THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE AND THE OLD WORLDS

But many food items such as peppers, maize, squash, and beans also reached southeastern Europe in haphazard fashion via Portuguese Africa, India, and the Turkish Empire.. By the end of t

THE COLUMBIAN

EXCHANGE AND THE

OLD WORLDS

And the trees are as different from ours as day from night; and

also the fruits, and grasses and stones and everything

Christopher Columbus 1

EUROPE

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries marked the maximum exten-sion of that episode of glacial expanexten-sion we call the Little Ice Age, when growing seasons were shortened by several weeks and altitudes at which crops could grow were reduced At the same time Europeans, having recovered from the devastation of the Black Plague, were once more increasing in numbers and in need of extra calories It was at this point that the American foods, whose earlier adoptions had been scattered and spasmodic, began to achieve widespread acceptance 2

A good question is why it took Europeans so long to embrace the Amer-ican crops 3 They promised more calories and some, like maize and pota-toes, had signifi cant advantages over Old World counterparts Illustrative are potatoes In that swath from the North Sea to the Ural Mountains, rye, although temperamental in the face of cold winters and rainy summers, was the only Old World grain that did at all well But potatoes thrived in such a climate – very like their native environment – and could produce

some four times more calories per acre than rye Moreover, potato crops matured in three or four months, whereas rye and other grains required ten months Potatoes could be planted on fi elds fallowed for future rye cultivation, and left in the ground to be dug up when needed Grains,

by contrast, had to be harvested when ripe, then stored in above-ground structures where they could be evaluated by tax collectors in peacetime and plundered by soldiers during wars 4

Maize – the other all-star American crop – could be cultivated wherever wheat was grown and had far lower labor requirements It delivered sub-stantially more calories per acre than other grains (double that of wheat) because of high disease resistance and a high seed-to-harvest ratio (maize gave back 25 to 100 grains for every 1 planted as opposed to wheat, which gave back only 5) And maize could prosper in areas too wet for wheat 5

Yet, despite such advantages, most of the American plants took con-siderable time to catch on as popular fare One reason was that people were wary of the solanaceous ones It did not take the Europeans long to realize that the potato, chilli pepper, and tomato all belong to the same

family as belladonna ( Atropa belladonna) also called “deadly nightshade,”

the European poison of choice at the time 6 But the Old World aubergine (eggplant), also a member, was enjoyed by many; so this was a problem that could be overcome A more serious short-run diffi culty was that most New World food plants were tropical in origin and, consequently, could not readily adapt to the more climatically rigid European growing seasons Even maize, which Native Americans had bred to grow in a number of climates, had to be reintroduced repeatedly, and many varieties underwent much tinkering before maize and other foods became major European crops 7

Much of this tinkering was done by botanists who initially probed the New World curiosities in the hope of discovering miraculous pharmaco-logical properties and, outside of Spain, botanical gardens were the fi rst European homes of the American plants The botanists entered the new

plants in “Herbals,” whose woodcut engravings displayed them in detail

and, as the plants became more familiar, some were slowly, often reluc-tantly, incorporated into diets

Reluctantly, because of yet another problem – the conservatism of the peasants whose job it was to plant the new crops Why should they jettison successful methods of cultivating familiar crops, passed from generation

to generation for a cycle of centuries, to accommodate new and strange

ones? And, for that matter, why should they eat foods to which they were unaccustomed and that demanded new preparation methods? Weaning the peasantry away from tried and true agricultural methods and tried and true foods was perhaps just a matter of time; yet, in many cases, it was a matter of a very long time

In the decades following 1492, American foodstuffs entered Europe through Spain and Portugal (a possession of Spain from 1580 to 1640), where they were cultivated and then disseminated via two principal routes One was into the Mediterranean to Spain’s Italian holdings; the other was north via Flanders, also a Spanish possession at the time But many food items such as peppers, maize, squash, and beans also reached southeastern Europe in haphazard fashion via Portuguese Africa, India, and the Turkish Empire 8

