Herbs and Spices

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The terms herb and spice are popular terms for plants or plant products that are used as flavorings or scents (e.g., spices and culinary herbs), drugs (e.g., medicinal herbs), and less frequently as perfumes, dyes, and stimulants.

Many herbs and spices are edible but may be distinguished from fruits and vegetables by their lack of food value, as measured in calories. Unlike fruits and vegetables, their usefulness has less to do with their primary metabolites (e.g., sugars and proteins) than with their secondary metabolites (compounds commonly produced to discourage pathogens and predators). The distinct flavors and smells of spices and culinary herbs are usually due to essential oils, while the active components of medicinal herbs also include many kinds of steroids, alkaloids, and glycosides. Most plants referred to as herbs or spices contain many different secondary compounds.

Spices are pungent, aromatic plant products used for flavoring or scent. The derivation of the word spice from the Latin species, meaning articles of commerce, suggests that these were plants that early Europeans could not grow, but instead had to trade for via Asia or Africa. Consistent with this, people tend to limit the word spice to durable products such as seeds, bark, and resinous exudations, especially those from subtropical and tropical climates, and use the word herb when the useful part is the perishable leaf. Commercially important spices include black pepper, the fruit of Piper nigrum, and cinnamon, the inner bark of two closely related tree species from the laurel family.

The word herb is popularly used to refer to a plant product that has culinary value as a flavoring, while scientifically an herb is a plant that lacks permanent woody stems. Most of our well-known culinary herbs are obtained from the leaves or seeds of herbaceous plants, many of which originated in the Mediterranean region of Europe. Many of the best known belong to the mint family, such as peppermint (Mentha x piperita), or the carrot family, such as coriander (Coriandrum sativum).

Medicinal herbs were once the mainstays of all medicine and include plants that range from edible to extremely toxic. Every culture has developed its own herbal pharmacopeia, with herbs taken as teas or tinctures, smoked, or applied to the body as poultices or powders. While much of the world still depends on herbal-based medicine, western medical practitioners rely mainly on synthetic drugs. Some of these are synthetic copies of the active compounds found in older herbal remedies, while others are more effective chemicals modeled on these naturally occurring compounds. At least thirty herbal drugs still remain important in western medicine. Some are obtained directly from plants, such as digitoxin from the woolly foxglove (Digitalis lanata), which is used to treat congestive heart failure, while others are the result of refinement and manipulation of plant products, including oral contraceptives from yams (Dioscorea species). Recent years have seensome resurgence in the use of traditional herbal medicines in many western cultures.

Alkaloids; Cultivar; Dioscorea; Economic Importance of Plants; Flavor and Fragrance Chemist; Herbals and Herbalists; Medicinal Plants; Oils, Plant-Derived; Tea.

Brown, Deni. Encyclopedia of Herbs and Their Uses. New York: Dorling Kindersley Publishing Inc., 1995.

Tyler, Varro E. The Honest Herbal: A Sensible Guide to the Use of Herbs and Related Remedies. New York: Pharmaceutical Products Press, 1993.

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