Epilogue
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THE SPICE CHAMBER
If there is an heir today to the Estado da Índia and the Dutch East India Company, it would have to be McCormick & Company. So, hoping to catch a glimpse of today’s dominant spice multinational, I called up its headquarters in Baltimore. Easier said than done. When I requested a tour of the plant, the press officer turned me down flat. “We don’t do tours,” she snapped. When I asked for an interview, she grilled me about just what it was I wanted to know and then promised to get back to me. She never did. I felt like a Dutch spy trying to break into the offices of the Portuguese viceroy. What dark secrets could be sequestered in the bowels of the world’s largest spice company?
But I persisted. Six months and several rounds of bureaucratic gymnastics later, I pulled into the McCormick parking lot. The company headquarters is in a large, fortresslike building isolated in a sylvan corporate park just north of Baltimore. McCormick gave up its previous facilities in the inner city in the early 1980s to move closer to the processing plant and away from the then-derelict waterfront. Luckily, it salvaged some of the old headquarters. Behind the receptionist hangs one of the original Depression-era murals rescued from downtown, depicting East and West Indians gathering black pepper and vanilla—still the company’s top sellers. (McCormick is the world’s largest buyer of vanilla.) Much to my surprise, the receptionist asks for neither fingerprints nor a retina scan before I enter. She is downright friendly as she pages James Lynn, my inside source at the corporation. As Jim shakes my hand and guides me inside, the secrets seem to dissipate, though not the peculiarities—this is Baltimore, after all. McCormick not only transplanted some of the old pictures, it lifted an entire mock Elizabethan hamlet from the old offices and shoehorned it here into the new suburban location. As you step through the generic corporate lobby past the bank of elevators, you are suddenly confronted by a street of timbered cottages and leaded glass windows. (The village had been built to promote tea, which was an important McCormick product in the 1930s.) To your left is “Ye Olde McCormick Tea House,” where visitors used to be offered tea by a wench in period costume at the old harborfront main office. Company guests could also visit the next-door “Tea Museum” to examine tea memorabilia and educate themselves in a six-foot-high book entitled “Ye Story of Tea.” The wench, unfortunately, fell victim to corporate downsizing a long time ago, though Jim does sit me at a rustic oaken table and offer me tea. Jim Lynn works in corporate communications, but on the side, he is an amateur authority on the company’s history.
Visitors to McCormick headquarters are greeted with a vintage painting of pepper picked and dried much the same as in Roman times.
Like Heinz, Kellogg’s, Hershey’s, and so many other grand American brands, McCormick was founded in the waning years of the nineteenth century. Jim describes a tough and feisty Willoughby M. McCormick, who got his start selling flavored syrups out of a basement in Baltimore. He survived the great Baltimore fire, the Great War, the Great Depression—all the while enlarging his portfolio, adding spices, tea, mayonnaise, and even insecticides. And he gave tours of the factory. (Today’s reluctance to host visitors is simply corporate caution, Jim assures me.) When it came to spices, McCormick satisfied its needs by buying on the New York Commodities Exchange, then processing and packaging the imported spices. Up until the Second World War, the spice export business was still mostly in Dutch and English hands.
Under W. M. McCormick’s successors, the American company went public and gradually assembled an international potpourri of spice companies from Shanghai to San Salvador. Investors can read all about it in the company’s annual report, where they’ll also find out that McCormick’s profits are soaring, mainly because world spice consumption keeps going up and up.
If McCormick headquarters holds a secret, it is on the fourth floor. This is where the carpeted hallways of the lower floors give way to barren institutional corridors lined with anonymous doors. Jim leads me to one of these doors, slides a key into the lock, and flips the light switch. As the fluorescent lights flicker to life, the little room bursts into a riot of words and colors. Hundreds, thousands of neatly arrayed packages from little one-shot servings of Moroccan chicken seasoning in hot pink tetrahedrons to giant food-service packs of Key West Style Seasonings labeled in tropical turquoise are arranged in row after row after row. A shelf of chili-flavored mayonnaise from the Central American division is squeezed next to a display case for Stange, the Japanese division. (“Taste the magician” is the only part of that package that I can read.) Here, in McCormick’s secret spice chamber, is a snapshot of the world spice market today and where spicing around the globe is going. Today’s company has divisions in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Central America, China, Finland, France, Great Britain, India, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and Turkey as well as the United States, and many of those national brands are exported elsewhere. The company that started selling vanilla syrup to Baltimore soda fountains is now the epitome of globalization, sourcing its vanilla in Uganda and Vietnam to flavor chocolate bars in Switzerland and Argentina. But then the spice business has always been a worldwide affair even before the Castilians and the Portuguese set in motion the first great push for a global trade network.