Maize was found on all the larger islands of the Caribbean by Columbus

who, mistaking the plant for panic grass, called it panizo.9 He carried maize

to Spain in 1493, where it was already under cultivation around Seville

by century’s end Three-quarters of a century elapsed before it became a dominant Andalusian crop, 10 a major Portuguese crop, had crossed the Pyr-enees to decorate the countryside of southern France with green fi elds, and traversed the Mediterranean to Italy Following this, the Venetians intro-duced it to the Near East, after which it doubled back into Europe through the Balkans

All of this activity was accompanied by the usual semantic and

geo-graphic confusion In 1542, a woodcut of maize appeared in a herbal of

Leonard Fuchs who wrote that the plant had originated in western Asia, then dominated by the Turks, and consequently should be called “Turkish

corn.” In John Gerard’s Herbal of 1597, it had become “Turkish wheat” and

in Italy was called “Turkey grain.” But in Spain the truth of maize’s origin was steadfastly maintained by names like “wheat of the Indies” and Indian wheat.” 11

Such a problem of nomenclature, however, tends to obscure the fact that maize did not always take fi rm root Despite an early introduction it was not an especially signifi cant Balkan crop much before the beginning

of the eighteenth century, and maize remained insignifi cant in Russia even throughout the following century 12

The crop eventually became established mostly as a food for European livestock whose meat and dairy products delivered maize to humans sec-ond-hand But in some areas of cultivation – in northern Spain and Italy,

southern France, and later the Balkans – maize was adopted by the poor as

a food for humans, and, almost overnight it became their most important one The cereal had some real advantages, not the least of which was that it could be propagated in peasant gardens, where it was tax exempt from both the tithe and seigniorial dues Moreover, cornmeal fi t easily enough into an

already existing diet based on pulmentum or mush (the Italian polenta, for

example), replacing more expensive millets or barley that could now be grown for market instead of local consumption

The adoption of maize, however, boosted populations beyond previous limits, which created both a need for still more tillable land and a large subsistence farmer class to work those fi elds in return for a small plot con-ceded by landlords to grow that subsistence As the diet concentrated ever more narrowly on maize, niacin-containing animal foods were rarely con-sumed and, without knowledge of the Native American method of treat-ing maize with lime to release its niacin, pellagra became endemic Those who contracted its curious dermatological symptoms were “the butterfl y people” who died in great numbers, or went slowly insane

But in the long run maize was health-giving It helped improve diets by stimulating the inclusion of more high quality protein Most Europeans have never been all that enthusiastic about eating the vegetable, but eat

it happily enough after its transformation into beef, cheese, milk, chickens and eggs And as an animal feed, the cereal made it possible to carry more barnyard animals through the winter which, in turn, meant more whole protein on a year-round basis Before maize, what little hay was cut went

to oxen, warhorses, and breeding stock, and the rest of the barnyard was slaughtered every fall 13 And fi nally, copious barn manure collected over the winter meant much good quality fertilizer for the fi elds in the spring 14

A reputation for possessing aphrodisiacal properties did nothing to dis-courage the use of sweet potatoes, but white potatoes had a tardier and more diffi cult acceptance 15 They may have reached Spain as early as 1539, with Hernando Pizarro, who returned from Peru carrying gold to the Spanish court only to be jailed for his trouble He was the victim of crown anger that the conquest of the Andean region had degenerated into civil wars between the conquerors These struggles dragged on until the middle of the sixteenth century and little more is heard of potatoes until peace fi nally broke out in Peru After this, however, intercourse between the new Vice-royalty and the Isthmus quickened as the silver mines of Potosí came into production and the precious metal was transshipped to Spain via Panama

Potatoes were adopted as basic ships stores for Spanish vessels operating off South America’s Pacifi c coast between Peru and the Isthmus

It is likely that the original Andean varieties needed some coaxing to adapt to the longer summer days of Europe 16 Nonetheless the tubers could be purchased in Seville as early as 1573, according to the records

of a hospital that fed them to patients From Spain, potatoes followed the now-familiar route to Italy where a hungry peasantry eagerly adopted them – in some parts of the country they were garden vegetables prior

to 1588 17 At that point, however, the potato entered a turbulent sea of slander and semantics

