by Tom Standage
A common feature of wealthy societies, however, is a feeling that an ancient connection with the land has been lost, and a desire to reestablish it. For the wealthiest Roman nobles, knowledge of agriculture and ownership of a large farm was a way to demonstrate that they had not forgotten their people’s purported origins as humble farmers. Similarly, many centuries later in pre-revolutionary France, Queen Marie-Antoinette had an idealized farm built on the grounds of the palace of Versailles, where she and her ladies-in-waiting would dress up as shepherdesses and milkmaids, and milk cows that had been painstakingly cleaned. Today, people in many wealthy parts of the world enjoy growing their own food in gardens or on allotments. In many cases they could easily afford to buy the resulting fruit and vegetables instead, but growing their own food provides a connection with the land, a gentle form of exercise, a supply of fresh produce, and an escape from the modern world. (Growing food without the use of chemicals is often particularly highly regarded in such circles.) In California, the richest part of the richest country in the world, it is the simple food of the Italian peasantry that is most highly venerated. A tourist village has even opened in India, near the technology hot spot of Bangalore, where the newly prosperous middle classes can go to experience a romanticized version of their forebears’ existence as subsistence farmers. One of the privileges of wealth is the option to emulate the lifestyles of the rural poor.
Wealth tends to distance people from working on the land; indeed, not having to be a farmer is another way to define wealth. Today, the richest societies are those in which the proportion of income spent on food, and the fraction of the workforce involved in food production, are lowest. Farmers account for only around 1 percent of the population in rich countries such as the United States and Britain. In poor countries such as Rwanda, the proportion of the population involved in agriculture is still more than 80 percent—as it was in Uruk 5,500 years ago. In the developed world, most people have specialized jobs that do not relate to agriculture, and they would find it difficult to survive if they suddenly had to produce all their own food. The process of separation into different roles that began when people first took up farming, and abandoned the egalitarian hunter-gatherer lifestyle, has reached its logical conclusion.
That people in the developed world today generally have a specific job—lawyer or mechanic or doctor or bus driver—is a direct consequence of food surpluses resulting from a continuous increase in the productivity of farming over the past few thousand years. Another corollary of these burgeoning food surpluses was the division into rich and poor, powerful and weak. None of these distinctions can be found within a hunter-gatherer band, the social structure that defined mankind for most of its existence. Hunter-gatherers own few or no possessions, but that does not mean they are poor. Their “poverty” only becomes apparent when they are compared with members of settled, agricultural societies who are in a position to accumulate goods. Wealth and poverty, in other words, seem to be inevitable consequences of agriculture and its offspring, civilization.
PART III
GLOBAL HIGHWAYS OF FOOD
5
SPLINTERS OF PARADISE
We ceased not to buy and sell at the several islands till we came to the land of Hind, where we bought cloves and ginger and all manner spices; and thence we fared on to the land of Sind, where also we bought and sold. In these Indian seas, I saw wonders without number or count.
—FROM “SINDBAD THE SEAMAN,”
IN The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night,
TRANSLATED BY SIR RICHARD BURTON (1885–88)
THE CURIOUS APPEAL OF SPICES
Flying snakes, giant carnivorous birds, and fierce bat-like creatures were just some of the perils that awaited anyone who tried to gather spices in the exotic lands where they grew, according to the historians of ancient Greece. Herodotus, the Greek writer of the fifth century B.C. known as the “father of history,” explained that gathering cassia, a form of cinnamon, involved donning a full-body suit made from the hides of oxen, covering everything but the eyes. Only then would the wearer be protected from the “winged creatures like bats, which screech horribly and are very fierce . . . they have to be kept from attacking the men’s eyes while they are cutting the cassia.”
Even stranger, Herodotus claimed, was the process of collecting cinnamon. “In what country it grows is quite unknown,” he wrote. “The Arabians say that the dry sticks, which we call kinamomon, are brought to Arabia by large birds, which carry them to their nests, made of mud, on mountain precipices which no man can climb. The method invented to get the cinnamon sticks is this. People cut up the bodies of dead oxen into very large joints, and leave them on the ground near the nests. They then scatter, and the birds fly down and carry off the meat to their nests, which are too weak to bear the weight and fall to the ground. The men come and pick up the cinnamon. Acquired in this way, it is exported to other countries.”
