If you’d have told me yesterday that Rome’s
been sacked and burned, entire civilizations have been enslaved, and current
superpowers in the world’s infrastructure had all revolved around one humble
spice named Pepper, I’d have looked at you like you were crazy. As it is at the
time of this writing though, I wouldn’t be able to call you crazy, because now
I know the bizarre truth behind the spice, and many others like it.
Also if you’d have told me that spice brought
about the birth of Capitalism I’d have been awestruck. As it turns out, taste
was an extremely integral part of our past, it’s a huge commodity in our
present, and I have a feeling it will continue like this into the future. Its
created monopolies, spawned atrocities, and enriched our palettes for
millennia.
But what are spices? Actually, let me
rephrase that…why do we taste spices? And more importantly, how do we taste?
Today at TI&IT we’re going to break that down. We’ll talk about seven
different categories of flavor; our “buddies” on our tongue that help us
distinguish between them, and the strange (and often violent) history behind a
few of your everyday spices. In fact, chances are, you’ve eaten some of the
spices, or are about to eat them at some point today.
But before we dig into the spicy history of
the East India Trading Company let’s talk a little bit about the how and the
why of taste.
Not To Be
Pretentious…But “Taste” Isn’t “Flavor”…
Despite popular belief taste and flavor are
two separate entities, however, for the most part we use the two terms
interchangeably. For our purposes today we’re going to outline the differences
between the two so later on it is very clear what we’re talking about when we
get into classifications.
Taste is a chemical response to gustatory
stimuli. Gustatory stimuli would be the food we eat. When something is inserted
into the mouth, small receptors on the tongue called papillae or more commonly
“taste buds”, receive information from the object. These transmit signals to
the brain based on the four major taste areas of the tongue:
The four commonly agreed upon taste sections
of the tongue are sweet, salty, bitter, and sour. Obviously we know the
differences in those tastes, French fries are salty, most candy is sweet,
lemons are sour, and espresso is bitter. But what happens when a food doesn’t
fall into one of those categories?
Well it turns out, regardless of what it is,
it can be classified into one of those four categories, but there is a broader spectrum out there. This
is known as “flavor”. Flavor differs from taste in one tremendous way. Taste is
a single sense in and of itself. In order to achieve flavor two senses need to
combine, namely taste and smell. The gustatory and olfactory responses are
closely linked with one another. I’ll give you an example.
Remember the last time you stopped out to
your friends for a barbeque? Remember the ribs he had cooking on the grill?
They smelled incredible didn’t they? In fact, I’ll bet you dollars to donuts
they smelled so good you could taste them long before they had even touched
your plate. That’s because the sense of smell is closely linked to the sense of
taste.
So now we know the difference between the
two, but how and why do we taste?
No Tongues Created
Equal
The why of taste is a simple answer. We taste
to identify whether or not something is safe to ingest. Think about it. Have
you ever taken a swig of sour milk unknowingly? Tasted pretty nasty didn’t it
and I’ll bet you spit it out and threw the milk away? Good thing you did too,
sour milk is bad for your stomach, and your taste buds were there to help you
identify that threat.
The how of taste, now that’s another story.
See, everyone’s taste buds differ from one another. Some have more, some have
less, some are predispositioned to certain tastes that others find gross.
Because of this it’s difficult for researchers to make any kind of definitive
chart for taste. The only thing agreed upon are the four basic tastes we
discussed earlier, salty, sweet, sour, and bitter.
So how does the tongue differentiate between
these different tastes? It’s pretty cool, let’s break it down real quick:
See those little bumps on the tongue in the
picture above. Those are the Papillae we talked about earlier in the beginning
of this article. Most people think that those are the taste buds…and
technically that’s misleading. See, sometimes they can contain taste buds, but
gustatory receptor cells are much smaller and not visible to the naked eye.
They are generally housed in clustered in between the papillae.
The papillae lock food in place and keep it
positioned during mastication (minds out the gutter…it means chewing…). During that period food
particulates get trapped by gustatory hairs and delivered to the receptor
cells. From there a series of nerves send signals to the cerebral cortex and
interprets the information from the tongue, along with information from the
nose, as flavor.
There’s a common myth that, “the tongue is
the strongest muscle in the human body.” Well…it certainly is a muscle. But by
no definition of the word “strongest” does the tongue hold any title. Don’t let
it fool you though, while it may not be a comparatively strong muscle, flavor
is a powerful motivator. In 408 A.D., Barbarians invaded Rome and demanded a
ransom of pepper.