Yet the way the world eats is changing, and these changes may be even greater than they were after the “Cabralian” exchange that redistributed New World peppers and peanuts along with Old World black pepper and sugarcane across the continents. One of the things made graphically clear in McCormick’s spice chamber is that people don’t cook anymore. They assemble. “Yes, we have all our gourmet jars of spice,” Jim assures me, “but much of what we put our attention to are blends—seasoning blends and grilling sauces—because people can come home and chuhk, chuhk, chuhk [he makes the noise of shaking sauce out of a bottle].” For every package of nutmeg and paprika on the shelf, there are dozens of ready-made mixes of multiple spices: to make teriyaki beef (the United States), chili con carne (the Netherlands), Moroccan tajines (France), or Balti chicken (the United Kingdom). Even in India, where the fashion for spices never faded, women today are as likely to rip open a polyethylene envelope of commercially processed masala as to pull out the mortar and pestle. For good or ill, the decisions about what your food will taste like are made at corporate headquarters.
And even that is only part of the picture. Jim Lynn explains how McCormick has increasingly moved into the food-service branch of the industry, so that now half its business involves products that never even reach the consumer’s cupboard, or at least not directly. That secret seasoning boasted of by a certain southern chicken chain—“They don’t like us to mention the name,” Jim says with a grin—is a McCormick spice mix; that special sauce at the hamburger chain with the arches is concocted in Baltimore. McCormick flavors everything from chips to beer. Processed food is where the future lies. The tastes in that food are often cooked up in McCormick’s “Technical Innovation Center.” Even food processors don’t want to come up with their own seasoning. “A food manufacturer doesn’t want a truckload of ginger; they want a containerload of a ready-made flavoring mixture,” the corporate communicator informs me. Which is why he keeps emphasizing that McCormick now wants to be seen as a “flavor company” rather than a spice company. You can be sure its flavor decisions do no harm to its spice business.
As Frank Lavooij, the Dutch spice trader, happily informed me, people are eating more spice, and they aren’t even aware of it. There is an apocryphal story about a research project in which dogs are given increasing quantities of chilies in their food. Eventually, they find chili-free food so bland that they refuse to eat it. The dog study apparently never took place, but we are undergoing a similar experiment. More and more of us are eating processed food that is increasingly spicier.
If the Dutch had figured out how to influence demand as well as control supply, Europeans and their New World colonies might never have given up the spice habit to begin with. But the kind of vertical integration that McCormick has accomplished was inconceivable in seventeenth-century Amsterdam. The Heren XVII could only wring their hands as the fashion for the exotic aromatics waned and per capita spice use sagged in the seventeen hundreds. The appetite for pepper, which the VOC had calculated at about seven million pounds in 1688, remained more or less stuck at that figure until the eve of the French Revolution, even as Europe’s population finally surged. Eventually, in the late nineteenth century, the overall demand for spices grew as living standards rose. Just about everyone could now afford to use cloves and cinnamon. But it was a pinch here and a pinch there. Victorians recoiled in horrified fascination at the earlier orgy of spice.
In the West, this abstemious approach has begun to change only in the last fifty years. Between 1961 and 1994, the volume of spices imported into the United States increased close to 400 percent and doubled again in the next decade. The average contemporary American eats more pepper than any medieval aristocrat, on top of all the other spices once traded on the Rialto and the Nieuwemarkt. But today, Piper nigrum is no longer the king. Dried capsicums have long since overtaken the berries from Malabar as America’s favorite spice.
