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Eight Surprising Crops That Originated In The New World
All of your favorite foods were discovered in 1492
What if I told you that tomato sauce really isn’t Italian? Can you imagine a world without chocolate? The discovery of North and South America changed history in seismic ways, but food is one thing that was influenced the most and is one thing that is most often forgotten.
Almost everyone is familiar with the rise of the United States, the proliferation of slavery, the decimation of the native populations, and the proliferation of settlement and colonialism throughout the New World. Few people realize that these events had an outsized effect on the global food scene. Many of your favorite foods originated in the New World, which means that they didn’t exist in 1491 and all of the centuries that preceded it.
Here are eight crops that originated in the New World and changed the diets and preferences of people around the world ever since.
(Note: I know that these crops were not “discovered” by Europeans. They were well known by the native populations of each region that they originated from. However, native populations did not cultivate and export crops in the same way that Europeans do. Natives did not build expansive plantations and they were not a factor in the export market following 1492…