The slander came at the hands of the Swiss botanist Caspar Bauhin, who wrote in the last years of the sixteenth century that potatoes not only aroused sexual desire but also caused wind and leprosy – the latter

a steep price to pay for an aphrodisiac Moreover – and another diffi culty for all of the American foods – in the eyes of religious fundamentalists, the potato was probably guilty on all of these counts After all, nowhere was it mentioned in the Bible; hence it must be the work of the Devil In fact, the strange subterranean process by which it reproduced seemed especially devilish And fi nally, Bauhin sought to clinch his case by once more declar-ing that the vegetable belonged to the notorious belladonna family and was therefore poisonous, which was partially true, at least of the plant’s leaves and fl owers 18

Semantic confusion began when the Spaniards appropriated the Inca

name, papa for the white potato and the Caribbean Indian word batata

for the sweet potato 19 Confusion was compounded because Columbus had taken sweet potatoes to Spain from the Caribbean decades before the white potato arrived from Peru By the end of the sixteenth century,

the sweet potato had been designated Ipomoea batatas, whereas the white potato was known as batatas hispanorum or the “Spanish potato” – this

appearance of science confounded as white potatoes reached England from (as legend had it) Virginia with Francis Drake He apparently had acquired them at Cartagena instead, but a Virginia origin of potatoes was

given scientifi c blessing in the 1597 Herbal of John Gerard, who repeated

the legend It appeared that the world had yet another potato – the “Virginia potato,” 20 and all of this was not completely cleared up until 1936, when the great Russian botanist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (who died in prison rather than recant his devotion to “western genetics”) established (or rees-tablished) the potato’s South American origin 21

Meanwhile, no one knew for certain what kind of potato was being referred to – a situation that grew murkier as the “Virginia potato” became the “English potato” only to be adopted by the Irish, and soon known as the

“Irish potato.” The aforementioned slander had helped to block the potato from spreading into Russia and Germany – slander coupled with a natural hostility of grain-growing peoples for root crops But by the third decade

of the seventeenth century – in the middle of the depredations and depri-vations wrought by the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) – potatoes were turned to as a famine food by those lucky enough to lay hands on some and proved to be miracle workers wherever they were grown, yielding many more calories per acre of land than any grain – and calories especially wel-come when grain crops failed

The Thirty Years War had brought destruction to much of Europe’s agriculture and, in its rebuilding, potatoes began to gain acceptance in the Netherlands A century later, they were widespread there after ousting another white root, the parsnip Potatoes were also adopted in England, and the same was true in Ireland, where in the span of a century, pota-toes would encourage the population to triple and men to grow extra-long thumbnails to peel them

In eighteenth-century France, Marie Antoinette wore potato fl owers in her hair to emphasize the potato’s virtues, and scientist Auguste Parmentier, who knew the value of potatoes having subsisted on them as a prisoner

of the Prussians, duped the peasants around Paris into accepting them

He put a fi eld of potatoes under armed guard until the plants were ready for transplanting, then withdrew the guards for a night, knowing that the peasants, now convinced that potatoes were valuable, would steal every last one and transplant them at home 22 Elsewhere, however, in Germany and Russia, it required stern edicts, often enforced at gunpoint, to compel

a peasantry that believed bread to be the natural food of man to plant potatoes even as a famine food 23 And resistance, especially in Russia, con-tinued well into the nineteenth century This was some 200 years after the peripatetic potato, which had journeyed from South America to Europe, returned to the Americas – in this case to Boston – as the “Irish potato.” 24

Another American food that reached North America along a similarly circuitous route was the tomato, although not all Europeans, by now

total-ly bewildered about where all the new foods were coming from,

conced-ed the tomato a New World origin In the past, new foods had generally reached Europe from the east or from the south across the Mediterranean