The reasons that lie behind the transformation in the American taste for spice are much the same as in the Netherlands—or anywhere in the developed world, for that matter. Immigrants bring the taste for chili and ginger from Latin America and Asia while at the same time overseas travelers (professional chefs among them) return with an appetite for the more complex flavors they’ve tried. However, companies such as McCormick do not merely capitalize on these trends; they shape them and, when it suits their purposes, transform them. Thus, foreign flavors that might be too pungent are mellowed for the domestic market. (You can rest assured that McCormick’s “Balti curry spices” wouldn’t knock anybody’s socks off in Baltistan.) But you can’t really fault Baltimore for that. If the seasonings remained in their original, “authentic” concentration, they would never reach a broad-based audience. Nevertheless, just like the apocryphal dogs, the public is experiencing more and more spicy heat without really noticing it.
A global company such as McCormick also takes advantage of trends that appear in one market by introducing them in another. When single-use packaging (packets of a few grams of spice in much the same spirit as the little cones of pepper sold in old Amsterdam) became popular in the United Kingdom, similar packages followed in the United States and France.
Globalization has not only affected how people eat around the world; it has also changed what farmers grow and where they grow it. To some extent, this was true when Malabar pepper was transplanted from India into Indonesia in the early Middle Ages and ginger was brought to the Caribbean by the Portuguese. But now spices come from all sorts of unlikely spots. Guatemala is the world’s largest cardamom exporter, even though the locals barely know what to do with the stuff—virtually all of it is exported to the Middle East. Most of the world’s vanilla—an orchid of Mexican origin—comes from Madagascar and Indonesia, but there are other, relatively new sources. Today, McCormick obtains a lot of its vanilla from Uganda. Because of ever-increasing demand, even the Indian Spices Board is encouraging pepper farmers in Malabar to grow the long, skinny pods. The new kid on the block is Vietnam, which, in ancient times, used to import black pepper from Malabar and is now the world’s premier pepper producer, undercutting everyone else’s prices. (Indonesia and Brazil come next; India is a distant fourth.) These days, Indian farmers worry about cheap pepper exports from Indochina much as American textile workers bemoan imports from South Asia. But even in India, people realize that the spice trade is changing, and perhaps more than elsewhere, they are trying to prepare for a karmic rebirth.
WEAPONS AND NUTRACEUTICALS
The first hint of how seriously spices are taken in India was driven home when I boarded a domestic flight to Calicut. Before I passed through security, the sign warned, “Passengers are requested not to carry pickles, chilly powder, masala powders”—as well as the usual forbidden arsenal of lighters, sharp objects, and nail clippers—in their hand luggage. (“Pickles,” in this case, refers to highly spiced condiments such as mango pickle.) In India, scientists have studied how spices can be used as weapons, food preservatives, colorants, drugs, and nutraceuticals. Naturally, there are also efforts to improve the strains of spices grown for better flavor and hardiness.
As a result of this ongoing research, the Indian government is especially wary of “biopiracy,” something I learned when I tried to get permission to visit the main research facility in the spice-producing state of Kerala. Luckily, I had been hardened by my McCormick experience. So, a half year’s correspondence later, I arrived at the Calicut airport clutching a handful of letters, duly stamped, dated, numbered, and signed by the undersecretary to the Government of India, Ministry of Agriculture, Department of Agricultural Research and Education. A large white taxi sent by the Indian Institute of Spices Research (IISR) awaited my arrival.
The institute is located on the outskirts of Calicut, just a little inland from where da Gama’s men first made their landing. To get there, you must brave the usual suicidal Indian car trip—dodging motorcycles, auto rickshaws, oblivious pedestrians, stray dogs, and speeding buses that seem to use the median divider primarily as a centering device. The research campus can be seen from a distance, rising like a castle on a hill. To enter, I have to pass muster with the guard, who seems disoriented to find a foreigner having been granted access to the holy of holies. Then the road winds up the hill, tightly sealed in by a barbed-wire-topped wall. At the highest point, I am deposited before the immaculate buildings surrounded by meticulously manicured grounds. There is no time for greetings or introductions before I am whisked into the sparkling new visitors center, presumably to avoid any temptation to do or see anything not strictly authorized.
