The Spice Route Enters A New Era

Since the dawn of civilisation, the longing for ingredients such as cinnamon and cloves has inspired conquests and created (and destroyed) empires. But as nonindigenous turmeric becomes a nascent Nicaraguan crop, the spice route enters a new era.

- Ligaya Mishan

In the hilly Boaco region of central Nicaragua, the turmeric plants on Celia Dávila and Gonzalo González’s farm stand over four feet (approx. 1.2m) 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 pulverised into a musky powder with a throb of bitterness, which is most widely recognised worldwide as the earthy base note and colour 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.