Cuisine

Abstract

Christopher Columbus never achieved his explorer’s dream of sailing west to reach the East with its promise of spices and gold, but instead he unwittingly set in motion the greatest food exchange of all time. Indeed, Columbus’s voyages made possible a gastronomic treasury and a nutritional status never before dreamed of (Goldblith, 1992). In the closing years of the 18th century the food plants grown in what would soon become known as the Old and the New World were almost completely different. No one crop was a significant source of food for both ‘worlds’. But the advent of the European voyages of discovery was to change all that as a multitude of new foods made their way to the Old World, where they were adopted, adapted and in many cases reintroduced to America by new generations of settlers and immigrants. Some 400 years later fully one third of all plant crops used to feed humans and animals are of New World origin (Crosby, 1972). From the New World came maize, beans, peanuts, potato, sweet potato, manioc (cassava), squashes, pumpkin, papaya, guava, avocado, pineapple, tomato, chile pepper and cocoa. Together, these made the single most valuable addition to food-producing plants of the Old World since the beginning of agriculture. (Crosby, 1972). From the Old World to the New came bananas, sugar and coffee.

The Food Exchange

How many of us still believe that the potato originated in Ireland? That the Mediterranean, and particularly Italy, is the ancestral hearth of the tomato and its tradition of savoury sauces? That the fiery chile pepper is an ancient and enduring part of the cuisines of Indian and Southeast Asia? That the pineapple is as native to Hawaii as chocolate is to Vienna?

Elizabeth Rozin (1992)