Medieval English shoppers paid a whole sheep's worth for one pound of ginger
Ginger no longer exists in the wild. It survives only because people keep planting it, and seafaring Austronesians carried it by canoe across the Pacific as far as Hawaii some 5,000 years ago. Later it became a luxury so prized in medieval England that a pound could fetch the price of a sheep.
Zingiber officinale is a perennial whose knobbly underground stem, the rhizome, is the part we eat. Its leafy false stems, formed from rolled leaf bases, grow about a metre tall, and its flowers are pale yellow edged with purple. It shares a family with turmeric, cardamom and galangal. A true cultigen, it originated in Maritime Southeast Asia, where Austronesian peoples ate its roots and leaves, wove mats from the leaves and used it in healing rituals and in blessing ships.
Its travels trace ancient trade. Austronesian sailors likely brought it to southern India and Sri Lanka around 3,500 years ago, and to Madagascar and the Comoros in the first millennium CE. Traders carried it on to the Middle East and Mediterranean by roughly the first century CE, and Roman doctors used it in costly remedies only the rich could buy. The earliest written mention is in the Analects, which claims Confucius ate ginger at every meal; in 406 the monk Faxian recorded potted ginger on Chinese ships to ward off scurvy. Ginger, cloves, saffron and pepper were found aboard the Danish-Norwegian flagship Gribshunden, which sank off Sweden in 1495.
The name has a long pedigree too, passing from Sanskrit through Prakrit, Greek and Medieval Latin into Old English. One popular story reads the Sanskrit as 'horn body' for the root's shape, though that may be folk etymology. In the sixteenth century the Spanish Crown encouraged smuggling ginger into the Caribbean, where it briefly beat sugar as the top export of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, until enslaved African labour made sugar cheaper in the seventeenth century.
World output reached 4.9 million tonnes in 2023, with India producing 45 percent. Indian farmers usually plant at the start of the monsoon, between March and June, and harvest after four or five months for fresh ginger or eight to ten for dried spice, whose skin is still scraped off by hand. On health, evidence is thin: ginger may beat placebo for pregnancy nausea, but whether it treats any disease remains uncertain.
Source: Ginger
