Could also be used to mask stale or spoiled foods that if cooked enough, wont kil you and still contains nutrition. Nothing goes to waste. Another could be preservation as is the case for salt.

Many spices, as well as actual oil extracted from actual snakes by actual healers, and mushrooms as well, gained reputations in antiquity as medicinal and/or beneficial to health in some way.

And this often fueled increased trade and increased cultivation volumes and increased prices and tariffs and wars and cruel laws. In antiquity.

And often, the actual medicinal benefits became overhyped, and crept from their scope, and each nation's crown jewel of a spice became a miracle cure-all, and cue the trade wars and sword-wielding knights defending their spice.

Basically the "Snake Oil Salesmen" of the Wild West were white hucksters who diluted the actual snake oil down so much, or didn't bother adding any in the first place, then sold the elixirs on Main Street between the saloon and the whorehouse. So the Native Americans were nonplussed that their shamanistic remedies had been subverted as a trope of quacks and hoaxers.

Most of all, these spices and mushrooms have been gradually enshittified, perhaps literally, and many of them are a shadow of their former selves, bred for mass-production. And Americans sit there and dust our burger and fries with gray sand that doesn't even taste like black pepper anymore. Not to mention the salt that's been refined until there's nothing but sodium in it.

Perhaps mushrooms are the least likely food to be enshittified or deliberately commercialized, except for about 4 types in the grocery stores. From what I've learned about mushroom foraging, it's never worth it; just go buy mushrooms in the store, I mean for crying out loud. The risk is too great, and aficionados can claim "easy identification" all they want, but "easy" is relative and not for you to judge, because there's a fine line between tasty and fatal.