| Handout 1 The Legacy: American Food Crops in the Old World |
|
Columbus and the innumerable discoveries that followed his venture across the Atlantic changed many things for the inhabitants of the Old World, but for most people what mattered most was not the new information about the lands, peoples, plants, and animals of the earth that came pouring into Europe after 1492, nor was it the gold and the silver treasure that made the Spanish government so powerful for a century and more. Instead it was a change that historians have often overlooked: the spread of American food crops to Europe, Asia, and Africa. These crops included maize, potatoes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peanuts, manioc, cacao, as well as various kinds of peppers, beans, and squashes. All of them were totally unknown outside of the Americas before the time of Columbus. If you imagine the Italians without tomatoes, the Chinese without sweet potatoes, the Africans without maize, and the Irish, Germans, and Russians without potatoes to eat, the importance of American food crops becomes self evident. Worldwide, the latest available figures compiled by the Food and Agriculture Organization of staples of human diet show the harvest for the two American crops, maize and potatoes, totaled 788 metric tons in 1986, or 78 percent of the total 1,010 million metric tons for wheat and rice. Their share of that addition to the world's food supplies constitutes by far the greatest treasure that Old World acquired from the New.
|
|
|
|
|
| return to the lesson | |