In 1491 Europe swirled and blustered at the height of the Renaissance. Three hundred years earlier the crusades had reintroduced long forgotten areas of study into European minds and whetted their taste for traveling and adventure. As religious institutions failed, new intellectual and geographical landscapes opened up for enlightened men. All the storm needed was a push of organization to become a hurricane of exploration, exchange, exploitation, colonization and destruction. In 1492 Christopher Columbus became that force. In his search for an alternative route to the wealth of the West Indies, he unknowingly plunged the world into one of the biggest biological and cultural revolutions ever. The series of exchanges across the Atlantic that followed thereafter fundamentally altered food, agriculture, and population around the globe.
Spanish colonists brought horses, cattle, pigs, wheat, and other European plants across the ocean to feed themselves (Crosby, 1972). The new animals took over the landscape, driving native animals to smaller, inhospitable regions and causing the landscape to erode and making room for opportunistic non-native plants. Today a botanist would be hard pressed to find a native plant in many meadows of the New World. The Spanish also brought smallpox which nearly wiped out the entire native human population of two continents and the Caribbean, including two of the most advanced civilizations in the world: the Aztecs and the Incas. Colonizers set up huge plantations of coffee, bananas, tobacco, and cotton. They imported millions of African slaves to perform the back-breaking labor involved with growing and refining sugar cane to satisfy the European sweet tooth. It’s estimated that every ton of sugar produced cost the life of one slave (Hobhouse, 1986). But the exchange worked both ways.
Searching for spices, Columbus found not only the chili pepper, but squashes, beans, tomatoes, cocoa, sweet potatoes, peanuts, avocados, pineapples, manioc, maize, and potatoes (Viola & Marlois, 1991). Brought back to the Old World with Spanish travelers and merchants, American plants radically changed agriculture and food preparation and production and by extension every other aspect of life and power in the western hemisphere. Who can imagine the Italians without tomatoes, the Chinese without hot peppers, the Africans without peanuts, the Irish or Russians without potatoes? Of the largest world crops--potatoes, rice, wheat, and maize--two are native to the Americas. The introduction of American crops coincides with population increases in nearly every region that adopted the new crops as significant parts of their diet. New World plants could be grown in soil that had previously lain fallow or couldn’t have been used for old staple crops. For instance, with the introduction of maize and sweet potatoes, the Chinese could cultivate previously barren hills which couldn’t be leveled off for rice paddies. The new crops made different demands on soil and labor and increased food production immensely all over the Old World. The increase demanded more labor, but enabled the same land to support more people. Population explosions and improvements of agricultural technique in Europe freed up labor from farming for industrial enterprises and colonization.
Because of the potato, Northern Europe could grow more food and support more people so support more people it did. The climate of Europe is the most hospitable to American crops and the potato became more welcome in Northern Europe than anywhere else in the Old World, though in most regions the people had to overcome significant cultural prejudice before they would eat it. Pizzarro and his men conquered the Incas in 1532, but the earliest records put the potato in Spain about 1570, and it doesn’t show up in herbals (catalogues of all known plants and their uses) until 1596. The common people in Europe did not enthusiastically embrace the potato for quite a while, and usually only when they were forced to by political circumstances such as wars, oppression, or despotic rulers. In medieval Europe, people thought the properties of a plant were manifested in its appearance, so the lumpy, pocked shape of the potato meant it must cause leprosy. Others thought the tubers were poisonous or blasphemous, as they did not appear in the Bible. However, aristocrats considered the potato a delicacy and an aphrodisiac when they first encountered the new food. Until 1584 potatoes ranked in price with caviar or fine wine in the aristocratic circles in France (Salaman, 1949). This situation didn’t last for long and by the opening of the seventeenth century the potato was well on it’s way to becoming a huge part of peasant life. For the Spanish, as for the Incas, potatoes had always been a working class food. For instance, Spanish colonials would not eat potatoes, but happily grew them to sell to their native American workers. The upper classes in Spain worked hard to convince the lower classes that potatoes were good.
The Irish were the first to adopt the potato as a universal staple both because of Ireland’s superior climate for growing potatoes and the extreme political oppression by the English. As the potato traveled eastward it met with a more moderate reception. The English grew quite a few potatoes, but refused to give up their daily wheaten bread. The people of Belgium, the Netherlands and the Germanys especially appreciated the potato in times of war and uprising. Unlike grain, the underground potatoes could not be trampled by marching armies or plundered like storehouses of wheat or rye. A serious hailstorm did not destroy the winter provisions if the food was potatoes. Some peasants, however, did not begin growing potatoes until their supreme rulers forced them to. The Russians recovered from their initial stubborn suspicion of potatoes and have become the largest consumer of spuds worldwide.
All of this trade and cultural revolution had a tremendous effect on how people prepared foods as well as what foods they prepared, especially in the Americas. The Columbian exchange produced totally new sorts of cuisine, blending ingredients and methods that could never have been blended before. In his book Why We Eat What We Eat, Raymond Solokov (1991) describes the outcome of the encounter and the balance between the old food and the new foods and how the circumstances of conquest and colonialism determined that balance. For instance, in Mexico the native people remained a potent cultural force even during Spanish domination. As a result, Spanish and Aztec foods combined in nearly equal parts to produce a new and unique Mexican cuisine. In comparison, the native population of Puerto Rico died out and the island became a culinary experimentation station, providing a space without ground rules for the meeting of ingredients from around the world. In the next two sections I show how the political, social, and agricultural circumstances of the Columbian exchange worked to shape the food habits of Ireland and Russia to produce two separate ways of looking at the same plant.