I've been constantly coming across food spices being much saught after and traded for in history. Europe got much of it from arab traders and arabs got much of it from india. Were people really just crazy about spicing their food so much that trade markets and routs were constructed for it?
hi! there's room for more on this, but fyi, you can get started on this earlier related post, which has links to a few more
Some quick reasons why Spice was such a big deal.
As you said, up until about 1500, maybe slightly earlier, all of Europe's spices came from the Arabs along the ancient silk route from the spice islands to Damascus then to Constantinople, Venice or Genoa and then on to the rest of Europe. As you might expect at each step along the route the prices rose so when the spices came to Europe they were hugely expensive. It has been argued that one of the main reasons for European exploration and the consequent growth of seafaring technology was that they wanted to find a way to the spice islands, bypassing the middlemen. One of these men was of course Christopher Columbus, the objective of his mission was to find his way to the East Indies and he ended up in the West Indies, what we now call the Caribbean.
As you might expect, financing these expeditions was hugely expensive. To get the money explorers and later trade companies belonging to the Dutch, Portuguese and later the English and French began to develop new financial instruments such as stock companies to get capital from those who had it to those who needed it. The centres of this banking revolution were London and Antwerp and contributed greatly to the development of these cities as centres of world trade.
Spice was the beginning of the European colonial empires. Europeans required places from which they could trade out of. In the first decade of the 1500s the Portuguese established a series of factories along the coast of India in Kochin, Kannur, Goa and Kollam. They then took Malacca and began to trade in spices in earnest. Then, in 1513 they began to put their first feelers up towards China, winning the right to trade in Macau and even penetrating to Japan.
Along with trading the Portuguese often brought with them missionaries, especially the Jesuits. Francis Xavier's mission to Japan in 1547 was hugely successful and he won around 100,000 converts before the Japanese government took notice and banned Christianity.
Hope this answers some of your questions as to why spice was such a big deal.