How did the Columbian Exchange shape food culture in the modern world?
Originally published by Newberry Digital Collections for the Classroom, 08.29.2017, Newberry Library, republished with permission for educational, non-commercial purposes.
Introduction
Can you imagine Kansas without wheat fields, Italy without marinara sauce, or Spain without gazpacho? Wheat, tomatoes, chili peppers, and many other foods were transferred between the Old and New Worlds, the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, following Christopher Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas in 1492. This transfer of foods, as well as other plants, animals, humans, and diseases, is now known as the Columbian Exchange. Contact between Europe and the Americas resulted in a fantastic array of foods available globally. Cows, for example, were introduced to the Americas by Europeans. Conversely, turkeys were transported to Europe from the Americas. The exchange brought potatoes from South America to Ireland and tomatoes from the Americas to Italy. And while the exchange initially affected European and American ways of life, the peoples of Africa and Asia were soon impacted too. The Portuguese provided two of many examples: they introduced the chili to India from South America and maize to Africa by the turn of the sixteenth century. In less than a century, global food production and transportation was radically transformed. With the discovery of the New World, Europe secured enormous tracts of fertile land suited for the cultivation of popular crops such as sugar, coffee, soybeans, oranges, and bananas. Upon introduction of these crops, the Americas quickly became the main suppliers of these foods to most of the world.
Plants and animals were not the only biological matter transferred between continents. The increased interactions between Europeans and indigenous Americans also facilitated a rapid exchange of diseases. Outbreaks of new diseases like syphilis occurred beyond the Americas for the first time. Smallpox, among other diseases, ravaged indigenous populations in the New World, killing at least half the population in the 150 years following Columbus’s first voyage.
The desire to control these newly-discovered foods and other natural resources led to dramatic human consequences. In an effort to produce and transport new edibles, European empires scrambled to claim land in the New World, impacting the culture, language, religion, and politics in the Americas for centuries. Furthermore, the desire to grow valuable crops, procure prized resources, and transport them globally resulted in the rapid spread and transportation of enslaved populations from Africa to the Americas.
European Impressions of New World Foods
European explorers wrote extensive descriptions of their travels and impressions of their new surroundings in the Americas. Hardly any detail was too small; they described people, environments, customs, manners, events, clothing, foods, and much more. As more people traversed the Atlantic Ocean, more accounts of the New World became available to European readers in a variety of formats. Artists also traveled to the Americas and were employed to create artistic renderings of explorers’ accounts.
Food, in particular, was fascinating to Europeans in the New World, and descriptions of food, as well as indigenous cooking and eating practices, formed a large portion of travel accounts. While many plants and animals were recognizable, Europeans often noted that they seemed bigger and more vigorous in the Americas. Many victuals, however, were completely new to the explorers and later, the colonists. The exoticism of foods like corn and bananas was further heightened by the ways in which indigenous peoples prepared and consumed their food. Scores of accounts, both text and image, describe foods with which we are now familiar, like corn, potatoes, chili peppers, pumpkins, cassava, prickly pear, banana, cacao, turkey, and a wide variety of fish.
The above excerpts from travelers’ accounts show the fascination with the Americas. Thomas Hariot, Theodor de Bry, and Samuel Purchas were all well known for their published accounts, despite the fact that Hariot was the only one who had travelled to the New World. Hariot’s book focused on his remembrances from his trip to Virginia beginning in 1585. De Bry and Purchas based their descriptions and images from first-hand accounts of expeditions across the Americas, from the Strait of Magellan to Newfoundland and everything in between.
Europeans Adopt and Adapt New Foods
The Americas are a vast quantity of land. The climate and environment varies dramatically depending upon location; consequently, the plants and animals available for human consumption also vary. Since explorers and travelers to the New World were affiliated with specific European kingdoms and staked claim to lands on behalf of these kingdoms, they brought back differing information to Europe about the peoples and foods of their new-found land. Consequently, adoption of New World foods into European cuisines was uneven.
Some foods became wildly popular and spread quickly throughout Europe, like chocolate, the product of cacao, and tobacco, sometimes considered a food or medicine at this time. Other foods, like potatoes, took a long time to gain popularity in the Old World. Some kingdoms adopted foods more readily than others at first, like tomatoes in Spain and Italy and turkey in France and England. Still other New World foods were embraced by non-Westerners as a result of trading and colonization efforts elsewhere on the globe. For example, chili peppers were transported to India and corn and cassava in Africa through these methods. Finally, many Old World foods were brought to the Americas by explorers and colonists, either for the necessity of consumption or the desire to profit from crop production. These crops and animals flourished in the New World and are still embedded in modern food cultures of the Americas. Beef, touted as one of the most iconic American foods, is not native to the New World. Introduced to the Americas by Europeans, cattle thrived in its new surroundings, growing in population to remarkable numbers. This growth, combined with the European introduction of horses, led to not only modern cowboy cultures North and South America, but contributed to deforestation and the destruction of indigenous crops. The introduction of other crops to the Americas, like wheat, rice, sugar, and coffee, had similarly dramatic results and mixed benefits in the New World.
Seventeenth-century texts reveal much about this complicated interweaving of foods and their origins, as well as praise and criticism of these foods in contemporary diets.
Exploitation of Resources and Labor
The exchange of food between continents enriched diets and cuisines world-wide. Diets became more varied, and thus more nutritious, cuisines benefited from the exploration of new ingredients. However, the Columbian Exchange was not without its drawbacks. One great stain on this food exchange was slavery. All food production, from growing crops to processing and cooking food, requires labor. As explorers and missionaries made trips to the New World, they identified resources which would be profitable in the Old World, like cacao, coffee, sugar, rice, and tobacco. Later, colonists made use of these resources and introduced new crops which were valuable throughout Europe. In order to sustain such a large-scale effort, Europeans instituted slavery in the New World, capturing and enslaving millions of indigenous Americans and West Africans over several centuries. The institution of slavery became so engrained in New World cultures that slave labor remained a critical component of American economies long after colonies gave way to independently governed countries.
Books were printed to convince Europeans to become investors and plantation owners. The above excerpt is from one of those texts. Ligon’s treatise enticing people to participate in the sugar industry of Barbados touted the virtues of specific area and outlined the financial incentives. The English colonized Barbados, as well as other Caribbean islands; planters and investors made fortunes from growing and processing sugar in this region. Sugar was not native to the Caribbean. Europeans brought sugar to the Americas because of the ideal growing conditions. While Europeans had long admired and consumed sugar, the Age of Exploration was the first time they were able to have control of the entire production and sale of this commodity. Sugar was incredibly valuable; not only was it important as part of edible foodstuffs, but was a necessary accompaniment to drinking tea, chocolate, and coffee, all of which rose in popularity during the same period. The successful planting and processing of sugar cane, like many other New World cash crops, was possible only because of slave labor.
Selected Sources
- Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972).
- Rebecca Earle, “Columbian Exchange,” in The Oxford Handbook of Food History, ed. Jeffrey Pilcher (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 341–357.
- Nelson Foster and Linda Cordell, eds. Chilies to Chocolate: Food the Americas Gave the World (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992).
- Sucheta Mazumdar, “The Impact of New World Food Crops on the Diet and Economy of China and India, 1600-1900,” in Food in Global History, ed. Raymond Grew (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999), 58–78.
- Redcliffe Salaman, The History and Social Influence of the Potato (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949).
By Dr. Sarah Peters Kernan
Independent Scholar and Public Historian
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