Yes…pepper. Like pepper, pepper. The same
black granules you put on your eggs this morning.
Not only did they sack Rome for the pepper,
after the Romans paid the ransom,
they burned the place down and took the rest! Slavery has been driven all
around the world due to the demand of Sugar. (Plantations anyone…?) Salt has
been used as a preservative and flavor enhancer for centuries.
Oh yes. The tongue is a neat sensory organ,
but the history behind what it’s capable of tasting is much richer than any
chocolate mousse you’ll ever taste. From spices fit only for a King, to sweet
commodities that take the world by storm, everyone has been trying to sate
their palettes for centuries. No other company more so than East India Trading
Company.
But we’ll get to them in a minute…first,
let’s talk about their number one product.
“I’ll Trade You One
Human For One Pound of Pepper”
Ah yes, pepper. A spice that at one time was
so valuable; a pound of black pepper could buy a serf in medieval Europe his
freedom. Spoiler alert, there weren’t very many free serfs roaming around. Long
ago, pepper was more valuable than gold, which makes sense, as its
practicalities were far more extensive. Not only is pepper a flavor enhancer,
it is also a preservative.
In medieval times, pepper was reserved only
for royalty. Princes for example would take up a hunt in pursuit of boar. When
one was brought down it would be gutted, and its insides would be thoroughly
rubbed with pepper. Not only did this make the roasted boar taste better, it
would also help save any leftover meat from spoiling any quicker than need be.
It was the spice of Kings that transformed this.
Into this:
There is some debate in the scientific and
historical community about whether or not pepper was truly used as a
preservative. It doesn’t have nearly as many stabilizing qualities as salt
does. Nonetheless it didn’t stop pepper from being a hot commodity. It spawned
conquests to India, spurred the “discovery” of North America, (You can’t
discover somewhere that was already inhabited…sorry U.S. …), and actually
helped fund the building of America as it is today.
It also spawned the East India Trading
Company. Not only was this corporation the villain of the second “Pirate of the
Caribbean” film, they truly were a villainous company in real life. Don’t like
capitalism or shareholding? You can blame that on the EIC and the Dutch
version, the VOC. It wasn’t just spice they had their hands in. Jewelry, tea,
cosmetics, coffee, even human beings were trafficked by this company. At one
point their grip was so ironclad on the Pepper Trade that they were classified
as a monopoly. Not bad for a bunch of old 16th century white dudes.
(That was sarcasm…)
The V.O.C. and
Outsourcing Murder
The systematic extermination of an indigenous
population can be nasty business, so naturally in 1607 when the Dutch needed it
done, they sent in just the right sociopath. Enter Jan Pieterszoon Coen. Many
like to claim he began slaughtering the people outright; however, here at
TI&IT we explore both sides of the story, so allow me to clear up this
historical matter real quick before we continue.
Coen arrived in the Banda Islands of
Indonesia in 1607, yes. The Dutch forced the people to work for very little,
almost slavery status, and offered useless trinkets in trade, yes. The people
of the Islands grew very tired of the Dutch taking advantage of them, yes.
So after all this buildup the Chiefs called a
meeting with Coen and his finest men in which the Chiefs, known as the “Orang
Kaya”, ambushed them and killed 40-50 (texts debate over the actual number) of
his men. Naturally, this really peeved a psycho power-hungry governor like Coen
into a fit of madness. He returned several years later with real soldiers this
time and Japanese mercenaries. He rounded up all of the Chiefs and had them
executed and impaled as a warning to any other villager who may want to try and
stage another uprising against him.
Coen could have stopped there but he didn’t.
He ordered the people to sign a treaty, one
which was easy to violate and impossible to follow. As a result of the
arbitrary violations he ordered the extermination of the populace of the Banda
Islands. 14,000 of the 15,000 native people lost their lives.
All in the name of Nutmeg and Cloves...
But we all know you can’t run a business
solely on the company policy of genocide. So Coen decided to outsource his
labor from the neighboring islands, by importing the innocent inhabitants as
slaves. He repopulated the island with sadness and tragedy, but he sure did
make those old rich white dudes even richer, and we all know, that’s what’s most important. (Once
again…so…much…cynicism…)
But why all the murder and mayhem? What made
nutmeg so important?
