Spice rescues foods that have lost their original flavor.

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The greatest spice is hunger. Nothing makes food taste better than lack of food.

I once saw a news report of starving children in some hellish third-world circumstance of blight and starvation. Children were scouring though a bare patch of sand. They were searching for individual grains of rice. They smiled with each grain of rice eaten as though it was a banquet.

They did not think about spice.

Spice is a concern of the well-fed. Only when hunger is satisfied does anyone think about how to make food taste better. Spice is a luxurious indulgence. Civilized folks in the first-world have heard about hunger They imagine what it must be like.

They can’t really know until they’ve gone for days without food.

Instead they say things like, “I’m starving”, when they only mean they have an appetite. Appetite, when hunger is already sated, has the luxury of fretting about which spice should dress-up the meal.

Overuse of spice tends to dull the taste buds. If a little bit of spice makes food tastier, shouldn’t more spice make it better yet. Not at all. If extra addition of spice made for tastier and tastier food, then the tastiest food would be the spice itself.

Garlic comes to mind. I enjoy a little garlic, too much ruins whatever it’s intended to enhance. The same is true of any sort of spice.

I had a conversation with an Italian friend of mine about the difference between French and Italian cuisine. He said, “French food is mostly about spices and sauces. Italian food is mostly about freshness and quality”.

Connoisseurs of French cuisine will howl in protest. Even so, the oversimplified, generalization is generally true.

Cultures throughout the world have developed spices to cover deficiencies in quality.

Much of French cuisine began in an era of no refrigeration when meat and vegetables were often less than fresh. Much of Italian cuisine has historically been closer from slaughter and garden to table. The difference is between temperate and intemperate climates.

Asian cuisine is rich in spices for a different reason, poverty of space. Asian communities often live in cramped city quarters, without family farms, and with little access to fresh food. That’s also oversimplified, but also generally true.

Spice rescues foods that have lost their original flavor.

These days I get most of my food from the produce section of the supermarket. It’s not truly fresh, but at least it isn’t canned. I restrict my spices to salt & pepper. The salt is kosher salt, which is sold as Margarita salt. The pepper is crushed black pepper. I use both lightly.

The result is that I can now appreciate the original flavor.

That’s spice enough for me.

By K. L. Shipley

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