(THE CONVERSATION) Regardless of how you celebrate end-of-year holidays, food is probably central to your winter festivities. A trio of spices – cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger – feature in many dishes and drinks and are an unmistakable part of the scent profile we associate with the holiday season.
As a plant scientist, I was curious to know how these spices, grown in the tropics, became so closely associated with the Northern Hemisphere’s winter holidays. Just as cranberries’ fall harvest makes them a natural choice for Thanksgiving, I thought that perhaps the seasonality of spice harvest had something to do with their use during the winter months.
However, this doesn’t appear to be the case. When it comes to growing spices, producers are playing the long game.
Growing holiday spices
Take ginger, which features in both sweet and savory recipes in many cuisines worldwide. Ginger roots take between eight and 10 months to fully mature. The plants can be harvested at any time of year if they are mature and haven’t been exposed to cold or wind.
That timing is important because harvesting ginger means uprooting the whole plant to get to the rhizomes growing underground. Rhizomes function like underground stems, storing
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