The visitors center is a temple to spice. The local farmers who are allowed access come here to look at photos, receive instructional pamphlets, and get advice. The guardians of the temple, the barefoot scientists, now cluster around me to offer their hands, a cup of chai, a plate of biscuits, and a bowl of cashews. They are perplexed by my presence but also my interest. Just like the guard, they can’t quite understand how I found out the magic word to open the gate to their ivory tower. I am apparently the first non-Indian to have been afforded this honor.
The assembled cast represents the full range of the institute’s research program. There is the careful biochemist in her emerald sari—still nervous about my presence. The wild-eyed and brilliant botanist stalks the room like a caged panther. I am introduced to the dignified botanical economist, the eager field botanist, and the silent young chemist. One by one, they gradually relax as they realize that I have not come to ransack their biological treasure chest. And as they let down their guard, their passions slowly unravel: the biochemist insists on reeling off numbers to explain the advantages of organic agriculture; the brilliant botanist riffs on the overuse of the planet’s resources; the field botanist tries to convince me that our civilization would waste less if only we imitated the swamis who live on water and sunlight alone. Then, green coconuts are served as we cluster around the touch-screen computer module, where a slick interactive promo shows off the institute’s successes.
The work they do here is the kind done at any agricultural research facility. They study root rot, explore issues of yield, and try to improve the quality of the cultivars. The biochemist launches into a highly technical description of the compounds that give pepper its unique taste. (To a biochemist, the flavors that sparkle on the palate are reduced to fractions and formulas.) An oil called piperine gives pepper its heat, while other trace oils give aroma. Typically, if one is high, the other tends to be a little lower, meaning that the hottest pepper is often not the most flavorful. The IISR maintains a germplasm bank of pepper, turmeric, and cardamom as well as other spices, and field-workers continue to collect wild varieties to add to the collection. The botanist with the guru’s unruly gray hair tells me that they have more than 200 cultivars of pepper here, but then he shakes his quizzical head and offers me a half smile, “But the Brazilians claim to have almost 180.” So much for keeping the secret at home. But then, even the Dutch policy of systematic murder couldn’t maintain Holland’s spice monopoly.
It turns out that the scientists are as frustrated by the government’s paranoia as I was. Like researchers everywhere, they are eager to share their findings, but they are not allowed to present papers at overseas conferences. What seems to excite them the most these days is sustainable agriculture.
“In a natural undisturbed system, in the forest state,” the irrepressible field botanist breaks in, “pepper plants exist that are a hundred years old. But when you disturb the natural system, by tilling and adding manure, the life will deteriorate. Under cultivation, the plant will have a productive life of [merely] seven to fifteen years.”
“The disease problem is worse than it was a generation ago,” the brilliant botanist silences the others to explain. “Nobody has specifically studied the causes. It could be climate change, the introduction of exogenous agents, or some other factor. One thing is for sure: once the people start applying chemical fertilizers, the local microorganism population—that used to sustain all the plantations in olden days—will decline. So when you use organic fertilizers, there is a very good response, not only with black pepper but all the crops.”
Of course, organic is not popular just with the scientists; consumers in the developed world want it, too. Even McCormick has an organic line now. When I talk to the people in the middle, though—the farmers and the exporters—they’re resistant. Nonetheless, there are a few who see the future in growing spices organically, as they have for hundreds of years.
The past may hold a prescription for the future in other respects as well. Medical researchers in India and elsewhere have been trying to isolate the properties that make spices so potent in Ayurvedic medicine. Like the old Galenic system, the traditional Indian practice of Ayurveda is based on a scheme of bodily humors that are naturally affected by what you eat. To Ayurveda practitioners, spices are as much drugs as flavorings. The scientists at the IISR are happy to shift from discussions of spectrum analysis and genetic engineering to trading opinions on traditional healing practices. The brilliant botanist turns out to be a font of information on the local medical uses of spices.
