How closely related are the plants that make foods spicy?
I.e., How far up the taxonomy do you have to go to find the category that includes Peppers (the plant), chili ,horseradish wasabi, and mustard?
Is pepper (the condiment) included there?
Horseradish and mustard are both in the Brassicaceae family, therefore related to cabbage. Chili peppers and bell peppers are Solanaceae, related to tomatoes. Black pepper (Piper nigrum) is a flowering vine in the family Piperaceae. The three groups use quite different chemicals to produce the pungent taste.
Expanding beyond the specific spices that you mentioned, there are spices among both the monocots and dicots, so it goes at least to their last common ancestor. I don’t know if there are any spices that come from gymnosperms. So around 200-250 million years back?
So, is this an example of parallel or convergent evolution?
I remember the terms, but not the specifics.
Neither one? “Has a taste that people like” is way too vague a category to call an adaptation.
Sweet peppers and chili peppers are all from the genus Capsicum. Many are even from the same species. (For example, sweet red peppers and cayenne peppers are both Capsicum annum.) It is my understanding that all peppers used to be spicy but the ones that are now sweet had the spiciness bred out of them.
As noted, horseradish and mustard are all from the same family of Brassicacae. Looking at the taxonomic classification, all the plants you mentioned are eudicots, which seems to be a relationship somewhere between the Kingdom and Order levels. Black pepper/white pepper/green pepper is not a eudicot, but it is an angiosperm, with all the above are as well (which seems to be some subclassification between Kingdom and Order. I’m not familiar with clades, though, so perhaps someone can explain it.)
And, yes, they all have very different ways of producing spiciness, and, to me, they are very different types of spiciness. I grew up eating mounds of horseradish and mustard. I never thought of it as spicy in the way chile peppers are. It’s more of a nose-clearing irritant kind of sensation. It’s not something that builds and lingers in the way chile peppers do.
Evolutionary ecology of pungency in wild chilies.
There is evidence that suggests that the pungency in chilies may be an adaptive response to selection by a microbial pathogen.
The existence of retsina and also gin makes us include gymnosperms (wow, people are an inventive and resourceful bunch when it comes to food, and especially booze).