It's World Food Day! Do you know your food origins?
It's World Food Day! Do you know your food origins?
October 16 is World Food Day, a good time to understand how we take an enormous range of fruits, vegetables, herbs, grains and nuts for granted. Food production and trade has become global in scope, yet the staples in our cuisine originated in one part of the globe or another. How did these foods become a part of our diets?
Let's see how well you know where your foods originated.
October 16 is World Food Day, a good time to understand how we take an enormous range of fruits, vegetables, herbs, grains and nuts for granted. Food production and trade has become global in scope, yet the staples in our cuisine originated in one part of the globe or another. How did these foods become a part of our diets?
Let's see how well you know where your foods originated.
Green Beans, string beans, french beans ... where are they from?
Peanuts are great in a PB & J, Pad Thai, or chocolate bar ... or roasted and plain. Where are they from?
Pineapples – "the taste of the Tropics" – are from where?
An essential component of any pasta sauce, bloody mary, or Greek salad, the tomato originates where?
Potatoes are a starchy staple of the global diet, but in what region were they first domesticated?
A delicate nut that's crunchy, sweet, and comes from an apple-like fruit, the cashew is native to the region of what modern country?
Don't call it "plain!" Vanilla comes from an orchid species, but these orchids first grew in ... ?
A delicious member of gourd family, squash is actually a fruit, not a vegetable. But who first began to cultivate it?
Ah, tobacco. Either smoked or chewed, nicotine fiends across the world have enjoyed it for centuries, for better or worse. But it also had medicinal and ceremonial uses for peoples located in ... ?
Lastly, the blueberry – a fruit species that's tasty either dry or fresh. This berry's history is rooted in what continent?
You're a food historian!
You're a food historian!
Very good! You understand well that these foods, now common in the dishes of Europe, Asia, Africa and the Middle East are just some of the many crops that originated in Mesoamerica, South America, and the lands belonging to Native American nations. Until 1492, these foods were completely absent from the so-called "Old World" diet... Imagine how boring cuisine would be without these flavors!
Not quite!
Not quite!
Nope! All of the foods that you just saw were so-called "New World Crops" that originated in what we now call the Americas. These foods were completely unknown on the Eurasian landmass until 1492, when Columbus opened the floodgates of colonization through his so-called "discovery" of the Western Hemisphere.