve out a brand new trade route, Columbus wanted to go west to get to India in way less time. He was pretty sure it was a lot shorter around the planet than it actually is, and that’s why Native Americans were still called Indians when I was a kid.