Was food exchanged in the Columbian Exchange?
From Ken Albala
Rachel, You’re right about immediate impact, it takes several centuries for New World plants to really transform Europe – eventually they do. But more interesting is the impact in Asia and Africa. Here I think you could make an argument – with chilies most clearly, but also with corn and the big surprise sweet potatoes in China, that 1492 is indeed the pivotal point when food supplies begin to be globalized. Not that there aren’t really significant earlier exchanges too. I’d argue for something like an Alexandrian Exchange, an Abbasid Exchange, and many independent exchanges in the Americas. It’s connecting the several systems together that make 1492 so important, and the Portuguese in Asia are just as important. Makes sense?
Yes and no Ken. I couldn’t agree more about lots of exchanges. And I’m not talking only about Europe although my examples are from Europe. And I’m not primarily concerned with how long it took.
(a) What I want to do is to distinguish dietary, culinary and nutritional exchanges. Chiles and corn come without the American culinary baggage (don’t think there is so much for sweet potatoes). Hence although they make a huge difference to both diet and nutrition, the difference they make to nutrition is not what they would have made had the culinary techniques come along. The corn is not as nutritious, neither are the chiles.
(b) This is to say that talking about food or food system is too general, it glosses over lots of important, no, crucial, absolutely crucial distinctions. The way plants are processed (and combined) is as important as the plants themselves. Or put another way, moving plants around is not moving food around any more than moving steel around is moving automobiles around. Plants are a resource, not food.
(c) Given all this, what the Old World got was the equivalent of steel. Most techniques were not connected. And this was a huge lost opportunity both gastronomically and nutritionally and it remains so.
Sure. The best example is corn. The material arrives but not the technique. And nothing is transformed gastronomically, polenta is just made with corn instead of another grain. So too peppers, which are used in Italian cuisine in ways completely different from the New World, and squashes like zucchini, not to mention tomatoes. Do these ingredients transform Italy gastronomically? Of course they do, just not in ways any Mexican would recognize. So?
In other words, if the steel is imported and something new is made from it, not an automobile, but something else, it’s still transformative. Isn’t it?