Well for starters it was a status symbol. If
you could afford nutmeg you could purchase a London brownstone. In fact, much
in the same way pepper could buy people, nutmeg could purchase property. In
medieval Europe, around 20 kilos of nutmeg could buy you a rather nice, fully
furnished flat. Not too shabby.
But Nutmeg had other uses as well. To
understand them, we need to talk a little bit about the spice itself and how it
grows. Let’s start with the tree:
Nutmeg grows on a tree, and its seed pod
bears a remarkable resemblance to the way the seed pod of a horsechestnut (here
in Michigan we call them “Buckeyes”) is set up. There are some differences
however. First, and most noticeably, the outer shell of Nutmeg doesn’t look
like a Sea Mine:
(The
Submarine Mine: AKA Explosive Underwater Ball of Death)
But the sea mine does bear a remarkable
resemblance to…
(The
Horsechestnut: AKA Spiny Shell of DEATH)
Anyway I digress…this is what a ripe Nutmeg
fruit looks like:
Nutmeg has several layers that must be peeled
away in order to get to the spice. The outermost layer is the fruit. The flesh
of the nut can be pulped to make jams and candies. The next layer of Nutmeg is
called the “Mace”. That’s the red stuff you see in between the two cracked
halves of the outer shell:
But even that isn’t thrown away. Mace is used
in culinary dishes worldwide. Traditionally, it’s been used in the cosmetics
industry because it contains the scent of nutmeg that can be extracted. It’s
also a classic example of holistic medicine, said to aide in a variety of
ailments, ranging from diarrhea to schizophrenia and pain reduction. (Although
I don’t recommend coming off Abilify in favor of the spice rack for anyone
suffering from mental disorders…)
But there’s another layer, (Criminey, it’s
like a Matryoshka doll I swear…). Once you peel off the Mace you reveal a
small, innocuous looking, dark brown nut. If you were to bite into this you
would be greeted with an extremely bitter taste, almost foul. Why? You guessed
it, because there’s another layer:
When all is said and done, that tiny little
seed pictured above in the top of that little pyramid, roughly the diameter of
an American Penny, brought the end of an entire civilization. Think about that
next time you go to sprinkle some on your egg cream this upcoming holiday.
So if pepper can buy humans…
And nutmeg can bring out the genocide in
people…
What the hell can sugar do???
Bittersweet Truth:
The Raw Past of Sugar
Turns out, sugar can enslave almost an entire
continent.
And create the first example of a human
pyramid scheme.
Well…you know the American way…go big or go
home…
Slavery was nothing new by the time sugar
came into the picture. It had already been a long standing tradition of a
conquering army to enslave a populace. But between 1505 and all the way up till
the beginning of the 20th century, Dutch and English “entrepreneurs”
elevated the brutality and ferocity of the slave trade to a disgusting and
disturbing art form.
Slaves were brought from Africa to North
America to work on sugar cane plantations. This sugar was then taken to mills,
where it was distilled into things like rum and molasses. The slavers would
then take the rum back to Africa where anywhere between 110-130 gallons could
be used to purchase an adult slave. Didn’t have enough for a full grown man?
Only 80 gallons left in the hold? No reason to leave empty handed! For that
amount you could buy a child.
In fact, sugar was so important it may have
cost Great Britain a very important war. It’s arguable that while Great Britain
was covering its “assets” on its sugar islands, they lost 13 colonies during
the American Revolution. Many have said that the war would have turned out
differently had Great Britain thrown all of its might against America instead
of defending its sugar stores.
So what made this “White Gold” as the
colonists called it so darn valuable?
Have you ever had sugar?
It’s tasty, delicious, and always leaves you
wanting more.
Through trade with various nations the world
became hooked and dependent on sugar. All because, “it tastes good.” Wars have
been fought over sugar. Hundreds of millions of livelihoods have been lost
because of it, and slavery still continues as a direct result of sugar demand
in certain parts of the world to this day.
It’s amazing what people will do, all in the
name of a few “buds” on their tongues.
-
Ryan
Sanders
Hope Sophie Monk
wasn’t too hot and spicy for you. I also hope you enjoyed reading this article
on the history of Spices and how our tongues work. As always please feel free
to share this around on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr, or any other social
media site you’re on, and don’t forget to subscribe to the blog for more daily
science! To know more about any of the topics discussed above feel free to
follow the links below. Happy Learning everyone!
-
Documentaries
by the BBC on various spices are listed below.
.jpg)