Theophrastus, a Greek philosopher of the fourth century B.C., had a different story. Cinnamon, he had heard, grew in deep glens, where it was guarded by deadly snakes. The only safe way to collect it was to wear protective gloves and shoes and, having gathered it, to leave one third of the harvest behind as a gift to the sun, which would cause the offering to burst into flames. Yet another tale told of the flying snakes that protected the frankincense-bearing trees. According to Herodotus, the snakes could be driven off by spice harvesters only by smoking them out with burning storax, an aromatic resin, to produce clouds of incense.
Writing in the first century A.D., Pliny the Elder, a Roman writer, rolled his eyes at such stories. “Those old tales,” he declared, “were invented by the Arabs to raise the price of their goods.” He might have added that the tall stories told about spices also served to obscure their origins from European buyers. Frankincense came from Arabia, but cinnamon did not: Its origins lay much farther afield, in southern India and Sri Lanka, from where it was shipped across the Indian Ocean, along with pepper and other spices. But the Arab traders who then carried these imported products, together with their own local aromatics, across the desert to the Mediterranean in camel caravans preferred to keep the true origins of their unusual wares shrouded in mystery.
It worked brilliantly. The Arab traders’ customers around the Mediterranean were prepared to pay extraordinary sums for spices, largely as a result of their exotic connotations and mysterious origins. There is nothing inherently valuable about spices, which are mainly plant extracts derived from dried saps, gums, and resins; barks; roots; seeds; and dried fruits. But they were prized for their unusual scents and tastes, which are in many cases defensive mechanisms to ward off insects or vermin. Moreover, spices are nutritionally superfluous. What they have in common is that they are durable, lightweight, and hard to obtain, and are only found in specific places. These factors made them ideal for long-distance trade—and the farther they were carried, the more sought-after, exotic, and expensive they became.
WHY SPICES WERE SPECIAL
The English word spice comes from the Latin species, which is also the root of words such as special, especially, and so on. The literal meaning of species is “type” or “kind”—the word is still used in this sense in biology—but it came to denote valuable items because it was used to refer to the types or kinds of things on which duty was payable. The Alexandria Tariff, a Roman document from the fifth century A.D., is a list of fifty-four such things, under the heading species pertinentes ad vectigal, which literally means “the kinds (of things) subject to duty.” The list includes cinnamon, cassia, ginger, white pepper, long pepper, cardamom, aloewood, and myrrh, all of which were luxury items that were liable to 25 percent import duty at the Egyptian port of Alexandria, through which spices from the East flowed into the Mediterranean and then on to European customers.
Today we would recognize these kinds of things, or “species,” as spices. But the Alexandria Tariff also lists a number of exotic items—lions, leopards, panthers, silk, ivory, to
rtoiseshell, and Indian eunuchs—that were technically spices, too. Since only rare and expensive luxury items that were subject to extra duty qualified as spices, if the supply of a particular item increased and its price fell, it could be taken off the list. This probably explains why black pepper, the Romans’ most heavily used spice, does not appear on the Alexandria Tariff: It had become commonplace by the fifth century as a result of booming imports from India. Today the word spice is used in a narrower, more food-specific way. Black pepper is a spice, even though it does not appear on the Tariff, and tigers are not, even though they do.
So spices were, by definition, expensive imported goods. This was a further component of their appeal. The conspicuous consumption of spices was a way to demonstrate one’s wealth, power, and generosity. Spices were presented as gifts, bequeathed in wills along with other valuable items, and even used as currency in some cases. In Europe the Greeks seem to have pioneered the culinary use of spices, which were originally used in incense and perfume, and (as with so many other things) the Romans borrowed, extended, and popularized this Greek idea. The cookbook of Apicius, a compilation of 478 Roman recipes, called for generous quantities of foreign spices, including pepper, ginger, putchuk (costus), malabathrum, spikenard, and turmeric, in such recipes as spiced ostrich. By the Middle Ages food was being liberally smothered in spices. In medieval cookbooks spices appear in at least half of all recipes, sometimes three quarters. Meat and fish were served with richly spiced sauces including various combinations of cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, pepper, and mace. With their richly spiced food, the wealthy literally had expensive tastes.
