Tastes of Paradise

Tastes of Paradise

Tastes of Paradise by Wolfgang Schivelbusch is great overview book about the history of spices and its cultural changes. Although this book is considered to be a history book, however it altered my views about history textbooks.  The author used simple yet effective language to introduce spices and stimulants such as salt, paper, coffee, chocolate, opium…etc. and their social development through time. In addition, he showed the importance of spices and how it was the turning point of discovering the new world.

Similarly to last class reading this book discusses trading of goods, social structure and economy, although each author introduces it differently.  Last week we were not able to decide whether or not to use Sweetness and Power as a source for the final project.  However I feel that Tastes of Paradise will not raise as much challenges and it can be relevant to use in one away or another. 

I looked over how we defined commodity in our first class and one of our definition was commodity is a product bough and sold.  If we take spices as the product, then we can agree that this book is about commodity, and if for some reason the class does not agree that spices were the main focus of the book then we need revisit our definition of commodity.