Boxi Learn › History › Stage 3 · Structure and Evidence
Where did your dinner come from?
Foods that are central to a cuisine today — chilli in Sichuan or Korean cooking, tomatoes in Italian cooking — have always grown there.
Many ‘traditional’ foods depend on crops that crossed the oceans between the Americas and the rest of the world only after 1492: chilli, potato, tomato, maize and sweet potato came from the Americas, while wheat, rice, sugar cane, cattle and horses went the other way.
A friend says chilli is a traditional Chinese spice, so it must have grown in China forever. Explain where chilli came from, when it is first recorded in China, and why a ‘traditional’ food can still be fairly new.
List the ingredients of tonight's dinner. Guess for each: from the Americas, or from Africa, Europe and Asia? Look them up. How many would be missing in 1400?