The latter most likely meant the Arab world and consequently the tomato

became a pomi di mori – an “apple of the Moor.” This mistake was per-petuated in many languages Pomi di mori, for example, was corrupted in French to pomme d’ amour (love apple), and in Italian to pomodoro (“golden

apple”) Despite these tantalizing names, however, the tomato initially enjoyed no aphrodisiacal reputation, and experts say it is unlikely that the

fi rst tomatoes in Italy were yellow or orange varieties

But another more lascivious variation on the origin of the name “love apple” soon developed among those convinced that Columbus had discov-ered the Garden of Eden and that the tomato was one of its fruits This made it another of the forbidden fruits, a red ball of oozing juices – clearly

an aphrodisiac The Spaniards, by contrast, called the fruit a tomate (from the Nahuatl tomatl) In Italy, the tomato ultimately had its greatest impact

during the eighteenth-century “red revolution” when the strident colors

of tomatoes and chilli peppers came to predominate in southern Italian cuisine 25 It is sometimes alleged that tomatoes reached North America via Europe in the late eighteenth century But they were being enthusiastically eaten in Carolina at the beginning of that century after drifting northward from the Caribbean

Other American plants also made a culinary impact on Europe Squash and pumpkins joined potatoes and maize to keep the poor alive, and one of the summer squashes – zucchini – became a near staple in Italy American beans gained easy acceptance in Europe, probably because they were not so different from the cowpea that had come much earlier from Africa, and other Old World favorites such as fava beans and chickpeas American beans were also the focus of considerable botanical experimen-tation, some of which led to still more semantical confusion In France,

for example, green pods (and dried seeds for that matter) became haricot

beans and returned to the New World as “French Beans.” But in England,

“haricot” came to mean a dried bean; the fresh were called “French” or

“green beans.”

The reception of chilli peppers was lukewarm at best among most Europeans The fi ery fruits proved considerably more than lukewarm to palates accustomed to bland diets, and people had no desire to indulge in

“benign masochism” as the consumption of chilli peppers has been char-acterized.26 Consequently, although both the Spanish and the Portuguese introduced them to Iberia and had scattered them around most of Europe

by the mid-sixteenth century, chilli peppers took hold only in the livelier

cuisines of Italy, the Balkans, and Turkey Predictably, Europeans got the idea that capsicums had originated in the east, especially in India, and began calling them “Calicut peppers” and “Indian peppers.” 27

The one animal from the New World to achieve ready European

accep-tance was the turkey ( Meleagris gallopavo), which, like so many of the

plants, also suffered nomenclature diffi culties abroad There was,

inci-dentally, a second New World turkey – the ocellated turkey ( Meleagris

“Agriocharis” ocellata) of Central America and southern Mexico, which was

exploited by the Maya, but there is little evidence that it was ever domesti-cated, let alone exported 28 By contrast, ( M gallopavo) seems to have been

domesticated in central Mexico around the beginning of the Common Era

or perhaps even sooner, because the birds liked to hang around humans, stealing food and roosting in warm places, and hence deserve some credit for domesticating themselves From Mexico, turkey domestication spread northward and the Coronado expedition (1540–42) reported seeing the birds in southwestern pueblos, even receiving them from the natives as gifts 29

Called gallina de la tierra (“land chicken”) or just gallina as well as pavo

by the Spanish, the soon to be misnamed turkey was an instant hit in Spain and a real delicacy, as testifi ed to in typical backhanded fashion by Miguel

de Cervantes (1547–1616) In his famous novel Don Quixote he had his

hero declare that “I had rather munch a crust of brown bread and an onion [at home] than feed upon turkey at another man’s table.”

As early as 1511, every ship leaving for the New World carried orders to bring back ten turkeys 30 and before 1530, the great American bird was not only established on Spanish poultry farms, but had spread out across a Europe where the wealthy, always seeking new ways to impress guests, placed turkeys on their tables alongside native birds like peacocks, herons, and cranes Later the bird was to earn the enthusiastic endorsement of French gourmet Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin who declared that “the tur-key is certainly one of the most delightful presents which the New World has made to the Old.” 31

