Over the past weekend, I finished Jack Turner's Spice: The History of a Temptation. It's alternately hilarious and horrifying. And, while he belabours his point a bit, it's hard to blame the author: There's just So Much Stuff to write about in a tale that circumnavigates the globe and spans millennia. You'll never look at your spice rack--particularly the pepper, cinnamon, nutmeg and clove jars--the same way ever again.
The repeated theme is how the notion of spice has, through the centuries, become conflated with the exotic, sensual, piquant, and even the erotic. Yet after swooping back and forth in Turner's historical panopoly, it to me seems a shorthand for what human beings do in the face of ignorance.
European merchants (and their suppliers) who traded in spices had a vested interest in keeping the Orient--from whence the spice originated--mysterious, dangerous, and glamourous. Just like marketing today, it goosed the price--in that day, enough to justify spices' multi-year journey* by ship and pack-animal.
But a generation after Marco Polo's relatively tame account of his trip the Far East, folks still gave their credence to the dragons and mountains of gold invented by the pseudonymous Sir John de Mandeville, who, at best, was reporting second-hand. (Notable exception: Christopher Columbus, whose own annotated copy of The Travels of Marco Polo still exists.)
It's no secret that the human mind, like nature, abhors a vacuum. But the real mystery--to my mind, at least--is how our species prefers to pad that gap with the most phantastical stuffing available. Occam's Razor is no match for the UNIX Beard of conspiracy theories, escapist fantasies, doomsday porn, organisational solopsism...or whatever pathology the "explanations" serve.
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* The distances traveled would doubtless have dulled the taste, justifying the larger quantities that are sometimes observed in medieval recipes. And, incidentally, putting the lie to the often-repeated myth that spices served to mask the foulness of rotting food.