This enthusiasm for spices is sometimes attributed to their use in masking the taste of rotten meat, given the supposed difficulty of preserving meat for long periods. But using spices in this way would have been a very odd thing to do, given their expense. Anyone who could afford spices could certainly have afforded good meat; the spices were the more expensive ingredient by far. And there are many recorded medieval examples of merchants who were punished for selling bad meat, which rather undermines the notion that meat was invariably putrid and rotten, and suggests that spoiled meat was the exception rather than the rule. The origin of the surprisingly persistent myth about spices and bad meat may lie in the use of spices to conceal the saltiness of meat that had been preserved by the widespread practice of salting.
Spices were certainly regarded as antidotes to earthly squalor in another, more mystical sense. They were thought to be splinters of paradise that had found their way into the ordinary world. Ginger and cinnamon were said by some ancient authorities to be hauled from the Nile in nets, having washed down the river from Paradise (or the Garden of Eden, according to later Christian writers), where exotic plants grew in abundance. They provided an otherworldly taste of paradise amid the sordid reality of earthly existence. Hence the religious use of incense, to provide the scent of the heavenly realm, and the practice of offering spices to the gods as burnt offerings. Spices were also used to embalm the dead and prepare them for the afterlife. The mythical phoenix was even said by one Roman writer to make her nest from—what else?—a selection of spices. “She collects the spices and aromas that the Assyrian gathers, and the rich Arab; those that are harvested by Pygmy peoples and by India, and that grow in the soft bosom of the Sabaean land. She collects cinnamon, the perfume of far-wafting amomum, balsams mixed with tejpat leaves; there is also a slip of gentle cassia and gum arabic, and the rich teardrops of frankincense. She adds the tender spikes of downy nard and the power of Panchaea’s myrrh.”
The appeal of spices, then, arose from a combination of their mysterious and distant origins, their resulting high prices and value as status symbols, and their mystical and religious connotations—in addition, of course, to their smell and taste. The ancient fascination with spices may seem arbitrary and strange today, but its intensity cannot be underestimated. The pursuit of spices is the third way in which food remade the world, both by helping to illuminate its full extent and geography, and by motivating European explorers to seek direct access to the Indies, in the course of which they established rival trading empires. Examining the spice trade from a European perspective might seem strange, given that Eu rope occupied only a peripheral position and a minor role in the trade in ancient times. But this served to heighten the mystery and the appeal of spices to Europeans in particular, ultimately prompting them to uncover the true origins of these strangely appealing dried roots, shriveled berries, desiccated twigs, slivers of bark, and sticky bits of gum—with momentous consequences for the course of human history.
THE SPICE TRADE’S WORLD-WIDE WEB
When a ship was found stranded on the shores of the Red Sea, around 120 B.C., there appeared at first to be no survivors. Everyone on board had starved to death—except, it turned out, for one man, and he was only barely alive. He was given food and water and taken to the Egyptian court in Alexandria where he was presented to King Ptolemy VIII (known as Physcon, or “potbelly,” because of his girth). But nobody could understand what the foreign sailor was saying, so the king sent him away to learn some Greek, the official language of Egypt at the time. Not long afterward the sailor returned to the court to tell his story. He explained that he was from India and that his ship had gone off course on its way across the ocean, and had ended up drifting in the Red Sea.