This speed of dissemination contributed to the ensuing confusion about where the turkey had come from By 1525 the bird was known in Italy

as a coc d’ Inde or galle d’India and by 1538 it was called a coc d’ Inde in France (which was corrupted into dinde), whereas the Germans alterna-tively called the bird a calecutische Hahn (a Calcutta hen), and an

indian-ische Hahn.32

Clearly, most of Europe looked in the wrong direction for the turkey’s homeland, and this included the English According to a chronicler writing

in 1524, the fowl had just reached England a year or two earlier, probably with Turkish merchants because it was called a “turkie cock,” which later prompted the waggish chant, “Turkeys, Carps, Hoppes, Piccarrell and Beer, Came to England in one year.” A few years after the debut of the turkey in Britain, the Portuguese brought the guinea hen from Africa to Iberia and it, too, reached England, where it was assumed to be a relative of the turkey Scientifi c disarray was assured when Linnaeus subsumed both the African

and the American fowl under the genus Meleagris, the old Roman name

for the guinea hen 33

The impact on Europe of this array of American foods was tremen-dous Caloric intake, which had been less than 2,000 daily on average, rose, as did dietary quality with the inclusion of more high-quality protein, the whole contributing to what Thomas McKeown has termed the “mod-ern rise of population.” This was a synergistic interaction that snapped a centuries-long cycle of famine and disease snuffi ng out population gains, whereby improved nutrition cut sharply into infant and child mortality and strengthened the immune system of young and old alike to overcome the ravages of infectious disease 34

That “rise,” in fact, snowballed into a population explosion as the num-ber of Europeans swelled in the eighteenth century; England’s population doubled between 1731 and 1816, and the French had some 6 million more mouths to feed in 1789 than they had in 1720 35

Yet – again the Malthusian dilemma – although improved diets are credited with bringing on the explosion, swelling populations soon cre-ated food scarcity once again so that population increases were increas-ingly paid for in the currency of human misery Robert Fogel, for instance, has calculated that by the latter part of the eighteenth century some

20 percent of the people of England and France had so little to eat that they lacked the energy to work 36 Hunger may have been at its worst in France where, as Le Roy Ladurie points out, fully one-third of the French adult male population subsisted on less than 1,800 calories daily during the early 1780s, and this was before the grain shortages that occurred in the second half of that decade 37

Population pressure continued to mount as the American crops found full acceptance, and local grass seed and clover were utilized along with maize to carry animals through the winter 38 From an estimated 140 million in 1750,

Europe’s people had increased to 266 million by 1850, and a whopping

400 million by 1900 39 As we know, the population excess began spilling over into the New World – the migrants drawn in magnet-like fashion to the hemisphere whose foods had engineered their eviction from the Old World Truly, the American foods were revolutionary – and not just for Europe

AFRICA AND THE EAST

Africa

Europeans may have found chilli peppers less than impressive, but this was not the case elsewhere In Africa, India, China, Korea, and Southeast Asia they were accepted as enthusiastically as the turkey was in Europe, even reaching the peaks of the Himalayas – an odd place for a tropical fruit, but making the point that chilli peppers can be grown practically anywhere 40

Their worldwide dispersal was largely the work of the Portuguese, who had followed up Vasco da Gama’s 1498 voyage to Calicut by building

an East Indian empire 41 The New World capsicums spread like wildfi re

in the East Indies and along the African coasts – so quickly, in fact, that within a generation or two everybody, including the Europeans, were con-vinced that chilli peppers were native to India and the Orient, save for the Africans, who claimed them as their own native plants

The dissemination of chilli peppers and other New World foods in Africa was closely related to a slave trade linking that continent with Portugal’s American colony of Brazil (discovered in 1500) From there American plants fl owed eastward to Africa to feed westbound slave cargoes Manioc and maize were the most important crops to take root, but sweet potatoes, squash, peanuts, guavas, paw paws, American taro and, of course, chilli peppers, all added to dietary variety In addition, the Portuguese brought Old World fruits like oranges and lemons to the African coast

The centuries-long slave trade was a direct result of the introduction of sugarcane to the Americas The Iberians had concluded that Native Ameri-cans were not going to prove a very satisfactory source of labor even before

a variety of newly-introduced Old World diseases decimated them and, almost by default, Africans were nominated to be the colonizers of the American tropics and, especially, the producers of sugar