Rounding the Four Corners – December 2010
By Larry Larason
When the days grow short and the wind blows chill, my thoughts turn to food. I don’t think I’m unique. After all, our greatest eating holidays, Thanksgiving and Christmas, are scheduled during cold weather. Just thinking ahead to Christmas makes me hungry, so let’s look at some food.
I don’t recall the movie, but I think it was one of Cecil B. DeMille’s epics set in ancient Rome. All I do remember about it is that in a scene at the Coliseum a vendor offered pieces of watermelon to the crowd. I wondered, “Did the ancient Romans eat watermelon? Is that historically accurate?” At that time I considered watermelon to be an American crop. Even now I can’t recall watermelon appearing in a foreign film, or being mentioned in what I’ve read about European food. That was the beginning of my interest in food origins.
Just so you’ll know: the watermelon is believed to have been domesticated in southern Africa. Cultivation slowly moved northward. Watermelon seeds were found in the tomb of Egyptian King Tutankhamen, who died in 1323 BCE. So, undoubtedly the Romans knew of watermelon. I assume that modern Europeans eat it, too.
"The Harvesters" by Pieter Bruegal, 1565.
Broadly speaking, by the fifteenth century there were three grand cuisines across the world. I’m using “cuisine” to mean a menu of preferred ingredients, as well as methods of food preparation. Each of the grand cuisines has a foundation crop that is reasonably easy to grow, supplies ample calories, and is reliably storable. The cuisine of Asia was built on rice. Europe and much of Africa based their diet on wheat, and some other grains, mostly consumed as bread or pasta. People in the Americas depended on corn [maize] for the bulk of their calories. Interestingly, all three of these crops are in the grass family.
Each domesticated food plant is a gift. Our ancestors found a wild plant, began to farm it, and by having the foresight to select seeds for next year’s planting from only the most desirable of each year’s growth, brought the plant to the form we know today. Hardly any of our crops are like their wild predecessors; selective breeding has produced varieties that are larger, more productive, tastier, and so on. All our significant food plants were domesticated by 2000 BCE.
During the Age of Exploration, crops from around the world were exchanged and cultivated in new locales to create the modern global cuisine. Plants appropriate to cultivation in new places were blended into the traditional regional menus. One author wrote, “The Indians (of the Americas) gave the world three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation.”* Let’s consider some of the gifts from our ancestors in the Americas.
Wild potatoes are found from the American Southwest to the far south of South America. In the area of its greatest diversity, Peru, farmers domesticated the potato maybe as early as 5,000 years ago. Although they and the later Inca also grew corn, the tubers were more of a mainstay in their diet than was the grain. Indigenous people there still grow several thousand varieties of potatoes. Around the world people harvest more rice, wheat, and maize, but potatoes are in fourth place. All three grand cuisines had included root crops in their menus. For example, the ancient Romans considered turnips to be fine dining for both men and livestock. But in no other case could a root food be considered a foundation crop.
Imagine the world without the potato; the famous English fish-and-chips would have to be fish-and-toast. The first time I was served potatoes in a curry sauce I thought it was weird. But potatoes are popular in India now. In fact, India is the third largest producer worldwide.
Potatoes are not as storable as the grains. Grain may be kept for several years, but potatoes last only one year at best. Still, the tubers have become one of the staples of modern eating, in part because they are easier to grow than the grains, less picky about soils, and they produce 2 to 4 times the calories per acre than grains.
Scurvy used to be persistent in European populations because their diet, relying on bread and dairy products, lacked sources of vitamin C. We don’t usually think of potatoes as a source of vitamin C, but they actually supply more than most tomatoes. One hundred grams of potatoes contains 20 mg of vitamin C, while an equal weight of an average tomato has only 13 mg. Some varieties are richer in the vitamin.
So now let’s look at tomatoes. Tomatoes were first cultivated in the same region as potatoes, but spread to Central America. The varieties the Spaniards first took to Europe were probably from the Aztec or Mayan region. Now there are several thousand varieties grown commercially and in home gardens. Like potatoes, tomatoes have become a worldwide crop, and China is the biggest producer.
When you think of tomatoes, you probably, like me, think of Italian food. The Italians adopted the tomato and made it their own. Before they embraced this new food from the Americas, they made pasta dishes with carrot sauce, or beets. I think I prefer the tomato sauce version. Can you picture pizza with beets on it? Italians also adopted some of the bean varieties from the New World, and the American squash they call zucchini.
Initially Europeans were skeptical about both potatoes and tomatoes. They are in the nightshade family, after all. Europe had its own nightshades [Solanaceae] including the highly poisonous belladonna. It took nearly two centuries for the two American nightshades to become fully accepted across Europe. Are all the Solanaceae poisonous? Yes, to some extent, but the poison in tomatoes and potatoes is largely concentrated in the leaves and stems. Green tomatoes contain the alkaloid tomatine; this is destroyed by cooking. Potatoes contain a poison, solanine. Improperly stored tubers can build more of this chemical, which is signaled by turning green. The color is actually from chlorophyll produced as the tuber prepares to sprout, but solanine is in the same parts of the flesh. Other poisonous American nightshades include tobacco and datura. Some people think chiles, another group of nightshades, are poison, but others revel in the sting they produce.
I was going to write about some of my other favorite New World foods, but this piece is getting too long. I will mention two more: chocolate and peanuts. Chocolate is not just a gift, it is a blessing! It’s a whole food group in itself. I eat a portion every day, although in summer that’s difficult because it tends to melt. And peanuts? What would harried mothers do without peanut butter? In the Far East most are processed for the oil, but in America and Africa they are eaten out of hand for a nutritious and protein-laden snack. For some reason, they never caught on much in Europe.
*Weatherford, Jack. Indian Givers; How the Indians of the Americas transformed the world. Crown, 1988.
This interesting book is still in print.
