| Title | How Spices Have Made, and Unmade, Empires | |
| Date | Sunday December 01 2019, @09:39PM | |
| Author | Fnord666 | |
| Topic | ||
| from the the-spice-must-flow dept. | ||
Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956
How Spices Have Made, and Unmade, Empires
IN THE HILLY Boaco region of central Nicaragua, the turmeric plants on Celia Dávila and Gonzalo González's farm stand over four feet tall — thriving giants, although as natives of South and Southeast Asia, they're actually newcomers to this land. Coffee once ruled these fields, but as its price has grown unstable, smallholder farmers like Dávila and González, 52 and 65, respectively, have had to turn to alternative crops, among them this strange arrival that yields knobby rhizomes of shocking orange flesh, rarely eaten unadulterated; instead, the underground stems are dried and pulverized into a musky powder with a throb of bitterness, which is most widely recognized worldwide as the earthy base note and color in many Indian dishes. Nicaraguans have no particular use for the spice, which has yet to make inroads in the local diet. But Americans do, having suddenly and belatedly awakened to turmeric's health benefits, some 3,000 years after they were first set down in the Atharva Veda, one of Hinduism's foundational sacred texts.
It's a story at once old and new, a latter-day spice route making unexpected connections between the grandmother in India, stirring turmeric into warm milk for a sniffily child; the Goop acolyte in California, sipping an après-yoga prepackaged turmeric "elixir," whose makers extol the "body harmonizing" powers of the spice's key chemical compound, curcumin; and Dávila wielding a pickax in rural Nicaragua. She is not alone in her embrace of this new harvest: Farmers in Costa Rica, Hawaii and even Minnesota are planting turmeric with an eye on an expanding market. Nor is turmeric the only spice to flourish far from home. The food writer Max Falkowitz has documented the work of small-scale farmers in Guatemala, mostly poor and of indigenous descent, who now grow more than half the world's cardamom, a crop that belonged for millenniums to India and was brought to the Central American cloud forests by a German immigrant in the early 20th century. Cardamom is one of the most expensive spices — so valuable that all of it departs Guatemala for sale elsewhere. As with turmeric in Nicaragua, its absence is hardly registered by local cooks, to whom the spice is an interloper.
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