I am new to this community and I have a question in mind.
Spices like garlic , cinnamon etc after drying lose the volatile oil content in them. [HERE, HERE]
Though We see fresh garlic in market being sold but that is not the case of other spices like cinnamon , black pepper, cloves etc.
Why don't people prefer them fresh? After all if there was a demand, there would have been supply.
Spices are generally comprised of bark, buds, fruit, seeds or stems of plants. They are almost always dried. Garlic is not a spice, rather, it is a vegetable, like onions or shallots. You can, of course, get dried garlic, onions, or shallot. But the drying process does not make it a spice. While spices have a fairly long shelf life, they should be used when fresh. Purchasing whole spices and grinding them yourself increases the shelf life, as ground spices, with more surface area, lose freshness more quickly.
Many popular spices, such as cinnamon, cumin, nutmeg, cloves, and black pepper, can only be grown in tropical countries, but are consumed all over the world. Even if those spices were useful fresh, you can't practically transport them that way; fresh nutmeg berries, for example, would need to be air-shipped from Indonesia to other continents, making them astronomically expensive.
This brings up the second reason, which is that some spices are very strongly flavored and are most useful dried and ground. This includes cinnamon, cumin, cardamom, cloves, etc. Nutmeg requires separation of several layers which is only possible when dried.
Finally, in the places where these spices are grown, they are consumed fresh some of the time. In Southeast Asia, people cook with green peppercorns. Indians cook with fresh green cardamom pods. As far as I know, Indonesians make things with fresh cinnamon bark, but I don't know enough of that cuisine to cite anything.