Since the only sea route to India known in Egypt at the time involved hugging the coast of the Arabian peninsula—something Alexandrian sailors were forbidden to do by Arab merchants who wanted to keep the profitable trade with India to themselves—the sailor’s reference to a fast, direct route across the open ocean to India was met with disbelief. To prove that he was telling the truth, and no doubt to secure a passage home for himself, the sailor offered to act as the guide for an expedition to India. The king agreed and appointed as its leader one of his trusted advisers, a Greek named Eudoxus who was known for his interest in geography. Eudoxus duly sailed away and returned many months later with a cargo of spices and jewels from India, all of which the king confiscated for himself. Eudoxus later made a second trip to India at the behest of Ptolemy VIII’s wife and successor, Cleopatra III. Inspired by the wreckage of what appeared to be a Spanish ship on the east African coast of Ethiopia, he then became obsessed with the idea that it was possible to sail right around Africa. He sailed along the north coast of Africa and headed into the Atlantic to attempt the circumnavigation, but he was never heard from again.
That, at least, is the story related by Strabo, a Greek philosopher who wrote a treatise on geography in the early first century A.D. Strabo himself was skeptical of the tale: Why did the Indian sailor survive, when his shipmates did not? How did he learn Greek so quickly? Yet the story is plausible, because direct sea trade between the Red Sea and the west coast of India really did open up during the first century B.C., just after the shipwrecked Indian is supposed to have appeared in Alexandria. Until this time only Arab and Indian sailors had known the secret of the seasonal trade winds, which allowed fast, regular passage across the ocean between the Arabian peninsula and the west coast of India. These winds blow from the southwest between June and August to carry ships eastward, and then from the northeast between November and January to carry them westward again. Knowledge of the winds, and Arab control of the overland routes across the Arabian peninsula, gave Indian and Arab merchants a firm grip on the trade between India and the Red Sea. They sold spices and other oriental goods to Alexandrian merchants in markets around the southwestern tip of Arabia. These goods were then shipped up the Red Sea, over land to the Nile, and finally up the Nile to Alexandria itself.
Following in Eudoxus’s wake, however, Alexandrian sailors learned how to exploit the trade winds—the details are said to have been worked out by a Greek named Hippalos, after whom the southwesterly wind was named—and were then able to bypass the Arabian markets and sail directly across the ocean to India’s west coast, cutting out the Arab and Indian middlemen. The volum
e of shipping increased as Roman traders gained direct access to the Red Sea following Egypt’s annexation by Rome in 30 B.C. Roman control of trade between the Red Sea and India was cemented under the emperor Augustus, who ordered attacks on the ports of southern Arabia, reducing Aden, the main market city, to “a mere village” according to one observer. By the early first century A.D. as many as 120 Roman ships a year were sailing to India to buy spices, including black pepper, costus, and nard—along with gems, Chinese silk, and exotic animals for slaughter in the Roman world’s many arenas. For the first time Eu rope ans had become direct participants in the thriving trade network of the Indian Ocean, the hub of global commerce at the time.
Knowledge of the sea route to India gave Alexandrian (and later Roman) sailors direct access to the spice markets of India’s west coast, bypassing Arabia altogether.
The “Periplus of the Erythraean Sea,” a sailor’s handbook written by an unknown Greek navigator in the first century A.D., gives a flavor of the frenetic commercial activity in the markets interconnected by the Indian Ocean. It lists the ports along the west coast of India and their specialties, from Barbarikon in the north (a good place to buy costus, spikenard, bdellium, and lapis lazuli), to Barygaza (good for long pepper, ivory, silk, and a local form of myrrh) and right down to Nelcynda, almost at the southern tip of India. In this region the main trade was in pepper, which was “grown in quantity” inland, according to the Periplus. Also on offer was malabathrum, the leaf of the local cinnamon plant and a particularly valued spice: A pound of small leaves would fetch seventy-five denarii in Rome, or about six times the typical monthly salary. In all these ports Roman traders offered wine, copper, tin, lead, glass, and red coral from the Mediterranean, which was valued in India as a protective charm. But mostly the Roman traders had to pay for spices with gold and silver, since most of their goods had little appeal to Indian merchants. Tamil poems of the first century A.D. refer to the “yavanas,” a generic term for people from the west, with their great ships and wealth that “never wane[d],” a reference to the vast quantities of gold and silver that were handed over in return for spices.