Spice-heterogeneity Contraction
by Samarth Misra
It started with Black Stone Flower. A packet of this rare spice made it into our spice cabinet thanks to my mother. My wife then started listing out several other spices that were very commonly used back in the day but are rarely seen or used today in domestic or professional kitchens. This led me to the hypothesis that thanks to industrialisation, urbanisation, and globalisation, we must be moving towards a narrower, less diverse portfolio of spice consumption.
A quick chat with o3 told me that Black Stone Flower used to be a core ingredient in several spice mixes like kala, goda, Chettinad, potli, and bhojwar since at least the 19th century. Today, lichenologists class Parmotrema perlatum as “rare and threatened,” citing habitat loss; modern packaged spice producers use it sparingly or just omit it from their mixes. Some chefs describe its absence as leaving a “hole” in the flavour profile, but most urban cooks have likely never seen or handled it in raw form.
Further research started to confirm the hypothesis. There is definitely a slow contraction in the spice consumption portfolio across India. Increasingly, only a narrow core of 4‑6 spices dominate domestic and commercial consumption, and several once‑ubiquitous or region‑defining flavourings are today confined to specialist blends, boutique brands, or home gardens.
India still grows roughly 75 of the ISO‑listed 109 spices, but four of them—chilli, cumin, turmeric, coriander—do most of the commercial heavy lifting, based on FSSAI’s assessment of the market. Scrape 6,800 online recipes and you see the same skew. The top half‑dozen spices represent over 80 % of all mentions in a Kaggle analysis of Indian cuisine. Over 95 % of cooks in Trivandrum use 10-12 different spices, but in big cities like New Delhi and Mumbai only 4‑5 spices, mainly ginger, chilli & turmeric, make up 95% of the spice consumption, highlighting the ongoing contraction of diversity.
Other examples of vanishing spices
Long pepper (pippalī) lost the arms race to the faster‑growing chilli after the Portuguese ships landed on India’s west coast in the 16th century; food writers now describe it as a “spice that once ruled the culinary world” but survives only in rasam and Ayurveda.
Marathi moggu—the caper‑like kapok bud—has slipped from mass‑market bisibelebath mixes and now lives on via specialist e‑commerce storefronts at INR 60 a packet.
Radhuni, wild celery seed, is so scarce beyond Bengal that even proud home cooks substitute mustard in their panch phoron (to the horror of purists)
Teppal / Triphal remains a secret handshake of Konkan fish curries; it is often called “the least‑known spice” in India, and comment threads are full of diaspora cooks lamenting the lack of supply
Why is this happening?
Cheaper agronomy (chillies fruit in weeks vs long pepper in years), industrial risk aversion and brand consistency nudge processors toward a low‑variance spice basket; market analysts flag “increasing interest in blended spices” as both growth driver and homogeniser, while horticutural texts file the orphans under “under‑utilised crops needing revival”.
Mathematical food‑pairing work shows that India’s distinctiveness arises precisely from its rare, high‑variance spices; swap them out and the flavour network collapses toward the global mean. If chefs, gardeners and online marketplaces start treating these vanishing spices as scarce cultural capital rather than quaint curios, the invisible hand may yet add some much-needed spice to our future.
Very well researched and written. Informative and forces me to think of all those rarely used spices which might be lost forever.