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Clockwise
from left: An engraved portrait of Christopher Columbus. Two
potatoes in garden soil. Drying tobacco leaves. Homegrown
tomatoes on the vine. (Engraving from "Christopher Columbus,
Life and Voyages," published in 1893) (iStock/iStock)
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It was a small round
object sent around the planet, and it changed the course of human
history.
Call it "Spudnik." It
was a potato.
On Columbus Day, the
country commemorates the grand global changes discoveries
and destruction alike that unfolded after Christopher Columbus
linked the New World and the Old. But some scholars take a more
granular view of what Columbus wrought. They look at the very seeds,
seedlings and tubers that began crisscrossing the oceans in what
they call the "Columbian Exchange."
The potatoes, tomatoes,
corn, peppers, cassava and other plants native to the Americas did
more than enliven the cook pots of Europe, Africa and Asia. They
transformed cultures, reshuffled politics and spawned new economic
systems that then, in a globalizing feedback loop, took root back
in the New World, as well.
It was a grand shuffling
of organisms with results both great and disastrous: Malaria-fighting
quinine from the South American cinchona tree aided European colonization
throughout the tropics; the ballast dumped in Virginia by ships
picking up tobacco introduced earthworms to the Mid-Atlantic. Diseases
common in the Old World quickly devastated the indigenous populations
in the New.
[The
Columbus Day holiday is under attack, and so are statues honoring
the famed explorer]
"What happened after
Columbus," writes science journalist Charles Mann in "1493," his
book on the topic, "was nothing less than the forming of a single
new world from the collision of two old worlds three, if
one counts Africa as separate from Eurasia."
The potato alone gets
credit for population booms in parts of northern Europe that paved
the way for urbanization and, in turn, fueled the Industrial Revolution.
Tobacco had such value it was used as currency in some places. Some
American foods became staples abroad, from the tomato in Italy and
cassava in Africa to the peppers that became the paprika of Hungary
and the curries of India.
"There really was no
spicy food in the world before the Columbian Exchange," said Nancy
Qian, an economics professor at Northwestern University who has
studied how the back-and-forth flow of new foods, animals and germs
reshaped the world.
Researchers don't know
what use indigenous Americans made of the capsicum peppers that
originated in Bolivia and Brazil. But as they spread around the
globe, the zesty pods that are the ancestor of modern bell, cayenne
and jalapeño peppers allowed cooks to conceal the tastes
of foods that were still edible but going a bit off. Soon peppers
would form the base of dishes around the warmer latitudes, from
Vietnamese pho to Mexican salsa.
By far the most consequential
transfer of organisms, Qian said, was the introduction of unknown
pathogens into the defenseless populations of the Americas. In the
first century-and-a-half after Columbus, smallpox, measles, whooping
cough, typhus and other infectious diseases killed up to 80 percent
of native people, according to demographer Noble David Cook. And
when Europeans introduced sugar, cotton and other plantations to
the Americas, they enslaved more than 12 million Africans to work
them.
[Slavery's
bitter roots: In 1619, 20 and odd Negroes' arrived in Virginia]
On the other side of
the Atlantic, fewer cataclysmic shifts occurred when new species
arrived. None had more impact than the potato, Qian said.
Before Columbus landed
on Hispaniola, the European diet was a bland affair. In many northern
climes, crops were largely limited to turnips, wheat, buckwheat
and barley. Even so, when potatoes began arriving from America,
it took a while for locals to realize that the strange lumps were,
comparatively speaking, little nutritional grenades loaded with
complex carbohydrates, amino acids and vitamins.
"When [Sir Walter] Raleigh
brought potatoes to the Elizabethan court, they tried to smoke the
leaves," Qian said.
Eventually, starting
with a group of monks on Spain's Canary Islands in the 1600s, Europeans
figured out how to cultivate potatoes, which form a nutritionally
complete albeit monotonous diet when combined with
milk to provide vitamins A and D. The effects were dramatic, boosting
populations in Ireland, Scandinavia, Ukraine and other cold-weather
regions by up to 30 percent, according to Qian's research. The need
to hunt declined and, as more land became productive, so did conflicts
over land.
Frederick the Great ordered
Prussian farmers to grow them, and the potato moved to the center
of European cultures from Gibraltar to Kiev. "Let the sky rain
potatoes," Shakespeare wrote in "The Merry Wives of Windsor."
Their portability made them ideal to transport into the growing
cities, feeding the swelling population that would be needed for
a factory labor force.
"It's hard to imagine
a food having a greater impact than the potato," Qian said.
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Potatoes
on a conveyor belt at Brett Jensen Farms outside Idaho Falls,
Idaho, this year. (John Roark/Idaho Post Register/AP)
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Cassava, which remains
the foundation of many African diets, had a similar nutritional
impact as it spread from the Americas. Sweet potatoes, too, proved
hardy in flood-prone fields. In China, some scholars credit the
sweet potato with reducing the frequent uprisings against emperors,
whom peasants tended to blame when floods destroyed their rice crops.
Some of the most notable
additions to global cuisine are nutritionally neutral: chocolate
(made from cacao beans); vanilla (which was first processed to improve
the flavor of chocolate); and the tomato, a native of the Andes
that had been transported to Mexico. There, according to Mann, "native
plant breeders radically transformed the fruits, making them bigger,
redder, and, most important, more edible." The result would
transform the cuisine of Italy and bestow upon the world pizza,
ketchup and the Bloody Mary.
"We don't need them to
survive," Qian said. "But I don't want to imagine a world without
tomatoes and chocolate."
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