Garlic is not a spice, yet ambergris from whales sometimes counts as one
What counts as a spice depends on history more than botany. The word once meant exotic goods from the East, which is why European staples like garlic and horseradish are left out, while ambergris, which comes from an animal, often makes the list. India now grows about three quarters of the world's supply.
Cooks treat seeds, fruits, roots and bark used chiefly to flavour or colour food as spices; herbs are the leaves, flowers or stems. Definitions still wobble. The Oxford English Dictionary says spices come from plants and from the tropics, but the Oxford Companion to Food points to ambergris as an animal-derived exception and to caraway as a temperate one. As Europeans met the Americas, the word stretched to cover new aromatics, and later it came to mean anything used in cooking this way.
Tracing early use is hard, because such small quantities leave little behind. Still, by 2000 BCE cinnamon and black pepper were moving through the Indian subcontinent and the Middle East, while East Asia traded herbs and pepper. Cloves reached Mesopotamia by 1700 BCE. Egypt used herbs in food and in mummification, and the Ebers Papyrus, from around 1550 BCE, lists some eight hundred herbal remedies. By 1000 BCE herbal medical systems had developed in China, Korea and India.
Trade shaped the map. Indonesian merchants sailed to China, India, the Middle East and East Africa, and Arab traders ran routes that made Alexandria the chief spice market. Knowledge of the monsoon winds, around 40 CE, gradually shifted traffic from desert caravans to ships. Much later, European hunger for spices helped drive early modern voyages of exploration.
Practical cooking follows simple rules. Whole dried spices keep longest, so buying them in bulk costs less per serving. Fresh ones such as ginger taste stronger but cost more and spoil quickly. Some are almost always sold ground, while small seeds like mustard and fennel work whole or powdered. As for health, a 2019 review found most claimed benefits lacked clinical support, though it noted that spice polyphenols might help.
Source: Spice
