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Ginger

Ginger or ginger root is the rhizome of the plant Zingiber officinale, consumed as a delicacy, medicine, or spice. It lends its name to its genus and family (Zingiberaceae). Other notable members of this plant family are turmeric, cardamom, and galangal. The distantly related dicots in the Asarum genus have the common name wild ginger because of their similar taste.

Ginger in Worldwar[]

During the Race Invasion of Tosev 3, ginger was found to have a powerful narcotic effect on males of the Race that consumed it. Shortly after the Colonization Fleet arrived in 1962, ginger was also found to disrupt the hormonal balance of females, causing them to become fertile and emit sexual pheromones which attract males every time they tasted it regardless of whether they were in their mating seasons.

It was most commonly pulverized before "tasting" (slang for consumption). The powder was poured onto the palm of a taster's hand and licked up, but it could also be consumed by biting off pieces of a whole ginger root--which produced a much stronger high. Lime-cured ginger was especially appealing.

Fleetlord Atvar quickly banned ginger when it was found to lower the combat readiness of the males of the Conquest Fleet, and especially it was "ginger-tasters" that were partly responsible for Ussmak's rebellion, and much later for disrupting the Race's mating seasons. His ban was confirmed by every subsequent Race authority figure to come into contact with the herb. However, these bans proved extraordinarily difficult to enforce as ginger was both powerfully addictive for the Race and extremely lucrative to smugglers of every species.

During the war, Atvar deputized agents to summarily execute ginger smugglers such as Yi Min. After the war's end, many human smugglers, including Pierre Dutourd and Rance Auerbach, were secretly encouraged by various Earth governments to sell ginger, so as to disrupt the Race's culture.

In 1963, the Soviet Union covertly launched an attack on a Race city in Australia, which included missiles armed with warheads which shot clouds of powdered ginger into the air. Atvar was visiting at the time. The Race never learned the source of this attack, and General-Secretary Molotov and his council decided not to repeat the stunt, for fear that it would be discovered, and that Atvar would see it as an act of war.

Though ginger was not native to Home, it had become firmly entrenched there long before the arrival of humans on the Admiral Peary in 2031, who made some effort to introduce additional ginger into the black market. Garanpo, a hard-nosed anti-ginger investigator, greeted the Peary crew, but was unable to find their contraband.

A side effect of ginger was the appearance of prostitution (a phenomenon hitherto unknown among the Race) with some females ready to take ginger in exchange for payment and thus make themselves sexually available outside the normal mating seasons.

Literary comment[]

Harry Turtledove has stated that the ginger subplot was inspired by his meetings with several drug-addicted veterans of the Vietnam War.[1]

References[]

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