“Nutmeg is a natural remedy, here, for sleeplessness.” He begins his monologue in an insistent staccato rhythm. “But you need just a small amount. We rub a little on babies’ lips to make them sleep, but just a little grain.” Myristicin, the active ingredient in nutmeg, has shown some potential as a weapon against cancer and liver disease, at least in animals. But there’s the thorny problem of its hallucinogenic effects. “The hippies, you know, in olden times, they would take one glass of liquor and dissolve the nutmeg in it.” The botanist tells the story and chortles. He adds, “Don’t try it. It is toxic!”
“Pepper, too, is used in Ayurveda medicine,” the spice guru continues. “There are enzymes in pepper that have antibiotic properties.” Mostly, though, scientists have focused on piperine’s effectiveness as a “potency multiplier.” Pepper is often added to Ayurvedic prescriptions to increase their effectiveness. It seems to do the same thing with more conventional medicines. In one study, researchers found that they could decrease the dose of a tuberculosis medicine by more than half with no loss in effectiveness; in another, chemotherapy for lung cancer seemed to work better when supplemented with piperine. An American has even patented Bioperine, a piperine extract, as a “bioavailability enhancer.”
“All the spices have medical qualities,” the others add their chorus of agreement. Ginger and cardamom are used to calm nausea. The capsaicin from chili peppers is widely used in arthritis creams. Galangal seems to kill cancerous cells while leaving the healthy ones alive, at least in the laboratory. In a study by the U.S. Agricultural Research Service, less than a half teaspoon a day of cinnamon reduced the blood sugar levels of sixty volunteers in Pakistan with type 2 diabetes who participated. Even their levels of LDL cholesterol (the bad one) dropped.
These days, though, the medical wunderkind of the spice world is turmeric. Curcumin, the active agent in turmeric, is a potent antioxidant and the subject of medical research at major universities around the world. The spice may protect against leukemia; it has been observed to inhibit the growth of cancerous cells in the lungs of mice with breast cancer; it seems to prevent the formation of diabetic cataracts; it pushes melanoma cells to self-destruct and may be useful in combating malaria, treating cystic fibrosis, fighting Alzheimer’s, and reducing chemotherapy-induced fatigue. “Nature’s gift to antioxidants,” the botanical economist chimes in, chuckling. And it makes a fine “natural” colorant, too.
And what of spices as weapons? Capsaicin is widely used in pepper sprays such as Mace (no connection to the Moluccan spice) both as a self-defense aid and, by the police, for crowd control. In the United States, a high-potency spray is marketed as a bear repellent, and in Africa, fences are smeared with a cocktail of grease and capsaicin to keep elephants at bay. Scientists at India’s Defense Research Laboratory have publicly identified the Tezpur as the subcontinent’s hottest chili, though just what they plan to do with it is, I’m sure, top secret. (It’s almost two hundred times as hot as a jalapeño.) Suffice it to say, it should probably be banned from hand luggage everywhere.
The scientists at the Indian Institute of Spices Research have more quotidian concerns. At the end of our delightfully informative interview, I wish them good luck in their battle against root rot and their search for the tastiest pepper, turmeric, and ginger. I pay the ten dollars that the Ministry of Agriculture requested for my admission to the spice temple and climb into the waiting taxi. I wave goodbye to the security guard at the front gate as the car swerves onto the main road to Calicut.
It had been a long trip from St. Albans to the pepper coast of Malabar, through a world of flavors and centuries of pungent smells. I recalled Luca’s telling me—how many bottles of Prosecco had we drunk?—that the world changes but people don’t. Spices were trendy for much the same reason in 1500 as they are now. Once again, people are looking to spices for the elixir of life or a ticket to paradise. And the future bodes well for people who study spices as well as for those who come up with new ways for us to consume them. As they have done for at least two thousand years, the people in the middle will take their share, paying the farmers as little as possible and charging us as much as they can get away with. As I looked out the window of the speeding taxi at the pepper woods flashing by behind fences painted with cell phone ads, it occurred to me that like those long-ago Venetians, Lisboetas, and Amsterdamers, we are living in a new golden age of spice.